Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 22 (Evaluation) - 22/03/16

Today was the day we performed our piece and I feel it went rather well! There were no major issues and the scene's seemed to transition really smoothly. 

A major change we made before performing was changing our lighting to just regular shadowy white lights. This was because we ran out of time leading up to the performance to look at the correct codes and settings of the lights. If we were to perform our piece again, I would use our original lighting plan and work out how to use the lights much sooner. However, this last minute lighting change was effective as the lights were on automatic settings so that whenever there were any fast, large movements, the lights would change to a different shade of white (cold, warm, neutral). This became very effective in You Don't Own Me, Elastic Heart and Charlie's Breakdown as the lights were changing colour and caught the audience of guard.

Below is my full evaluation of the unit:

Response to stimuli:
Our initial reaction when hearing the stimulus was to mind-map our initial thoughts which would allow us to develop ideas and possibly construct scenes.

• From the song, we drew the theme of helplessness; this led to the theme of depression. From depression we knew that drug abuse was a main cause so we wanted to include drug abuse in our piece.
• From the music video and Adele's thoughts on the song, we drew the theme of a car crash relationship. From this, we wanted to include some sort of break-up. This links to all of the tension of the love triangle between Charlie, Ben and Kourteney.
• From the song title, we drew the theme of persistence. We wanted to have a character in our piece be very persistent to match this theme; this is the living example of Ben. Ben is persistent at keeping in contact with Charlie which then leads on to him falling deeply in love with Charlie wanting his attention even more. This idea led to the development of Ben's break-up scene.

Upon noting down our ideas and linking them to what we could do with them, we analysed opportunities for different techniques to be used such as voiceover and mime; we also made a list of which techniques we wanted too.

Development of Ideas:

From the very beginning, we were experimenting with our different ideas. We had our initial three ideas and developed them enough to create a scene for each. We then chose an idea to take further and develop in order to perhaps find our final idea and we were successful. When we had our final idea of the love triangle we developed it in many ways:

• We initially thought of Ben to be immediately in love with Charlie, however we later changed this as we wanted to show key character development so we had Ben start of as a close friend.
• We were originally going to have Ben be the one to introduce Charlie to Kourteney so Ben can have a sudden realisation of his mistake (introducing Charlie to Kourteney) later on in his monologue. However we felt that this made one of the flashback scenes far too long so we cut it down and we had Kourteney mention that her and Charlie met in their media class.

Collaboration as a group:

As a group we split the workload evenly for all tasks such as research, script writing and sourcing media. Hope conducted a lot of research especially towards the beginning of the task and looking into the stimulus, Charlie worked on a lot of devising and script writing for scenes such as the phone call from work and I worked on lot of technical parts of our piece such as lighting, merging audio tracks and creating the tracks which were needed for voiceovers. 

Developing performance through rehearsal:
Through rehearsals, we have changed and developed our piece so that it makes more sense and derives similar meanings from. We originally had more flashbacks than interrogation scenes in our piece as we wanted to display to the audience the development of each character throughout their lives but this removed the effect of the mystery about who killed Charlie.

Performance:

Scene 1: Dead body intro

+ The BBC News intro music was very effective at providing an official atmosphere to the voiceovers.

- The voiceover was very quiet as it was exported at a lower volume.

- I feel it would've been better if we supplied the voices for the voiceover ourselves rather than asking members of other groups to help.

Scene 2: Ben's Interrogation (1)

+ Charlie did well to characterise his character of DI Sanderson as his character of Charlie has very similar dialect to himself.

- I feel I was very static in this scene and it could've been improved if I used more hand gestures.

- My tone of voice was rather constant throughout so ranging this will provide a more entertaining performance.

- I feel my reaction to learning about Charlie's death was very weak considering my character's level of commitment and obsession towards him.

+ The transition into the school scene was very smooth and provided me with a good follow through to start my introduction to the scene.

Scene 3: First Day

- When explaining how Charlie and my character met, I should've spoken to the audience, not to the empty seat which was previously DI Sanderson's.

- When talking to Charlie, I was very repetitive in what I said.

+ When explaining my shock of Charlie punching Kyle, I did well to look at the audience and tell the audience how I felt.

Scene 4: Kourteney's Interrogation (2) + Dating

+ Hope did very well to respond to DI Sanderson revealing Charlie's death.

- The pairs transition into the next scene was very slow and felt quite forced and awkward. 

