Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 16 - 24/03/17

Today we performed our piece to be assessed and we below is my evaluation of our performance.

Rob’s scene:

• Rob spoke with good volume when opening and narrating the scene however, I feel that he needed more diction in his speech as some words were lost for me and I was standing beside him.
• Ollie and I, again, used different leg movements when walking around the shop. While I lifted my feet up normally, Ollie dragged his foot along the ground to meet the other as he walked. Although this showed a clear difference between our characters, it looked a bit odd from the audience’s point of view in a previous runthrough so we should’ve specified which we would do!
• Ollie and I were supposed to meet at the centre at a certain point in the music as this may affect the timing of the whole piece. However, when Rob and Ollie were masking each other’s movement just before this – to make it explicitly clear that they are the same person, just in different places in time – they took too long and if we waited for Ollie to make it to where he needed to be for us to clash, it would have been out of time with the music. Still, to counter this I stepped backwards naturally so that we clashed earlier, thus resolving what could’ve been a big issue.
• The transfer of Rob’s character’s trademark notepad – another key symbolism of the character – went well this time with Ollie successfully taking it when left on the till counter by Rob and then with me taking it from the back after Ollie runs off after his necklace gets stolen and leaves it on the unused chair.
• The entire cash machine section went very well as always, the only problem we thought of was my facial expressions during the robbery. According to Ollie, I didn’t look like a man who was being held at gunpoint.
• The final torture section was very good and was extremely tense. This controversial section did well to captivate the audience.

Lorna’s scene:

• I believe the order of scenes may have been confusing as a few audience members asked questions about the plot afterwards. To make this clearer, we should’ve gone in chronological order.
• We successfully performed this scene naturistically which allowed the audience to connect effectively to the scenario.

Lewis’ scene:

• Our movement went very well and represented the emotions of my character very effectually.
• The dialogue sounded more natural than it has before but could’ve done with being more naturalistic. Also, there was no clear end to the dialogue as I had finished my movement but the others continued talking but there was some sort of awkward pause. We should’ve rehearsed this more to prevent.
• Ollie’s scene:
• Our movement at the beginning went very well and it was clear what was happening.
• Mine and Rob’s speech logs throughout the scenes could be improved as Rob spoke quite casual while I spoke very professionally. Also, I said the word progress twice in the same sentence and said it differently both times.

Ollie's scene:

• Our movement at the beginning went very well and it was clear what was happening.
• Mine and Rob’s speech logs throughout the scenes could be improved as Rob spoke quite casual while I spoke very professionally. Also, I said the word progress twice in the same sentence and said it differently both times.

General:

• Most set changes were good as everything was put in the right place however they could’ve been faster.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 15 - 10/03/17

Today we finished Lorna’s scene by creating three more sections. We wanted this scene to be in a different order as this fragmented timeline works well with our stimulus. Below are the four sections in order.

• Harry stealing letters
• Charles leaving for war
• Receiving the death telegram
• Revealing the letters

For the second scene, we have me walking in with my case leaving for war and I’m saying my last goodbye to my wife. The third scene has Lorna receiving a telegram notifying her of my death. During this, I am lying on the floor as the dead body, then when Lorna leaves the telegram and walks towards where my grave is, I stand and walk over to the house side of the split-screen. I then place down the photo frame of us both. The final scene takes place 40 years later and Harry (Ollie) enters with the mail. He confesses to Stella that there’s more letters, goes off and comes on with the letters he hid. After he apologises and exits, Stella is devastated and slams down a photo frame of her and Harry.

We feel that this is a very effective ending to the scene and I believe that the audience will be able to understand the flashback.

Next lesson, we will will perform our piece to be filmed and assessed.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 14 - 09/03/17

Today we wrote the dialogue for our first section of Lorna’s scene and blocked the movement to go with it. We first came up with the script which took us a while as we wanted to make the dialogue as natural as possible. In this section, we have Harry (Ollie) visiting Stella (Lorna) and offering comfort.

