Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 21 - 01/03/16

This lesson reshaped our piece and changed the order as well as recorded the narration for the news reports.

We started off by writing down every scene we had completely devised and agreed we're keeping in our piece (on blue post-it notes) and listed every scene we wanted to include (on purple post-it notes). 

Although we already had our interrogation scenes devised, I added them as purple notes because we were going to reconstruct them so they were basically new scenes. We've added two more interrogations so that we have two for both Kourteney and Ben and one in which they are both being interviewed at the same time (via split focus) and this is where the event of suicide is revealed to the audience. This is the outline of how we want this scene to be done:

• K and B enter in their respected seats. DI S enters and begins asking more questions.
• DI S gets an alert (we're not yet sure on how we'd do this) to exit.
• DI S exits then re-enters a moment later. He apologises to them and says that their is further evidence supporting that it wasn't them.
• All exit and the next scene begins.

I feel that this is an effective way to perform this scene as it doesn't give away the fact the death of Charlie was suicide until the very end where it reveals him taking a cyanide pill.

We discussed about adding in another Kourteney interrogation midway through the first day of school scene so that we can see the separation of Charlie meeting his two future lovers but we decided to go against this as it would mean that Kourteney has more interrogations than Ben and we wanted the pair to be equally expressed throughout he piece.

We also made a significant change by removing the scene where Charlie breaks up with Kourteney. We felt like this scene was very lacking and we wanted to spend the little amount of time we have left working on our new interrogation scenes rather than making an old scene better. We agreed that we'd have Kourteney discuss her break up with Charlie in her final solo interrogation with DI Sanderson.

Finally, we got our news report audio recorded ready for us to use in our first scene. We originally were going to use a text-to-speech program to do this for us but after trying the voices from the same website again, they sounded far more robotic than what we first thought they were. As a result of this, I asked Lorna and Ollie Kelly if they minded voicing the news reporters. From our storytelling unit I am aware that they are the best storytellers in the class by far. They were very happy to help.

Next lesson we will work on our interrogations, flesh them out by making notes on what each one would be about and finally get down to redevising them.