Monday 26 June 2017

Unit 9- Burn Evaluation

Evaluation Unit 9

At the end of unit 8 we as a class were given the choice to pick what play we wanted to do for the final unit. One student suggested that we do the play that I did for my GCSE in secondary school but there was no script for the play plus as we were a large group there were not enough character in it. Rob our tutor provided us with a script from a script box so he helped us to make a final decision for unit 9 for the production of Burn.  
At beginning of unit 9 for Burn I personally felt it was a very hard production due to the length of the script and was shocked by how it ended however I was pleased to have been given the role of Rachel as I felt I could relate to the character more that the character of the social worker.    

My first reaction of Rachel my character was that she was a very sweet and seemed nice but very protected of her boyfriend Colin. I had to play her with attitude because she is afraid Colin will leave her for the other girls and believed that Colin only wanted to be with her for sex when Rachel wanted an actual relationship. This meant she very insecure as well as very unsure whether to believe the rumour about Colin raping Linda at the end of scene 10 and she was spiteful to Birdman even though he sticks up for her even when he can see that deep down she knows what Colin did to Linda but still goes with him to make everything seem ok.

During rehearsals it was very chaotic as there were a lot of lines and the commitment from the other students was poor. They did not turn upon time ready to rehearse and there were conflicts throughout about following the script some were ahead of other and some where not paying attention. This crated an atmosphere that did affect rehearsals but I continued to learn my lines for my character Rachel and helped other student to learn there lines too. On rehearsal days leading up to the production it was important that everyone respected the behaviour backstage which didn't go to well as it was so noisy that at times I found it very difficult to concentrate as my hearing impairment relies on people being quite so I can here when its my time to come on stage which I found very distracting. 

For the duration of rehearsals, actors would be turn up late which resulted in some people not being prepared on the day not concentrating or being respectful of others trying to get the production finished. Brad and I had to work together as production managers, we were responsible for making sure that the production ran smoothly, set design and props were very good. Lighting was faded in and out to create the correct mood for the scene however there was poor communication between the costume department. Actors were given specific costumes to wear that would suit their character but then when actors came to rehearsals they chose to wear different costumes. This was not the only downside, the makeup that was requested was not ordered therefore the female cast were reliant on bringing makeup from home to ensure each member got into character.
  Despite all of the disruptions and failure to provide specific items, overall the 2 performances on the day went well. There were a couple of mistakes in actors forgetting their lines but the reaction from the audience which included laughter, cheering and lot of applause congratulating us on our performance was very pleasing to receive.

Friday 12 May 2017

Unit 9- Burn

Thursday 20th April

Began looking through the script to the play Burn by Deborah Gearing would be our end of year performance. We all took turns reading the lines for the characters as well as getting an understanding of some of the characters as well as decide who we would like to play, I choose either the Social Worker or Rachel.







Friday 21st April

In this afternoons blog session we began writing up our initial thoughts about Burn as well as the characters, after reading through the script a couple of times I felt comfortable taking the role of Rachel as I believed that her character and I were very similar which mad it an easy decision. Instead of going to our usual drama lesson we stayed in our Blog room and continued with those where we also discussed what would be obligatory to accomplish a distinction, merit or pass.


Monday 24th April

Throughout the weekend I went over my script and got to understand my character a bit more so I knew how to portray her in the upcoming drama lesson, in our tutorial session Abi came to collect me to have a 1-1 to discuss whether next year I will be staying to do a L3 course and if not what should be the best thing to do.

















Monday 24 April 2017

April-


Monday 24th April


During the weekend I spent some time reading my script and rehearsing my lines as the role of Rachel to understand what sort of character she is. Next we had 1-1 with Abi as we discussed what I was looking to do next year and if I was planning to move onto Level 3 next year and if didn't want to then what my other options are as I legal have to stay in college as I am still 16.








