Week One
Thursday– We started our FMP by finding out both our production and cast roles. For my performance role, I got the part of the Evil Queen, which I am extremely happy with as she is the first option I wanted for a non-singing role. For production, I got Front of House assistant which is the production role I really wanted so I am really excited for the planning for this role. To start of this project, we had a production with our head of production roles to discuss what we would need and any ideas we may already have to put forward in each of our production groups and then shared them with the class. For front of house, we came up with the drinks and snacks we would need and assigned each person things to get. We also discussed how we would welcome our audience in, and I suggested the idea to introduced them while being in our characters so the audience get an idea of what the play is like. We also mentioned planning the seating for the shows to see how many people we can fit as well as having a section for the live band. This part of the meeting was quite stressful as we are unsure of whether to place the band in the corner of the stage, or in a corner where the audience would be. Either way we either lose space to perform or less room for audience so we are going to further discuss this with the stage manager. After out production meeting within the different groups, we shared our idea’s with everyone and also imputed our ideas to other groups to give each other some inspiration.
Week Two
Monday– We began this lesson by having a table read as a company for not only those who haven’t read the script and to help those who have already began to read the script begin memorizing their lines. Reading through the script helped us also get an idea of how we want to characterize our characters as they are portrayed differently than the Disney Characters and the Grimm Fairytale characters. It also helped us prepare for the production elements of the show as there was a list of sound affects included, as well as props and set, so we managed to start planning ahead of time for the production side. I found having a read through extremely helpful as I had the chance to properly look through the scene with the cast that are involved and created a plan in my head on how I was going to portray the Evil Queen. While reading through the scene, I remembered that she turns into the Old Lady to try kill Snow White so I had to plan how I would differentiate the two from each other by changing my voice and adding a cloak to the outfit as a disguise. This helped me plan out the costume element.
Tuesday
For our dance lesson this week, we focused on the ending choreography ”We Go Together” from the musical ‘Greace’. The year two’s took some inspiration from the dance they did last year. We got put into pairs, starting with the main cast being paired up with their characters from each story, and then pairing the rest of the cast up. For the rehearsal I was paired with Alex H. We began by starting the dance from where the whole company joined the main cast so everyone knew the dance. The dance was extremely faced paced which is something that I struggled with as I couldn’t keep up with the timing so we slowed the dance down so everybody could keep up with each move and the timing of the dance before we sped the dance up and practiced keeping each dance move controlled and strong. This helped me keep up with the timing and made me a little more confident in my skills for this choreography.
Once we finished learning the choreography, we moved on to blocking the first scene in Act One to work out the character placement of where we want our characters to go and for the set team work out the set they needed for the scene. Once we ran through the first scene a few times to figure out the placement and be happy with the scene. Once we had run through the script we went back over the dance as a company with the beginning of the main cast and the ending that we added on which went really well as we sorted out the timing and we just have to clean the dance up.
Wednesday:
For this lesson we moved onto the vocal side of things with the first song of the musical “revolting children”. We separated the solo lines between us and then tried singing along to the backing track which proved to be a struggle as not everyone knew the song and since it is an extremely fast paced song so we struggled to stay in time with the song and each other. To fix this we began with slowing down the song and working with the main focus points of each line to help with perfecting the timing. This helped individually, but when it came to singing in an ensemble, It was still a big struggle with staying in time. To fix this, we broke the lines up, so the boys would sing the first half of the line and the girls would sing the last half of the line which worked a lot better. We ran that a few times before singing it with the backing track. We were still a little bit out of time since we slowed the song down but it was a lot better compared to our first attempt.
Thursday:
This lesson was focused on blocking the first few scenes up to the scene between Cinderella and prince charming. We talked about character placement as well as just figuring out how to play our characters, We also talked with our costume team about what costume we have envisioned for our characters. After this, we had another production meeting to pass on information to anyone who wasn’t here before and to also think of anything else we need to include. With our group being front of house, we don’t have things that change weekly, however we did try to come up with some new ideas.
Week 3
Monday:
We began this session by focusing on finishing blocking the rest of act one and the start of act 2. We spent a lot of time on where our characters were placed in each scene as well as the entrances and exits as while the princesses fairytales are being explained. There is many characters appearing multiple times. This got a little bit confusing as we would enter and exit from different sides of the stage quite quickly. We also went through certain scenes a couple of times while we would change the blocking. This was helpful though as while we continued through the scene, we would notice that where we were originally placed was blocking part of the scenes and we would have to keep changing the scene around. After we did this, Olivia and Tara began to show us a section of the jailhouse rock dance so they could figure out when to add cast into the dance. We then focused on the beginning of the revolting children dance.
