In the first week of starting project 5, We got our scripts to look through and get a feel of what we would be working with, We then began to do a run through as a whole group before other people left for their math and English lessons, people began to fill in for missing people during the run through as a group because we had many absent. I liked the idea of running through it as a group in a circle straight away because it calms my nerves about not knowing much about the script as none of us know and we can all work on it together. We then started to lean the dance Choreography Tara and Olivia created for the ‘we go together’ pinching ideas from their past projects to help put on a full performance to the song. We did a singing workshop halfway through the week to work on vocal ranges for everyone. We practiced the ‘revolting children’ song and got separated into different groups to help identify every ones vocal talent. We also started to block act one of the show before people had to go off for Math and English.
In the second week, some of the performing arts, Makeup and art students went to London for the night! When we first arrived in London we got the tube to our hotel to drop our luggage off so we didn’t have to carry any of our things around. Once we dropped our luggage off we decided to visit the art museum as it would benefit the Art students on the trip and we got to see the beautiful art within the museum too.
Once we finished in the art museum we went to Leicester Square to look at some of the shops in that area, We first went to the M&M store to see all the M&M things there. We walked around and got scanned to find out which M&M we were before heading towards the section where we could get huge bags of M&Ms in whichever color and flavor. When we finished in the M&M store, we headed towards the Lego store, We saw some fascinating statues made of Lego such as Spiderman and the Gringotts wizarding bank from harry potter, We got to create our own Lego Mini figures and watch people build Lego.
Once we left the Lego store, We headed back to our hotel so we could get ready for the rest of the evening. Everyone got changed and Tidied themselves up from the train journey and the walk around London. Once we were all ready we all chose a place to eat for Dinner, We decided on Wagamama! When we finished eating, we headed to ‘The Novello Theatre’ to Watch mama Mia. It was the most amazing show we had seen. The actors played their characters really well and portrayed them to their full potential and made everything so accurate! It was perfect, everyone enjoyed it and it made us all laugh. Once we finished watching Mama Mia, We headed back to the hotel for the night!
We walked back to the hotel so we could see the ‘Night life’ within London’s streets. It was Fascinating seeing all of London’s bright lights at night as it lit up the whole area!
The next morning when we woke up we got ready and went straight for breakfast before heading out for the day
. We went to visit some more shops around London! One of the shops we visited was Hamleys, the biggest toy shop in the world!
Once we left Hamleys, we headed towards Leicester Square to find a place for us to eat and do a bit more shopping for things like souvenirs before heading back to the hotel to collect our luggage so we could head to the train and come back to Bradford.
In the 3rd week of project 5,We started working on the dances by listening to the songs and figuring out what moves would work to the music so we had a rough idea of what to do when teaching others the dances. As I was playing a villain, we took me out of the dances as all the dances were for the heroes in the story so I got to give my input on the dances from an audience members POV, this helped as we could start working on lighting placements within the dance and figure out if everyone was in the right places in the dances. we continued to block scenes and get more into character by getting the performance on it’s feet. We started marking out the floor plan for where ques would be and where to enter and exit the stage from. We had a few problems doing this as some of our placement wouldn’t work with how the dances started as people could not get into their positions in time to start the dances. This meant we had to rearrange a lot of the placements of characters and a lot of the ques around to make sure everything went smoothly. For the rest of the week we continued to block scenes as a group and try fix anything that needed fixing within the teaching scene at the start of act one scene 2.
In the 4th week, we started working on production elements. We got into small groups and all focused on different elements of production. My group worked on Set design, this meant we had to create pieces of set and sketch it out before turning them into actual pieces to use. We created a village on fire background, a well and some signs for pieces like Cinderella’s talk show and Snow White’s night club. We started by thinking of props and important pieces within the fairytales that we could use to decorate the signs. We used a pumpkin and a shoe for Cinderella’s talk show and we used an apple for Snow White’s club. We started sketching out the designs on paper and trying different fonts that would fit with each Princess. We decided on big cursive writing as it fits with the princess theme. We placed the little designs around the font to see where they would look best and after multiple attempts of getting in in a good position, we finally found the right one! We then decided as a group what colors we would be painting the set as we needed to go get paint, So we got our budget and headed into town to get the paint for the set! 3 of us went in with a list of what to get. We checked multiple shops to see the different varies of paint and to see which ones were the cheapest. Once we got back to college we figured out our budget after buying the paint to put back into the pot. We set up the paints a the back so when we came in the next day we could finish painting the signs. We started with seeing which colors would go better with each character. We didn’t want to give Snow White colors like purple or baby blue as those colors don’t represent her in the movies and the fairytales, So we used colors such as dark blue, red and yellow! We repeated this process for all of the signs we would be using before getting started on the background. We chose to do a castle and a medieval village to fit with the old cheesy fairytales! Once we did the background set, we started doing the smaller set pieces like the well. We designed it like it had been left for years by adding moss and making the bricks look uneven and broken. we painted a blue circle at the top to represent the water in the well to make it look more realistic!
In the 5th week, we began to get off script and start doing full run throughs of each act part by part. We focused on act one and cleaning anything up that needed finishing. This included polishing the dances off and making sure everything was correct and people knew their ques onto stage. Later in the week we worked on transitioning between act one and act two so we could continue doing run throughs of act 2.
In the 6th week we focused on dancing as not many people were confident with their dances, we worked as a team to make sure everyone knew their places in the dances and their cues to come into the dances. We made our tutors watch over the dances to make sure they looked okay and if they had any tips for us so we could change it to look perfect together! Later in the week we focused on dancing and singing at the same time as we realized when dancing people wouldn’t sing and wouldn’t put much effort into it. So we focused on making sure that was all cleaned up.
In week 7 we did full run throughs start to finish. This happened multiple times to make sure we were prepared for the actual exam part of it. When doing full run throughs in week 7, we started adding in set changes and making sure all the lighting was working properly so everything would go smoothly on the day.
Week 8 was the hardest as we were all really tired and under so much pressure to make sure everything was good. We continued to to do the full run throughs for week 8 which the makeup students watched as they were gonna start doing makeup tests on us for our makeup before our final recording for our final marking.