Tuesday 25th April


In drama we went through more script work and line reading to get a further evolution on the play, in Mandys movement class we continued practicing more Tai Chi by following a video doing a action at a time.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBvF6r6DOvc


In Beccas lesson, roles were given out where I got given the role of Production Manager where I basically had to overlook all the other production groups. Once we knew our role we then had to research our roles to get a better glimpse at it and what we had to do








Thursday 2 March 2017

UAL L2 Unit 5

March -



Thursday 2nd March

In Drama we continued on our #immigrants project where we were given a sheet which had small improvisional pieces, my group and I picked with the story of a Romanian women named Alexa where she gets rejected from taking a loan from the bank as well as a form from a GP's office. The scene begins with Alexa (played by me) walking into the bank and 2 members of the public making racist remarks towards her nationality behind her back, the bank manager finally calls Alexa in for a meeting which then outrages the other members of public as they apparently have been waiting for longer. Once Alexa goes into the room with the Manager he asks her questions like her name, age and nationality, this then causes the manager to decline any requests she was willing to make as well as making her leave the room because she came from Romania, Alexa then leaves the bank unwillingly where she then passes the two other members where they then continue to say malicious comments about her, the scene then ends.


Friday 3rd March

Blog session was the same as normal, then in drama we began brainstorm noticeable food from around the world.



Monday 6th March

Blog session stayed the same, in Drama we began to give ideas towards our #weareimmigrants performance in separate groups, we next started to piece together the performance with it beginning with Bruno sitting in a chair in the middle of the stage going through all the 'legends' about Immigration.



Monday 13th March

Began by carrying on with blog from Friday, next we spent most of our drama lesson practising our #weareimmigrants through a couple of times changing different things each time we went through it



Tuesday 14th March

In Drama we spent the majority going through the performance and trying to improve them. Next in Mandys lesson we began going through our monologues that we have been learning, once we have gone through them a couple of times and in front of our teacher we were then allowed to leave.

Friday 16th March


In blog we continued with updating it, next we did not have drama as our teacher was not present so we got to go home early.




Monday 20th March
Began updating our blogs from our new unit that were handed to us in class.




Tuesday 21st March

To begin our drama lesson in the theatre we started with a warm up game of playing musical statues where the aim was to get us focused for the on going lesson, where we then moved onto doing the bad breath exercise as well the pen in the centre of the room. Next we moved onto continuing our #weareallimmigrants performance, after a couple of run throughs our teacher gave us back some feedback which then helped to improve our play to then make it better.

In Beccas blog lesson we began working on our self publicity posters, I choose to go along the theme of the Wizard of Oz where I will be portraying Dorothy in my audition.


Thursday 23rd March


Our Drama lesson began by us going through some tounge twisters as a warm up for example "Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry", "She Sells SeaShells at the SeaShore " and "Roberta Ran Rings Around the Roman Ruins". Next we went onto doing around 3-5 improve excercises where the opening line had to be " She/he was here last night" my partner and I created scenes where we played sisters and we found out our dad had come back to just get money off our mum and did not bother to see his daughters, after that we watched our groups performances as well as gave them feedback on how to improve for future references.



Friday 24th March

Began catching up on our blogs in beccas lesson next we went on to continue rehearsals for the #weareallimmigrants performance including feedback from not just our teacher but also our peers, due to not that man people attending the lesson we had to feel in for them on their scenes.



Monday 27th March

Instead of continuing on our blogs we decided to create a cv and a letter for our Self  publicity project.

Thursday 2 February 2017

February-



Thursday 2nd February

Due to it being the last rehearsal before our actual performance in drama, the lesson plan was set that my partner and I were to go out with Rob one last time to make sure everything looked okay by tomorrow where all we had to do was go through our lines overnight for it to be perfect, we did multiple run-throughs, where at each run-through we would try and include a new action or facial expression that we haven't added before to make it look believable as well as our scene's much better.