Tuesday:
For the beginning of this lesson we started by using our dance “we go together” as a warmup to see how much we remembered of the dance last week. Not a lot of us remembered the ending as we didn’t rehearse that part as much since it was added at the very end of the session. Other than that, we remembered the majority of the dance, it wads just very messy and looked rushed. After, we had Olivia, our dance captain do the dance with Tara, our assistant dance captain so we could follow on with this to improve our timing and clean it up. Once we sorted “we go together” , we set up the stage to work on our opening dance ” revolting children”
Wednesday:
Today we had another singing session. This time we focused on ‘We Go Together’ from Grease. This song is the final ensemble piece of our musical. I was quite nervous about the singing session as last week didn’t go smoothly, we had to stop and restart a lot as we struggled with timing and staying in tune with each other. However this session went a lot differently as we had listened to the song on repeat while learning and rehearsing the dance so most of us had memorized the words. We went line by line to help us pronounce the words better as there was a lot of tongue twisters that needed to be broken down while we were singing. ‘We Go Together’ was sounding a lot better than ‘Revolting Children’ as we were all in time we just needed to work on projecting. We moved on to singing and dancing to the instrumental which I was I was confident with at first as I knew the dance quite well and was pretty confident on the lyrics. When we began dancing I quickly realized I realized that I struggle a lot with controlling my breath while dancing, especially with how fast it was. We also had to change the ending of the dance as we realised we all couldn’t fit when we were in a line facing the audience to do the ending as originally planned.
Thursday:
Due to weather conditions, we were unable to attend college so instead we had a meeting on teams to discuss different elements of the course and the Matrix, what they included and how they help us prepare for our projects. I was put in the reflections group with Olivia and Aliya. We discussed why reflections are important to report into our digital space and how to further explain the events of our day. We do this by asking ourselves questions such as ‘why did we do this?’ ‘how does this change/improve something?’ ‘what gave us this idea?’ ‘how does this make me feel?’ etc. This is important to include as it adds more detail into the scrapbooks and helps us push ourselves into more reflective writing.
week 4
Tuesday:
Today we began to start some of the solos. We started with ‘Helpless’ which is Cinderella’s solo. We wanted to give it a ballroom type dance as the song is quite slow paced and is set in in the Princes party scene. This dance was something that we managed to complete completely as Liv already had a plan on how she wanted to choreograph so she started by teaching me it so we could work on the ending then we taught it to this rest of the class. I found this really fun as its the first time ive helped out with choreography and I really enjoyed doing it. Next we started on ‘Waving through a Window’ which is Rapunzel’s solo. Skye already had an idea of what she wanted to do with the dance so we started by having a group of people walking around the center during the first verse and bridge then once it reached the chorus we’d all freeze for a few seconds then began moving again, from there some of the group would leave so there was six of us left on stage to create the rest if the dance. After we worked on some of the dances we decided to work on the first scene in Act One so we could see how it ran without the scripts. It was very choppy as some people weren’t fully off script yet.
Wednesday
We started todays lesson with rehearsing ‘Revolting Children’ to make sure we don’t lose the energy and also the different vocal groups we made. After this we began finishing and cleaning up solos. Since ‘Waving Through a Window’ was the one closest to the ending we decided to start with that one. As Skye had an idea of how she wanted the ending to work we did what she told us and worked a lift into the dance. After we began working on ‘Surface Pressure, as Liv and Alex had already began choreographing it they just had to teach us it. After we started adding more to it, taking inspiration from the lyrics and incorporating that into the dance, for example, with the line ”line up the dominos’ Alex would walk past us all as we were stood in a crouched stance and would stand up straight. After this, we rehearsed each dance a few times to ensure we were all confident in them, which I took a while in, especially for ‘Surface Pressure.’ as I would mess up the moves sometimes. While the rest of the dance team we were working on ‘Take A Chance on Me” I sat and read through my lines as I was struggling with a couple of them and wanted to make sure I knew them all before the deadline.
Thursday:
Today we had a production meeting to reflect on things we still needed regarding costumes and props. Most people brought in there own costumes however there were some people who were not sure about what they are wearing so we discussed how they would get their costumes, whether they would bring it in themselves or if we would use the budget to get it. We also made a list of props that we were missing and what we needed to order and if we could get them in time of the deadline so we could also start dress rehearsals. After we also made a plan to find a day to clean out the prop room so we can store our bags and costumes in there, leaving more room backstage and also making it a safer area for us to walk around when it come to us waiting for our cues in the wings.
Week 5
Monday:
In today’s lesson we have focused mainly on the blocking of scenes that we haven’t really focused on. Throughout the session we didn’t get through enough scenes in the day like we had hoped to as we weren’t focused enough to run through each scene without there being stops, although we all knew that act two wasn’t as strong as act two so we really wanted to focus on getting these scenes developed. I was really glad, however that we finally began to work on these scenes as we haven’t focused on them and working on them was fun as we got to see new characters being developed and the whole show starting to come together.
