evaluation

Our performance this term didn't go very well. When we were asked to create a list of WWW (what went well) and another list of EBI (even better if) the page was full of improvements. My group actually found it easier to come up with bad points and we struggled intensely on creating good points. Our biggest problem I think, was the fact that we made our performance to film based. Our performance might have been good if we would have made it 2 hours long. Our story was too complicated that yelling it in the space of 30 minutes was a big challenge. From the start of this term my group had struggled with creating a story line and we would often drift into film techniques, rather than performance techniques. Another problem was the stage combat. We over-used the stage combat and even even though we rehearsed it a lot, it still didn't look real. It looked as if we had just thrown in fight scenes at any given opportunity. Another problem was fluency. We hadn't practised exiting and entering stage, so when we didn't need to be on stage we didn't know where to go, making the performance look messy. Also the lighting didn't go as.planned and the ending was completely ruined because the lighting didn't change. This tells that we were far too dependant on lighting to make our performance good. We shouldn't depend on lighting, the price should look amazing without it. But instead we all stood on stage, frozen, for at least 10 seconds not knowing what to do, just waiting for the strobe to switch on. The audience could not relate to the characters, so when they died they didn't really care. We needed to engage the audience in the characters a lot more. I think saying a short monologue on each of their lives was no where near enough. The romance also didn't engage our audience and seemed childish as well. Looking back on the performance I would change almost everything about it. We were too stuck on a film based idea, and when we realised this would not work, we didn't have time to change it. I am glad we were able to see all these improvements, this tells me that next time we won't make these mistakes again.

weeks review

This week we finished the performance. We still need to go over and perfect all the scenes. We also filmed Carl's news reporting scenes. These scenes will be placed at certain points in the play, the first one will be placed at the beginning letting the audience know the basic outline of the play. The second is after the mission, this is when the group begin to deteriorate and the last is when we tell the audience of the new world.Carl was dressed in a suit when filming these scenes,to show that he is a different character.

This week we also perfected the ending scene. We decided to add strobe light when Jamie kills everyone, this makes the deaths easier to do. When "killing"characters on stage you run the risk of it looking awful. When you try to kill a character in a realistic way it ends up looking fake, instead we decided to make it UN-naturalistic and add strobe and slow motion.

In the ending scene the men also gang up and kill James (Ashley) for this we decided to add music. We wanted a piece that contrasted with the violence so we have decided to use elegant and light music to match the heavy violence. This adds a sense of irony to the play.

Next week we will do a full run through in costume.

weeks review

This week we filmed and created a movement based mission scene. We decided to incorporate dance into the piece to portray the fighting. This week we also organised the lighting. We decided not to over use lighting as we want the main focus to be on the performance. We also decided that all the scenes in "base" would be the same, so we don't keep changing the look of our scene. We kept the lighting in the base to very cool colours, using white with a silver undertone. White also represents the future or modern day. For the other scenes we focused mainly on how all the characters were feeling. For example fight scenes had red lighting to show the fury and violence and anger.