Friday 3rd February

Today was the actual day of our performance for the Dumb Waiter to our audience which was also recorded by Rob.

Monday 6th February

Began the day with Blog catching up from any days I didn't write about last week, then after everyone still went to Rob like a normal lesson where we watched our performances from the Dumb Waiter and was then given a task to write an evaluation about how we thought we performed and how it went. Next everyone went back to Beccas class where each of us went outside and spoke to Abi where we were given information about the courses for next year and if we had an idea of that to do in the future as well as what we need to do to achieve getting into those courses.

Tuesday 7th February

Instead of Robs drama lesson today we had Beccas production lesson instead which resulted in everyone learning early, the materials had arrived for our stages so everyone worked on their own stage.

*From the 7th February until the 20th February it was half term*

Monday 20th February

As it was the begin of arriving after half term, the day began with a blog session where we continued on any blogs trying to add as much detail as we could into them from the previous term

Tuesday 21st February

In Drama we started with our new assignment of "#Weareallimmigrants", we began by writing any words that we knew associated with the word immigrants and what we define it as. Next we began working on the Silent Movie we did last term, we ran through it a couple of times in order to make it better.



In Mandy's lesson we began learning 'Tai Chi' which is a form of Chinese martial arts, we began researching it for examples of where it originated as well as the physically and mental benefits for actors, we began watching videos on YouTube of someone demonstrating the movements including defense as well as attack forms, after watching it we began practicing it for ourselves to later demonstrate to the class,

Thursday 23rd February

In Drama we continued practicing for the silent movies, this included the Cops and Robbers silent movie as well as the others that my classmates created.

Friday 24th February

Blog lesson stayed the same where next for Drama we stayed focused on the #weareallimmigrants project where in todays lesson we got given a sheet with all words and definitions where we then had to come up with three different freeze frames improvising the pros of immigration, the three freeze frames my group and I came up with were along the lines of Asylum, safety as well as Jobs.

Monday 27th February

Just Blogged for this session.

Tuesday 28th February

Today was the day of our Silent movie project piece where we practiced before half term and recently, we spent the best part of our day at the theatre running through it to prepare ourselves for the show later in the evening, at the start of the evening performance when the audience began to arrive a selected few were asked to go outside and be in their characters to then speak to the audience and try and get them to participate, this was then tried out where the audience was asked to join a dance routine, if they knew about stolen goods as well as a guessing game.

Thursday 5 January 2017

unit 4 & 6 clash of the concerts

January -


Thursday 5th January


Due to it being our first week back wet started the day with drama where we began our new project of "The Dumb Waiter" (Written by Harold Pinter in 1957 and is a Comedy/drama) where we looked through the script and discovered that the play was about two assassin's, Gus and Ben and were living under a restaurant and were waiting for a signal from someone to kill someone and we explore the relationship between both men during that time where it starts as a normal relationship when they both begin to get annoyed with each other when finally at the end the phone rings and we see Ben being told through the phone to kill Gus and then it ends so we don't know what happens to both characters. 

Friday 6th January

We were given the choice to either continue our blogs or work on our duologue for "The Dumb Waiter".


Monday 9th January

The day started with a lesson with Becca where we started a project on the costume for our chosen celebrity which was Jennifer Lopez. I finished the design by the end of the lesson by looking at her past performances and how it would also match the chosen song my group have chosen for her.