Tuesday:
For this lesson, we started by trying to do a full run of act one, missing out solos as most of them haven’t been rehearsed so we wanted to see how far we would get without them, however it took us a lot longer than we thought as we weren’t very focused and a lot of us weren’t off script yet so we took time getting to our cues and remembering lines which is something that we were going to work on in the afternoon while others were painting set. In the afternoon we continued blocking scenes in act two while others who weren’t in those scenes would either work on set or help block act two. I sat and went over my lines as I knew them but i struggled with some of them as they were quite long and I would mess up the order of my lines so I went of my lines and then would write them into my notebook to see if it would help me memorize them, which was really helpful as it helped me get the order of my lines into my head and I managed to read most of them out correctly.
Wednesday:
We started this lesson by working on singing. We started by singing ‘We Go together’ as a warm up while jogging to develop our breath control and also to get used to singing without the backing track as we haven’t really practiced the songs much without the vocals. After this, we moved on to working on solos. First, the solo singers rehearsed by just standing to get used the feeling of standing in front of the audience and hearing themselves through the speakers. After this, we began doing the dances while the singers danced and sang so they could work on how to control their breath while doing both. We noticed a struggle with hearing feedback with the head mics so we decided to swap some solos to having a hand held mic to see if that would help with the feedback which we did. We also made sure that while the singers did have head mics on as they were dancing to make sure they didn’t stand too close to the speakers so the feedback wouldn’t happen.
(I was ill week 6)
Week 7
After the warmup today we attempted to do a full run of act two as its the act that we’ve focused on the least having spent most sessions focusing on act one. We did this so we could see how long how long the act was and also to see the areas of weakness and note where we needed to focus our attention on since we’re getting closer to performance week. Due to not really focusing on this act it took us a while to get through as a lot of people kept forgetting lines. Working on this act was really important as people weren’t very confident in their characters so this gave them the chance to work through this and gain some confidence in their characterization. After this we split into groups, some people worked on lines, others on finishing set pieces. Me and liv finished polishing the solos and going through the dances a few times so everyone knew them. Today was very helpful as we got a lot done. We were all very focused and we managed to finish a lot of incomplete dances and set.
Wednesday:
Today we performed the play in front of the media makeup students so they could get an idea of what makeup to do when they see us under the lights. It took us a long time to get through as people still weren’t extremely confident with their lines making the first act run longer than expected. This meant that we didn’t get to perform act two which wasn’t great as there isn’t much time until show day and at the moment act one is very long and we haven’t really spent much time on act two so we were getting very worried about what the finally result was going to be. After we still had a bit of spare time so we spent time going through the solos with the speakers as well as going through some scenes in act two to help people feel more confident.
Thursday:
The plan originally for todays lesson was to show Act Two to the media makeup students however they were unfortunately unable to make it so instead we just kept rehearsing it so people could go over their scenes and memorize their words which was really helpful for the actors in act two and to also help speed up the run of act two as it was quite long and we needed to speed the entrances and exits in each scene.
Week 8
Monday:
For todays lesson we focused on the second act as it was the show at the end of this week so we focused on the scenes that we were still struggling. I wasn’t able to take much participation in the dances as I had injured my ankle last weekend so I watched. From an audience perspective the show was looking a lot better than we had originally thought it did. It was moving a lot faster and the transitions were a lot smoother. The cast were also a lot more comfortable in their roles and I saw a big improvement in their characterizations. I had to leave early due to pain unfortunately but I was impressed with the progress we made in such a small amount of time.
Wednesday:
Today we had the recorded show so we were all a little nervous. We started our day by going over the dances and then started running through act two so we had some more time to rehearse it. Then I went to go get my makeup done. My makeup artist made a cool look with gluing my eyebrows down which was a weird experience but I think it looked really good. Then she put prosthetics on my cheekbones to give my character a more evil look, which looked really good however it was very uncomfortable and the glue was irritating my face so we had to take them off unfortunately. The filmed show went really well, it ran a lot smoother than we thought it would and I think we all did very well to say we were extremely nervous, and we accidently missed out a part of a scene due to someone forgetting their lines but we managed to cover it up quite quickly.
Thursday:
Today was the day we were performing in front of an audience so we were all very nervous. We were all making sure that we had a lot of energy by doing some of the danced from the show to hype us up. Then some of went to make up which helped calm my nerves as I was talking to my makeup artist as we she was doing my makeup and it managed to calm me down a bit. When it came to the shows I was really nervous as we haven’t performed in front of an audience in a while and i also haven’t done a musical theatre project before. I was really proud of the outcome. We’ve all worked together really hard and we all were very nervous and we helped each other out in times we were struggling. I’ve very proud of us all for putting this show together and I think it went really.