+ Hope's narration during the text message placard section was very good as it was a good length for me to hold the placards for their scene

- I felt that although we had narration, the placard scene was very awkward and seemed too silent. I think next time we should have some music in the background to give the scene a more romantic atmosphere.

Scene 5: You Don't Own Me

+ The pair did very well to keep focus and move in time with the music.

+ The lighting was very effective due to the movement detection.

+ The movement was very effective at portraying the relationship between Kourteney and Charlie and matched the lyrics to the song.

+ I did well to transition ready for the next scene whilst the pair are still dancing.

- I feel we shouldn't of include puppetry gestures in this scene as Charlie's breakdown scene was the main focus of those actions; luckily this error wasn't too major.

Scene 6: Ben's Interrogation (2)

+ I felt that this interrogation was very conclusive and moved the plot forward.

+ Charlie and I were effective with our pauses and gestures in this interrogation as opposed to the first.

- There were a few moments where we ran out of things to say which prolonged some of the pauses.

Scene 7: Confession of Love (The Bar Scene)

- I feel my speech when drunk didn't sound genuinely intoxicated.

+ Our movement was very unbalanced during this scene which added to the illusion of us being drunk.

+ The timing of the lights cutting out was perfect thanks to Hope and an audience member

+ Our transition to the next scene was very smooth and almost seamless.

Scene 8: Kourteney's Interrogation

+ This scene represented Hope's change from sarcastic and arrogant to emotionally distraught and angry.

+ Charlie keeping silent throughout the scene is very effective at showing his infatuation with Ben while texting.

- Charlie mimed some actions away from the table but this was out of the cameras field of view so wasn't seen at all and wasted.

Scene 9: Ben's Break-Up

+ Our movement was well timed with the lyrics.

+ We had many well timed pauses for us to share facial expressions. This provides the audience with an in-look on our characters emotions.

- Mine and Hope's movements were slightly out of time which loses the effect of our characters being similar and going through the same experience.

+ When performing my monologue, I kept my attention to the audience but didn't look at them the whole time. I spoke to myself for most of it but then to the audience towards the end in my grief.

Scene 10: Joint Interrogation

- When exiting the last scene, I place the chair back on the stage right side of the table but I exit when I'm meant to sit back on the seat. This looked rather silly when I entered 5 seconds later than Hope.

- There was a long pause once I was seated as Hope had forgotten that she started the scene. This resulted in me starting the scene instead.

+ Our choral voice was very effective at confirming Charlie's demise.

- When Charlie says we can go, he made the same mistake he made in rehearsals by saying we could both go. The idea of the scene was that we were in different places but shown together as an abstract way to show our similarities. But Charlie saying we could both go would make the audience think that we were in the same room.

Scene 11: Charlie's Breakdown

- When on the phone to Charlie's boss, Charlie's responses didn't make sense when matched with the speech on the other end of the call. (E.g. "Oh hey! You alright?" "What's up? Maybe the fact...")

- When performing the hand puppetry there were a few moments where Charlie's movement was out of time to the puppetry string movement. This was my fault due to me not warning him soon enough.

+ We all remembered our movement and our facial expressions displayed to the audience the rush of emotions overwhelming us.

+ Our actions were mostly in time with the music making it very smooth.

+ When laying the final blow on Charlie, he did very well to fall backwards in slow motion as this is very demanding on the abs.

- When exiting, I turned over my left shoulder. This turned my back to the audience which doesn't allow them to see my facial expressions.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 21 - 18/03/16

Today we performed a full performance runthrough in front of the class in order to find ways to improve our piece and what bits needed working on before our final performance next week.

We had 10 minutes to confer before performing our pieces to the class in order to collect some constructive criticism. Charlie, Hope and I quickly ran through the interrogations between each other by just listing what we say and what scene we go into next. We then performed the piece to the class and below are all of the notes we collated from the audience and ourselves:

• When using my phone for music, my message tone kept going off as my phone wasn't on airplane mode. In the real performance, my phone will be on airplane mode and "Do not disturb."
• Charlie and I got very lost on what to say during our interrogations so a lot of the content we pre-decided wasn't included.
• Charlie and I forgot our movement when it came to Ben's Break-up which resulted in us skipping parts so the timing for me and Hope was very off and this scene was much shorter than before.
• During the bar scene, Hope forgot to turn the lights off so we when Charlie and I pretended to kiss, the black out effect was lost.