Tuesday 10th January

I started the day by having a Drama lesson with Rob where we went down to give a first look at the script of "Dumb waiter". We were next given the task of being paired up with someone who would work well with one another for the end of term performance. We both were then give the assignment to rehearse certain sections with our chosen partners, this was very effective as it gave us a sense of getting use to stage directions and using them for performances as well as characterising our characters. The next activity was to perform our part of the piece which was done in chronological order, this was effective so we knew the array of what scene was next and when to go on stage and perform. There were 4 rules we were told to consider while performing and that was 1) Why am I there? Think about why the character we are playing is there and try and continue the story and narrative one. 2) Describe the environment while learning the script we should describe the environment in our heads, for example why is this character pacing up and down and where is he acing up and down, is there stuff on the floor? 3) What's the relationship? What is the relationship between this character and that character, are they best friends, are they siblings, do they hate each other? If they do then we should portray that through our characters so that the audience identifies that clearly. 4) Play so > PLAY.  (Rob wrote this down to remind that this is a play so that we should 'play' the character fully so that we portray the character that we meant to)



Next I had Mandy's movements lesson where the lesson began with a drawing of a circle on the whiteboard done by Mandy and a few movements in the sections were it was set out like a pie chart. The first task of the lesson was to give an example of each movement for example 'Flick'.





After this task we were asked to perform one of the movements 1 by 1 in a random order without using our hands, once we had done this the class was spilt into two groups and we were told to create a mini performance associating with the movements but with various awareness to make it a completely different order than the original one, by the next lesson these performances will be elaborated. Next we had a blog lesson with Becca where we continued to work on our blogs except my group and I continued to work on our Jennifer Lopez concert outfit.


Thursday 12th January

In Robs Drama lesson today we didn't do any practical work where instead we watched the second years 15 minutes performances that was split into 3 sections after each performance for example one of the performances was about a murder case and we were given clues throughout the piece that were not obvious about who commited the murder, I liked this piece as it gave the actors a chance to interact with the audience to see what they really believe happened, at the end we were asked to vote who the killer was and the majority of the audience voted the right killer. Next in the same lesson the seconds years led a workshop that involved the whole audience where the aim behind it was to help up in the future when it comes to acting.

Monday 16th January

The day started with a blog lesson where we continued with our blogs where we next had Drama and began rehearsing with our partners with "The Dumb waiter" script. We were trying to merge the characterization skills we were discussing last session that included about why our characters were there as well as their motive. When our 15 minutes of rehearsal time was over we were asked to perform in chronological order with our partners this was essential as it could help us get use to the running order for the actual performance day. The summery for the whole lesson what we were told from Rob was that we needed to work on our use of characterisation more as well as to begin to practice the use of the magic 'if' which involved us as actors to portray that character for the full extent i.e. "What IF we were this character would our walk change, the way we speak or even our posture.

Tuesday 17th January

In drama we began by rehearsing our lines as well as practicing with our partners where we then got taken each other one at a time with Rob to another room to go through it in front of him so he could help us improve e.g. with our pronunciation and posture etc but he mainly helped me and my partner on our body movements as well as our facial expression. After each group had been seen to we all assembled around the main classroom computer and started analysing key points about what we have inferred about Ben and Gus i.e. each their statuses and which one of the two had a higher one.


After this lesson we had Mandy where the lesson began with warm up exercises where mandy wrote down 1-8 where each number included an action we had to perform e.g.
  1. Walk
  2. Run
  3. Stop
  4. Drop
  5. Turn
  6. Pose
  7. Jump
  8. Gesture!


The context of this activity was that Mandy would shout out these certain numbers while walking around the dance room and do the activity at hand i.e. if she shouted 4 then we would all have to drop to the floor and come back up, half way through the exercise we would begin to change the speed we were walking in as well as changing direction occasionally, one of the main activities that were involved with this exercise was that we would have to walk in slow motion from one corner of the room to another to "win a bar of chocolate", this exercise worked well as everyone wanted to get they're quickly to receive this chocolate. Next we worked on our core by doing core exercises, one of these exercises involved a sweeping exercise where we would have to sit with our legs stretched out straight and then sweep with both arms halfway off the floor with our heads up as well after doing this a couple of times we then had to life both our arms and legs into the air with only our backs on the floor.