Below is our dialogue:

We thought that instead of Harry coming along as another lover out of the blue, we wanted him to be the cause of Stella’s willingness to remarry. We have adapted the story so that now, Harry is intercepting the letters from Charles which leads to Stella thinking that Charles hasn’t bothered to write. Stella then ends up marrying Harry. We wanted to show in this section that Harry is intercepting the letters. We originally thought of having Ollie and Lorna run their dialogue and I enter as the ghost of Charles (as the real Charles is obviously at war) and place letters in Ollie’s pockets to show him intercepting them. However, when trying this out, we felt that not only was it difficult to do, but that it wasn’t clear that Ollie was intercepting the letters. Instead, I now go to hand Lorna the letters but Ollie takes them out my hand before they get to her. I attempt to ‘deliver’ four letters and then leave the last one on the table which Ollie takes.

Next lesson, we will work out the rest of the scene.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 13 - 03/03/17

Today we discussed our ideas for our final scene for our piece. Originally, our idea related to the media and how they represent body image for young women, however we felt that it was extremely similar to the scene based on the paparazzi as they both relate to the media haunting our main character.

We then came up with the idea of a woman (Lorna) being haunted by the guilt of remarrying and sees visions of her passed husband. We thought this suit very well to our stimulus as Lorna’s not only haunted by her guilt but she’s also seeing ghostly visions of her husband which really stays close to “Ghost Stories”.

• We started off by trying to devise movement but we thought that although we’re good with movement pieces, we can’t do a movement piece for every single scene as it doesn’t make our piece very diverse. We spent some deciding how we were to layout our story and below is a basic outline of the scene:
• Stella (Lorna) and Charles (Lewis) are happily married but Charles is conscripted to join the army. Charles reassures his wife and proceeds to leave for war. Throughout his absence, Stella waits and waits for a letter he’d promised he’d send.
• When she discovers her husband is dead, her childhood boyfriend and pal, Harry (Ollie) comes to help her get through her rough time. She eventually falls in love with this man but throughout the course of their relationship, she starts to see visions of her previous husband. Her guilt overwhelms her and we see her breakdown.

We said that next lesson, we will work on dialogue for our scene as we wanted this scene to be heavily dialogue based. We also wanted Rob to play the piano for this piece as we felt this would make the scene more effective if the underscore was played live. The song Rob’s playing is, “Comptine d’Un utre Été-Die fabelhafte Welt der Amélie Piano”.

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! 

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 11 - 28/02/17 ADD VIDEO

Today we decided to rehearse everything we had so that we could fully wrap up the two scenes we already had: The Paparazzi Scene and the Suicide Scene!

For the Suicide Scene (hyperlink), the only improvement is see necessary is for Rob to be louder with his narration so that he can be heard over the music. Lowering the volume of the track would create less of an atmosphere so Rob definitely needs to be louder. Besides that, this scene is finished.

For the Paparazzi Scene (hyperlink), the Breakfast show part needs to be acted more naturally as it sounds very acted. I feel that this is because the group is reading from the script still which makes it difficult to fully act it. Seeing as the script isn’t at all long, we will have it learnt for the next time we run through this scene so that it can be performed more naturally. Once we work out this issue, we will have two finished scenes!

Next lesson, we will recap the Ollie’s motif scenes so that we can possibly make them longer. 

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 10 - 23/02/17

Today we continued with our paparazzi scene and focused on the next section. We wanted to have some dialogue which the other sections in our piece lack. We wanted a group of people discussing our celebrity "drug addict" which decided to call Sam Marshall. We were going to have it a group of teenagers at school but we felt that we'd lose maturity in the piece and make it less believable. So we decided to change it to a group of network TV directors who are arranging who's going to be on their Sunday breakfast show. We felt that we could show how the media warp and manipulate situations and have our TV directors discussing how much of a mess he could possibly be on set and how it'll rake in views while in reality we have Sam Marshall walk onstage with his bags from rehab in a split screen and show that in reality, he is completely normal and that the media have pretty much ruined his private life.

The movement I have as Sam Marshall is simple which only requires me to walk onstage and take out my clothes etc out of my bag but its the dialogue between the TV directors on the other side of the split screen which makes this section effective.

