Week one reflection-
´ This week I learned what we would be doing in the course and the people I would be doing it with.
We discussed the idea of humor, and what humor is. We came to the conclusion that humor was a joke, story, or action that brings laughter and joy to others. This work supports our overall ideas for the hallmark production, our chosen theme from our discussion is humor, here are some of our ideas that were discussed in our production meeting.
As a group we discussed and wrote down what type of humor is acceptable and non acceptable.
We worked in teams to device a still image from a hallmark card we got. My group got a birthday card so we created a still image and a performance based of that.
What could of gone better in my group, communication. We were all putting ideas forward on what we should do, we had very little time to put it together. I think that this was partly due to the fact that we didn’t know each other yet. However, we did some different devising techniques to help over come this . In the long term I don’t know if comedy is the type of genre that I want to do therefore I don’t know if I would include certain characters of mine in the production, for example with some of my characters i didn’t even get to explore them fully I just made them up on the spot and I don’t know if it was funny or not.
Today we concentrated on our focus. We did little tasks to test and help improve our focusing skills. This is to help us for when we preform on stage to keep us concentrated on the task in front of us not messing or fidgeting. We then got given a character or a scenario and we had to improvise a scene base on that character/scenario. This definitely benefited my improvisation skills also stereotypes by watching how other people may portray them differently than I did.
Week two-
14th September 2022- Today we focused on the physical elements of drama rather than the speaking element. We added on to our stereotypical characters from last lesson and in groups devised a piece of slapstick comedy performance based of off our characters. We got inspiration by watching a video on slapstick comedy
As a group we have been working on a piece of slapstick and physical comedy, for the first part of our hallmark production. The scene starts as everybody walking on stage as various characters going to a train station. In our groups we then go on and preform a 40-50 second slapstick piece of comedy. In my group we had changed and progressed our piece by changing it each time making it better to the performance that it is getting to now. We have listened and taken advice from our teachers and peers and have made developments to it. We have also included music to our performance. For our scene my character is a bimbo/shop keeper who has really no control over a fight that is occurring in the shop. The other people in my group are fighting over a dress. Originally my character was another ‘bimbo’ fighting over the dress but we have changed it.
As part of our hallmark card production level 3 and level 2 have produced their own short comedy scenes. For my character i originally was a nerd but now I’m playing the character or a pregnant cheerleader.
My character has a witty personality which is great to play it’s exciting to see my character progress through each rehearsal. Me and the rest of the group have worked hard to make the scenes the way that they are. We have produced scripts and spider diagrams to help. Today we did a run through of the whole performance all together including transitions and lighting. Once we did that i worked on my first scene with level three, we developed, practiced and changed things in our scene to make it better. This is beneficial as it helped our scene and made it more understandable.
Today we changed the train scene, originally, we had the song of 9 to 5 and we walked on as our characters and then of again. We have developed the scene and it is now a Charleston jazz piece with movement and interactions. So, I practiced on my movement. We also added to more members to our slapstick scenes, so we added them as security guards.
For the scene I’m doing with level 2 we are doing a detention scene which will come after the detention scene. Over the weeks we have progressed the scene and added new elements to make it make more scene and to better improve it. We originally made spider diagrams of stereotypical people, like what they did, say and walk then we turned them into characters.
We have developed a script for our detention scene, which helped my script writing and gave me an understanding of how scripts are put together.
As a team we held a meeting to discuss what kind of props we needed and things like lighting, sound and costume.
Wednesday 12th October 2022: Today was the day of the performance and I think that we did really well. We worked hard together as a team, we listened to feedback that was given to us throughout the weeks, and it worked well in the end. We also did well considering that a few people were missing so people had to step in and improvise which is an improvement from the beginning of the year and we were creating a still image and scene for a birthday card, because we didn’t know each other, and we didn’t communicate. To being able to step in and trust the other person to bounce of and respond to what you say next.