In the next lesson we had Becca's production lesson where we finished off our concert costumes by adding colour to mine where I decided I preferred it grey to symbolise the diamonds that will shimmer upon Jennifer's body when she dances. After my group and I had to do a presentation explaining the choices behind our outfits


Thursday 19th January

In Rob's Drama lesson we began by doing a full body warm up which included tounge twisters, stretching and other different vocal warm ups as well as it helped to focus us as well as relax for the on going lesson, next we continued practicing our Dumb Waiter scenes with our partners to later on perform them which we then got feedback on.

Friday 20th January

Blog continued the same where we updated them, next in Drama we continued the practice for the Dumb Waiter like in our previous lessons after we did this for half an hour we started practice on a new piece for our upcoming Silent Movie project which included all of us into the Cops and Robbers production.


Monday 23rd January

In this Blog session I mainly added some more work to my Blog that I did not add from Friday. In drama we began by doing a full body warm up involving a vocal warm up then after we continued on rehearsing for the Dumb Waiter.

Tuesday 24th January

To begin the day we had Drama so while everyone else was rehearsing my partner and I were taken out to do another 1 and 1 practice in front of Rob, this then designated to concentrate more on our section of the performance and working with Rob was an advantage as we got to practice more on our facial actions in detail to make sure the piece runs smoothly, after this we went back to the drama room to carry on rehearsing. In Mandy's Lesson we continued using the board number warm up which then continued to a full body warm up along with stretches and various muscle workouts. In Beccas lesson we began working on our concert layouts, we looked at various examples before being told to give a shopping list of the materials we would need to create our own model boxes for our concert that we were creating.

Thursday 26th January

This morning in the drama session a photographer came by and took our photos doing our warm ups as well as group activities, when the photographer left we carried on with on practicing the Dumb Waiter.

Friday 27th January

This afternoon we continued our blogs to then to go to Robs room and do more run throughs with our Dumb waiter piece where we did a full run through in the classroom in front of our peers where we also received feedback from them as well as Rob which would then apply to our next lesson to then use that feedback and work on it in order for our piece to go smoothly.

Monday 30th January

Drama was not on today so everyone went in for Blog

Tuesday 31st January

In Drama to make up for the lesson that we missed yesterday we began with our usual warm up of stretches and vocal warm ups that included tongue twisters, humming and the use of repetition of the letters C,G,L,N,D,T,B. We did this so that we could be better with our pronunciation as well as articulation of letters so that every word came out pronounced correctly and be heard clearly. After this warm up we moved onto another run through of the piece. In Mandy's class we began with a small warm up by walking around the room in different directions and doing different muscle workouts. Once the warm up and our usual exercise's were done we then got into different groups from the last lesson and began to join all the pieces together to create a whole piece of different sports mixed together this then got recorded. In Becca's lesson we continued working on our concert layout using model boxes, this was usual as my group had a visual imagination of our dream stage so all we needed next was the materials for our stage.

Thursday 1 December 2016

December-



Thursday 1st December

For this drama lesson I wasn't in as I had a medical appointment.


Friday 2nd December

I began the day with some blog and then we went to drama where we started with some vocal and body warm up which we do every lesson, after the warm up we moved onto a exercise involving different lines for example we would say a few lines and then involve that chosen sentence or finish it or start it with that line.

 Monday 5th December

We updated our blogs as well on things we did the previous week, next in the pastoral lesson we continued on our blogs which we did in the previous lesson whereas some had to speak to our teacher about our academical choices for next year.

Tuesday 6th December

We watched a Peter Pan pantomime done by the Level 3 drama group, the performance itself was amazing I liked how they customize it to make it a drama as well as a comedy but to also keep to the main story of it. My favourite character in this version was Tinkerbell as she portrayed a lot of body movement as well as Mr Smee was a very comedic character who would make me laugh with doing the smallest thing but would exaggerate it to be funny.


Friday 9th December

We had to complete the rest of our blogs from the term of 2016 before we moved onto our next unit/project.

 
*Christmas Holidays*