So this lesson we spent the remainder writing out the script for the TV show part. We wanted to keep it short but still have enough content to create an effective scene. Our first draft was alright and contained the right context but we felt it was far too short so we had to extend it. Below is a photo of the final script:

Next lesson, we will rehearse this entire scene and move onto the final scene which would star Lorna as the main actor.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 9 - 10/02/17

Today, we continued on with our paparazzi physical theatre and I had lots of ideas to add. This morning we had a physical theatre workshop from someone outside of school and there was plenty that we could implement into this piece. Below is how much we have so far:

• I walk onstage and the soundscape starts immediately and the others run on immediately and try to get a photo of me, I keep trying to walk through patiently and when the soundscape finishes. We all freeze and I’ll be stood in front of the pack of paparazzi; the music will then start (which hasn’t been picked yet). 
• I start walking to the right slowly and the others stand still in a group miming holding a camera and this imaginary camera follows me everywhere I go. This means that when I then drop down to tie my shoelace, the cameras also point downwards to me. 
• As I stand back up, I turn over my back shoulder and start walking in slow motion while the paparazzi walk one step per beat of the song (the song would be quite lively) and on the 8th beat, they’d turn in a random direction as if they’re searching for me. After around 6/7 of these, I stop centre stage facing the audience and the “pap” is behind me in a line (Ollie-Lorna-Rob).

I wanted to use an interesting technique from the workshop which was making something natural look abstract by larger movements. For this instance, I’m eating breakfast. So pour my milk with both hands, I scoop quite dramatically, I eat it and then I get pull back by Lorna and Rob snaps a photo of me, I repeat this again but with Ollie taking a picture of me and again where I go straight back and both of them do it. Finally, I do it once more but fall back and then get thrown back up to fall forwards on the floor.

This is as much as we got, so next lesson we will continue.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 8 - 07/02/17

Today, we focused on our third scene and tried to come up with a topic to base it on. It took us a while to come up with a topic as we didn’t want to use a very common topic as the past two scenes have done (terrorism & domestic abuse). However, we felt that we could do something very different with the topic of drug abuse. An amateur performance that Ollie went to see before based their entire piece on 9/11 but it was only about halfway through that the audience would realise this as they were very vague with how’d talk about the disaster which made it very ambiguous. We thought we could do this with drugs and have each of us have a statement about drugs but make it sound ambiguous. Examples for phrases were:

• “It’s the smell that gets you, that gets you wanting more.”
• “You would’ve had some only half an hour ago, but you find yourself craving more.”
• “Just the mention… my attention on anything else just drops.”

After this we thought more about how we’d incorporate an individual into this scene as we wanted all of these controversial topics to haunt each of our characters. We then thought about real life people who were hooked on drugs before and our attention went straight to celebrities. The likes of Macaulay Calkin, Drew Barrymore and Charlie Sheen have all been addicted to drugs before and we thought deep into how this may affect their publicity and egos. For a regular person to get hooked on a substance, very few people are worried or even interested, however if it were a famous face, it wouldn’t take minutes to appear on celebrity gossip websites and YouTube channels. We thought that these celebrities who come out of rehab must have a rough time getting over their addiction as it is, let alone having cameras in their faces everywhere they go. We thought this would be the perfect base for our scene: a celebrity haunted by the paparazzi.

We then started thinking of questions a celebrity would be asked and below are several of the questions we came up with:

• Is it true that you’re broke?
• What’s next?
• Are you high right now?
• Did your girlfriend visit you in rehab?
• Have you read your reviews?
• Why did your agent drop you?
• What have your parents said?

We then went on to record each of these and more so that they can be overlapped to provide a paparazzi soundscape. I thought it would be effective to use this as the opening of a physical theatre piece where the celebrity would step out of rehab, for example, and the soundscape begins with the other three actors surrounding him/her. We agreed that I would play the celebrity as it would make domestic abuse easier with a female as the centre attention as woman are commonly portrayed as innocent. Next lesson we will focus on creating this physical theatre piece.

