Double - Storytelling - Blog 10 (Snow Queen) - 18/11/15

Today, we moved onto a new section of our Story Telling Unit! We had to devise a brand new piece based on any story we wanted, original or conventional.

We started by listing techniques and methods of storytelling. These were our ideas:

• Storyteller - tone/pitch/volume/pace of voice - recorded narration - contrasting speeds
• Sound effects - soundscape
• Dialogue - monologues - choral speaking
• Props
• Movement - dance - physical theatre
• Multimedia - projection - music
• Placards
• Thought tracking

I felt that a an original story would be good but this would require a great deal of brainstorming, so we decided to go with a pre-made conventional story.

When it came to deciding what story we would choose, we had to bare one thing in mind: our audience. We spoke about what age audience we would perform to and what stories would be suitable for them. We were first going to perform to a slightly younger audience but we felt that it would be best to perform to an audience of people of our age as it would be easier to think what they'd want to see. We thought of many different ideas such as Harry Potter (very recent series of books tailored for people of our age), Winnie the Pooh (Less recent and less tailored to our age range but would bring back memories) and Frozen (a very recent children's film which is popular with our age range too, due to catchy songs and elements of humour). After much discussion, we ended on the decision of Frozen but with a twist! We went for the story from which the film Frozen was initially inspired by, "The Snow Queen."

The outlook we wanted this piece was to portray something very dark and twisted and fully expressing the bad. We started by reading part 1 of 7 of The Snow Queen and we decided to think about who would narrate each parts as narration is a key part of story telling. We thought it would be logical to have one person narrate each scene as we had the right amount of people! We started our first scene vaguely with Lorna narrating. Our rule was that whoever was narrating would devise their scene. This was Lorna's time to shine!

All we got done so far was assign our starting positions (the all loosely positioned, spread out and facing different directions), and decided some movement. We make two small jagged movements, hunching over on the word, "*****", and shooting up with one large jagged movement on the word, "Magnified."

For homework, we will all devise each of the parts assigned to us e.g. I have to devise scene 3.