Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 12 - 02/03/17 ADD VIDEO

Today, we worked on Ollie’s motif scene’s as they haven’t been run in a while and we need to make at least one of them longer. We felt that the first one, where Ollie walks around the stage slowly, can’t be changed much as it is very simplistic. For the second one, the puppetry hand movements, we changed the movements slightly to make it more interesting and longer.

We changed it so that the doctor lifts up Ollie’s hand once and let’s go to let it fall, repeats this once more and then lifts up the hand and mimics tying a knot so the hand stays there. The doctor turns it over so it’s facing palm up and clenches their own fist twice which Ollie repeats. The doctor checks Ollie’s pulse on his wrist and then writes a note on their smartwatch. Whilst doing so, Ollie clenches his fist again, uncommanded. The doctor slowly looks at the fist.

For the third one, where Ollie names the colours he sees, we kept it the same as it didn’t really need changing. However, with the final scene, the one where we move Ollie’s head and kill him, we thought it looked a bit naff so we decided to try something different. We wanted something to fail so we’d have to “operate” on Ollie. The scene starts with Ollie on a table unconscious but with his eyes wide open. Rob, Lorna and I each have 3 movements we perform on Ollie in sequence with each which appear to be medical as we attempt to bring him back. For me, I continually lift up his legs and rotate his ankles. After our 3 move sequence, Rob mimes using a defibrillator to bring Ollie back to life but this fails. He shocks him 7 times, but only 3 Ollie reacts to, while the others, he lies there dead facing the audience with his eyes open still. All of us doctors exit and we leave a 10-15 second gap and Ollie will react a couple of times to the shocks despite them happening about 30 seconds ago. We the have the generator sound gets louder and as it gets louder the sound of the light fuzzing cuts out and we have a sound effect of a lightbulb smashing which is in sync with a blackout, thus the end of our entire piece. I think going through the motifs has made our piece so much more mature and is a lot more entertaining. Next lesson, we will work on our third and final scene!