Single - Devising Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 7 - 31/01/17

Today we decided to scrap what we came up with yesterday as we felt that it was very basic and needed more thought put into it. Although we will keep in mind the good things we can take away from what we created such as the fade in/out of the lights to represent the passage of time.
We then started working on our scene for the suicide scene. We wanted this to be a physical section but not dance-y. Although something like an extravagant dance would look nice, we didn’t think it would be very effective at portraying the emotions of our character. We wanted to show not only how the murder of Lee Rigby haunts Danny but how his previous life events affect him mentally too. 

Below is the movement we came up with. 

• The piece begins with Rob sat at a table with a notepad, trying to write his suicide note as Danny Cornelius. Ollie, Lorna and I are scattered across the stage in different places and levels looking depressed; Lorna on the floor, me on a chair and Ollie standing on a chair. This is to show the elevating levels of Danny’s depression.
• Rob performs a short monologue where Danny asks himself what does one put in a suicide note. When this monologue ends, Rob stands and Lorna sits where he once was whilst Ollie and I take our chairs we were using to the back.
• The music transitions into a slower beat so Ollie and I walk back into the scene quite robot like, taking one step or performing one action per beat. The setting has changed into a shop and we Ollie and I pick up a few items and place them on the counter for Lorna to scan. This is all very abstract movement despite being a naturalistic setting. I exit the store first and then stop midway across the stage, Ollie then catches up and once we’re level, I stick out my arm in front of his chest, we both squat and as we rise I turn to face him.
• I push his chest and tug at this chain, which Ollie then takes off and gives to me. I push him away slightly and I hold out my knife arm threateningly. I then walk off briskly towards the table and Ollie walks off in the opposite direction. By this point Lorna has set up the table so it’s on its side facing stage right. During this entire shop section, Rob has relevant speech relating to what’s happening.
• I walk over to the turned table as the Danny now and interact with it as if it were a cash machine. Lorna enters from the back and looks towards me she steps backwards until we’re back to back and she raises her gun up to my head. Ollie is standing behind the table and for the next 10 seconds, he rises hands me money, I lift my arm over my head and give it to Lorna. After these 10 seconds, she turns to face me, pushes me and runs off. Ollie and I lower the table down so that the legs are facing upwards, and during this whole section Rob again has relevant speech.
• Ollie and I stand in front of the table at either end facing each other and Lorna is on her knees on the table; representing Lee Rigby. Using hand puppetry, we both manipulate Lorna. We raise up each of her arms and throw them down, we raise her up by her shoulders then let her droop down, I lift her up by her chin and have her face left. She then goes into a sort of back bend and Ollie slits her throat where she falls to her knees facing back to the right.
• Ollie steps further away and pulls her forward off of the table and laying face up. We circle her and then Ollie mimes handing me a knife. I stab her 3 times piercing her stomach and as I connect with her stomach her torso and legs lift up. Ollie and I then lift her up but through her down almost immediately.
• We finish the murder section by Ollie stabbing her a few more times resulting in her death. During this torture scene, Rob lifts the table back up to normal and continues speaking.
• We then have a blackout and when the lights come back up Rob is standing in front of the table with Ollie and I standing to the side of it holding rope across Rob’s neck. Rob “finishes his suicide note” and then Lorna, standing behind Rob on the other side of the table, pulls his head down and Ollie and I lower down which leads to Rob falling back onto the table dead.

Next lesson, we will try to collect ideas on what our third main scene should be about.

Single - Devising Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 6 - 26/01/17

Today, we worked out how we would portray an alternative to 9/11 and changed our mind on abortion.

After researching Rob brought forward the idea of Lee Rigby, a man who was slaughtered in the streets by Islamic State supporters. Rob will be performing a monologue written as Danny Cornelius, a witness of the murder of Lee Rigby. Below is the research we found:

"A man haunted by seeing Lee Rigby hacked to death in the street was found hanged, an inquest heard. Danny Cornelius, 38, was described as an isolated man during the hearing. Unemployed, single and childless, he would often stay at his grandparents' home in Elwill Way, Istead Rise, Gravesend. The court heard that he was a victim of two armed robberies as a young man. Firstly as a teenager, his gold chain was stolen at knifepoint, and on another occasion just a couple of years later he was forced to withdraw money from a cashpoint and hand it over, on both occasions by young black men. After that he began to suffer with paranoid schizophrenia, and when his friends started to get married and have children he became disconnected from them."