We agreed to go over our piece over the weekend to be sure we knew what we were doing for the entire performance ready for next lesson.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 20 - 17/03/16

Today in Single, we went to the gallery theatre and rehearsed Charlie's breakdown scene.

We begun the lesson by moving over to the gallery theatre as there was more space and we would have use of a set of speakers. I walked the pair through the movement for the scene, explaining who did what movement, at what point in the music we did them, and why we did those movements. I did this to confirm with the pair that my movements made sense and linked well with the characters involved. We rehearsed the scene multiple times and go it running smoothly before adding on something to the end.

Our extra addition changes the way we end our piece but not the meaning. We decided to replicate the puppetry completely from our scene we devised when first looking at initial ideas for our piece. This involved the controlling entity of the puppetry forcing Charlie to take drugs which represents their indirect involvement with his demise. We devised the short extra section within a few minutes and below is the outline:

• Ben uses puppetry to force Charlie into smoking.
• Kourteney uses puppetry to force Charlie into drinking.
• Ben and Kourteney use puppetry together to force Charlie to snort cocaine.
• Ben and Kourteney use puppetry together to force Charlie to inject heroine.
• Ben and Kourteney use puppetry together to push Charlie backwards in slow-motion and he falls backwards in slow-motion. He's left lying on the table as a corpse.

I feel this ending is a great deal nicer than the last ending and is much smoother as Charlie needs to end the scene on the table somehow as the "epilogue" to our piece requires Charlie to be dead on the table.

We then went back to our classroom and discussed lighting. We were planning on setting the rest of our lighting on our lights but they were unavailable as they were being used for something already. Instead we wrote down what lighting we wanted and we will link up the codes to the lights at some point. To the right is our lighting plan:

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 19 - 15/03/16

Today, Charlie and I rehearsed all of our scenes which involved only us two.

We stuck to the plan I made on my last blog post and only rehearsed all of the scenes which involve only Charlie and I as Hope was away.

We recapped the interrogation scenes quickly as we had already done them recently then got to work on recapping the bar scene and our break up.

We ran from the interrogation prior into the bar scene which we hadn't done in a long time. We were rather rusty to begin with but we remembered our outline and ran the scene a few times.

We then ran our breakup scene which involves a lot of physical movements to remember. I had to runthrough and remind Charlie at times but in the end we had the scene working like clockwork!

Next lesson we will refer to my lesson plan and completely run through all physical theatre/dance scenes.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 18 - 11/03/16

Today we rerecorded the phone call audio and made executive decisions to do with the state of our piece. We also made plans for our few remaining lessons.

We began by recording the audio for the phone call. We did this as in the last recording, we used Charlie's old character name, "Hunter Andrews."

After rerecording this, we looked at the checklist I made in my last blog and made some decisions. Hope and I discussed whether we'd keep in the part with our text placards and decided we could remodel the scene to leave them in. Below is the outline which we came up with for the whole dating section of our piece including some lighting:

• Kourteney's interrogation (leading onto asking what their friendship had turned into)
• K and C sit on separate sides of the table as if it were each of their bedrooms. K is narrating as this happens.
• C and K exchange texts between each other which lead to a date being arranged. This is where we'd use our placards; we'd use less placards than our original plan as this small scene will be too long. (Pink lighting)
• They transition into still images of the pair dating. C ends facing the wall and says, as DI Sanderson, "So where did it go wrong?"
• C turns and "You Don't Own Me," starts playing. The lights turn to red to show the sinister side of the relationship. The movement piece then begins

After this Hope and I made plan of what we're going to each of our remaining lessons leading up to our performance date:

• Tuesday - As Hope won't be in due to a business trip, Charlie and I will rehearse all of our scenes where it's just us two including the bar scene and Ben's breakup scene
• Thursday - We will runthrough Charlie's breakdown and work out the lighting
• Friday - We will perform a full runthrough of our entire piece with lighting

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 17 - 10/03/16

Today in Single, we finally finished all of our interrogations and also rerecorded our voice recording for Charlie getting fired.

We began with running through the first interrogation so that it stays fresh in our minds and then moved onto devising the others.