While Rob wrote his monologue, the rest of us discussed our ideas on the topic of abortion. Although we thought that abortion is a very interesting idea to go with and there are lots of ideas we could test out, we decided to choose something else as abortion is a very touchy subject which may offend some people in the audience. We thought that domestic abuse would be a good idea to go with as it is something that is a recurring issue and it's something we felt more comfortable to perform.

We began discussing a short storyline for the scene:

• A couple (Lorna and Lewis) start of very happy, but soon, Lewis starts becoming impatient due to work stress and is suggested that he becomes violent once or twice.
• In the end, Lewis leaves Lorna. Distraught, she can't believe what's happened to her and decides to blame herself for him leaving her. This leaves her socially awkward and afraid of starting a relationship.

We wanted to have a slow movement piece featuring many tableaux showing the stages of their relationship. Below is our movement:

• Lights up, Lorna and Lewis are standing next to each other and they embrace. Fade to black.
• Lights up, the pair are lying down at a picnic, Lewis feeds her a strawberry, fade to black.
• Lights up, the pair are getting married, with Rob as the priest, fade to black.
• Lights up, Lewis is on his computer sending emails etc. Lorna comes to spend time with Lewis but he tells her to go away, fade to black.
• Lights up, the pair greet a male friend, Ollie, Lewis goes for a firm handshake whereas Lorna goes for a very friendly handshake. Noticing the pair look very happy chatting, he pulls her closer to him quite aggressively, fade to black.
• Lights up, Lewis is on the phone to a work colleague and has a notepad to write down info, Lorna enters trying to talk to him and but he, like, last time tells her to leave, fade to black.
• Lights up, Lewis is talking to Lorna and telling her that things aren't working so he doesn't want to be with her. Distraught, Lorna tries to persuade Lewis to stay but he has already made his mind up and exits, fade to black.

After this we discussed the idea of having a scene afterwards where Lorna is at work and a colleague asks her if she'd like to go out for drinks with him, but she ends up rejecting this because she's scared of this potential boyfriend leaving her later down the line.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 5 - 24/01/17

Today we redesigned the motif idea and discussed what else we could have for our three main bulky scenes.

For the motif scene we wanted to use typical things that psychiatrists would do to examine mentally scarred patients. We wanted to start off with the original scene of me walking across the room following Ollie with a clipboard. Below are the three other motif scenes we want to have:

• Ollie is sitting in a chair and a doctor would use hand puppetry to lift up Ollie's arm and test his hand by clenching and unclenching his fist to be sure he still "works".
• Ollie stands in the centre of the room and doctor stands beside him with a clipboard. The lighting in the room would change from white to a colour and then Ollie would name that colour and it would switch to another. This would be in a very dead and monotoned voice, said quite slowly with plenty of pause between the colour change and the naming of the colour; this is testing Ollie's perception.
• Ollie is standing in the centre and a doctor is standing beside him. They move behind Ollie and turn his head with their hands, first looking left, right then up and down. If this were to be final scene, we'd have the doctor step back from Ollie and the light would fade to black. Once there is a black out, there'd be short flash of light back to a black out in which a bone cracking sound effect sounds, and Ollie twists his head to the side making it look like he's breaking his neck.