While Charlie and Hope were working on Kourteney's interrogations, I went through each of our scenes and made a checklist of which one's need some work and in what way they needed work. Below is the list:

• Dating scene - We need to create more still images and decided whether we'd keep in the part where we use the text placards
• Confession of love - We need to possibly make this scene longer
• Break up with Ben - We need to runthrough this scene as it involves a lot of movement and we haven't done it in quite a while
• Charlie's Breakdown - We need to rerecord the audio for when Charlie get's fired as it uses Charlie's old character name, "Hunter Andrews." Also, we need to finalise the movement and link each action to the track; this'll make it easier to remember the movement.

After we had finally completed our interrogations, we got onto rerecording the audio for Charlie's boss for when he gets fired.

Next lesson, we will fully complete Charlie's breakdown and possibly do some work on the dating scene.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 23 - 04/03/16

Today we located a new prop for our piece and we ran through our first interrogation!

We first started by trying to find a CD player of some sort in the props cupboard but we came across a large cassette player instead. We thought this would look a lot more impressive for our interrogation scene as the audience are more likely to see the buttons from a distance than with the CD player.

After finding our prop, we got down to work with our interrogation scene. Compared to our original first interrogation, it was much longer and revealed a lot more about Ben's personality to the audience. We go into depth about the relationship between Kyle, the school bully, Charlie and Ben which in the end links nicely to the next scene, Charlie's first day at school.

Next lesson, we will pick up the pace and try to finish all of our interrogations so we can perhaps set the rest of the lighting.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 22 - 03/03/16

Today, we began to outline what content would be in each interrogation scene. Planning this out now will make our next lesson far more productive as we'll have what we want to do ready. Below is a story outline with notes on our interrogation scenes and how they'd be laid out:

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.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 20 - 26/02/16

Today, we began searching for headlines for which we could edit and use in our projection. This began with us searching the internet for headlines but a great deal of them weren't what we needed. They either featured a location which wasn't the one where we're basing our piece in (not North London) or they weren't worded in a way which makes it easy for us to cut. In the end we found one headline which will do for now but if we need another at all, we can always search for one in our own time. Below is the headline we found very useful:

We can add onto the end something along the lines of ":result of suicide." Which would be part of the big reveal.

After this we spent time trying to find news reports on suicides. We found a few but the mention of suicide was mostly in the middle of the reporter's sentences as opposed to the beginning/end. Instead we looked up text-to-speech to read out our news reports. We found one website (Oddcast) which provided very life like voices and after trying out a few sentences to hear how the voices sounded, we decided that this would be the website we would get our reports from.

Next lesson, we will record our text-to-speech news reports and focus on the order of events in our piece.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 19 - 25/02/16

Today was a very effective lesson for us as we made some major changes to our piece which will result in scenes being added and removed.

We began discussing the future of our piece and we'd realised we've forgotten our original focus: the death of Charlie! We felt we had added in the interrogation scenes at the beginning but towards the end of the piece we were more focused on the relationship statuses of the trio rather than leading the audience onto who the killer was. When devising the interrogations we have we had made them rather short. This was most likely due to us having a production plan so soon that we wanted to move onto the scene so we had very poorly constructed short interrogations. In order to improve this, I will research police interrogations and analyse what sort of language the interrogator uses, how the person being interrogated reacts and how they last. 

We agreed that in order to improve our piece and redirect the current focus we have, we need to create new interrogation scenes and perhaps alter the ones we already have. We definitely need to add more interrogations with Hope as she only has one; we will need to add at least one more interrogation with me. However, when adding interrogations, they must be relevant and offer more information to the plot every timer otherwise they would be wasted time.

We also discussed how we could change the opening too! We had an idea of using news reports and headlines to show the death of Charlie but only show part of the headline; at the end we show the entire headline which reveals the extra vital information. Below is the outline we came up with:

• Charlie starts seated on the back chair and falls slow motion onto the table, dead. Whilst this is happening, we will have news headlines projected behind him saying something along the lines of "Body found in North London apartment"/"North London man found dead" etc.
• We will also have audio from news reports repeated over the top exclaiming relevant things but not giving away that it was suicide.
• In the final scene, we will show Charlie taking a cyanide pill and then the projections which follow will also have the correct ending added which reveals that Charlie's death was suicide. The news reports audio will also continue to reveal that his death was suicide too.

Next lesson, we will spend researching how we will be able to get the audio and headline and whether they will merge perfectly or not. If not we will have to work out a resolution.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 18 - 23/02/16

This lesson we decided as we had all of our scenes devised and we had the entire room to ourselves, we would sort out our lighting for our performance!