We then discussed the ideas we had for our first scene. We first thought that terror can haunt a person for a long time so we linked this to terrorism and to different bombings. We originally wanted to base this on the monologue from the play Eight which is about a man who gives 10p to someone so they can buy a Mars Bar, this is the same man who leaves the shop and goes on to blow up a bus; the 7/7 bombings. We then went on to the idea of 9/11 as I didn't think we should base our piece off of another play as that ruins the originality of our piece and it wouldn't be as creative. Next lesson, we will report this to Ollie and start working on the bombings scene.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 4 - 19/01/17

Today we discussed where we wanted to go with our piece due to some of our ideas not working or becoming dead ends. We originally wanted to focus all of our piece on the story of Ollie's character but we felt this would leave our piece very narrow and linear and not containing much depth to it. I wanted to make our audience think more about our piece by displaying something more creative. We then came up with the idea of hauntings, based on our stimulus of "Ghost Stories" (linking obviously to Ghosts). We wanted to show that different people are affected by different experiences. These different experiences haunt these characters for the rest of their lives and we wanted to show this through different scenes. This small showcase would represent different hauntings.

We didn't want to waste anything from the last few lessons as we did come up with some good ideas. As a result, we're still keeping the idea of a motif which involves frequent alternating scenes. We're also keeping the same idea for a story during these motif scenes as the whole process of Ollie's mental examinations is a great topic to use when we're using people who are getting haunted.

Next lesson we will continue brainstorming ideas for haunting life experiences.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 3 - 17/01/17

Today we continued planning out our story for our devised unit so that we could plan when and what we're doing each lesson. We began with the idea of some sort of storyline and below is what we've come up with:

• Opening walk in scene
• Classroom scene
• Common Room scene (Physical theatre)
• Parents scene
• Parent consultation scene
• Closing walk in scene

We then came up with the idea of having the walk in scenes as a motif throughout the performance and have them weaved between each scene so every other scene is a walk in scene! We came to a disagreement with this as I wanted to have this as one continuous scene being stopped and continued as they we progress through the story while Lorna wanted them to be similar but different scenario scenes (e.g. taking temperature, walking with notes, physio etc.) While I was confident that my idea would look good, we decided as a group that we would go with Lorna's idea.

We next started looking for music for our physical theatre scene in the common room. We wanted something that has a beat as we wanted to perform abstract dance/PT movements to it but something modern that would match Ollie having a smartphone throughout the scene and it being his centre of attention. We thought of "Treat You Better" by Shawn Mendes but we then felt it didn't sound techno-y enough to suit our modern setting. We then played "Shape of You," but then felt that although it matched our modern theme better, it was very repetitive and didn't change much throughout. We decided to go for "Starboy," instead as its a very effective song for movement and has a very techno upbeat mood.

Next lesson, we will work on creating the physical theatre scene.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 2 - 10/01/17

Today Rob shared with us his idea he had outside of lesson. This idea used elements of both mine and the groups ideas of a social media and a misunderstood kid. The addition is whenever he opens up social media, something "strange" happens (e.g. things falling over, someone is hurt etc.) These events would build up to a climactic ending like having a character die.

The idea we finalised was to have a teen who's considered to be mentally unstable but isn't, he's just very intelligent and introverted. This misunderstanding leads to him being left alone and given extra support from school. His ultra intelligent brain waves lead to him disrupting technology such as lights and mobile phones. Eventually, he gets taken to a psychiatric hospital where he's treated for his "illness." This focuses majorly on the idea of mental health we all found interesting last lesson.

We wanted our play to start with the end scene as it forebodes to the audience the characters downfall. Below is a scene we devised for our opening to show this:

We discussed our next scene where we wanted to show how effective Ollie's powers are in real life and how much of an outcast he is in school. This sparked the idea for the school scene. In this scene, we have the chairs in a triangular formation with Rob at the front on the right being a teachers pet, Lorna and I in the middle to the side throwing paper at each other not really caring about the lesson and at the back, Ollie between Lorna and I.

We wanted to have a voiceover similar to Mrs Horrocks from our Flint Street Nativity to show the authority of the teacher. We wanted to show the paranormal side of the Ollie immediately to get the audience thinking. We were going to have a text tone sound effect and Ollie would get his phone out and look. As soon as the screen lights up, the lights dim down and Rob, Lorna and I lean towards Ollie to grab him and his phone and when we're close, we have a blackout and when the lights come back up, we're all back in our original positions.

Next lesson, we will discuss our ideas further to develop more scenes.

Single - Devised Unit (Ghost Stories) - Blog 1 - 05/01/17 & 06/01/17