As this was my first time using the lights I decided to familiarise my self with the lights and play with the different functions. We had two different types of lights, two behind the audience, which have warm white, cold white and neutral white settings, and multiple lights around our performance space which have multiple colour settings.

Below is the written outline of the light settings we have so far:

The settings at the top are for the backlights and the settings at the bottom are for the lights around the performance space.

For the opening scene Hope came up with an idea which elaborates more on the issue of Charlie's death. She said that we should have a scene where Shanice is being visited by a police officer at her and Hunter's home and being told the bad news about her fiancée's death. I then added onto this point and worked out how we can include this into our performance without using techniques we already had in our piece:

• Shanice starts onstage, at the table, and hears a knocking at the door; she walks offstage to answer.
• Officer Fisher (me) will greet her and ask to come in and Shanice allows him too all offstage. This voiceover-like dialogue brings something fresher than the regular dialogue which would be featured a lot in the rest of the play.
• The pair then enter and sit at the (dining) table. Fisher tells Shanice about her fiancée's death and we freeze.

Depending on whether we keep this scene or not, we'll look into how we'd join this into our previous opening scene.

We also renamed our character (again!) as we agreed that the names didn't suit the characters at all. Hope chose the name Kourtney as it is a typical name for a "chavvy" urban black girl, I chose the name Ben as it's a typical wealthy (he transferred from a grammar school) and gay name and Charlie changed his character's name to his own name, Charlie. This is helpful as, when he plays DI Sanderson in rehearsals, he continually calls his other character Charlie rather than Hunter so this name choice resolves this issue.

For the interrogation scenes, we chose to have a dark lighting scheme with no lights excluding one of the backlights on the cold white setting. This really accentuated the shadows of the actors onstage which symbolises the lies/secrets they may be hiding. For the school scene, we're using orange lighting to create a sepia effect to represent how far back in time that period was. We're using pink in the dating scene as pink is very representative for the theme of love and we're using red for the You Don't Own Me scene as it's a darker variation of the pink showing how Kourtney and Charlie's relationship has gotten darker; the lack of the white backlights in this scene fully promotes the theme of darkness.

Next lesson, we will look at analysing if the piece needs any further changes and, when they're dealt with, continue setting our lighting.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 17 - 11/02/16

Today in Single, I shared with Charlie and Hope my ideas for our Hunter's Breakdown scene!

We began by discussing which music we would use; we could either have the original track of Madness by MUSE or the instrumental. We all agreed to use the instrumental as the lyrics may distract the audience's attention from the performance. Also, we didn't want our audience to recognise the song as they would be thinking of the artist and the artist's thoughts on the song, whereas the effect we wanted was the audience to be reminded of our performance upon listening to the song in other scenarios of their lives.

We then got up and started acting it out without music so that we weren't under any pressure to rush through the movement. We learnt the actions pretty quickly and my vision was becoming a reality! After this slow run, we ran it again but with the music and me saying out loud what should happen when so that Hope and Charlie knew what to do and when as they were new to the choreography!

Next lesson, we will polish up the choreography and then film this scene. We'd then start planning what to improve and our decisions will be based on what needs improving in our video we took last Friday of everything we had so far.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 16 (Devising) - 09/02/16

Today, I decided to work on devising Hunter's Breakdown scene. This is what I got so far (FPS is shorthand for figurative puppet strings):

• Hunter receives a call from his supervisor and gets fired. He hangs up the call and steps into centre stage.
• Clive enters stage right and walks past Hunter and Hunter looks at him, reaches out but Clive walks past like a ghost, Clive stands at front left.
• Shanice enters stage left and walks past Hunter and Hunter looks at her, reaches out but Shanice walks past like a ghost, Shanice stands at front right.
• Clive pulls Hunter gently with FPS and Hunter moves towards him slowly per pull.
• Shanice pulls Hunter a tad more vigorously and Hunter diverts off track and towards her.
• The pair perform a tug of war for Hunter until he falls to the floor on his knees.
• Clive walks behind him and lifts him up arm by arm using FPS, Shanice runs and pushes Clive away. This loosens the strings on Hunter and he falls back to the ground.
• Shanice lifts Hunter up arm by arm using FPS, Clive pushes her away letting Hunter fall to the ground once again.
• Clive pulls him up using FPS and they stand facing each other. Clive grabs Hunters hands and looks at him desperately. Shanice uses FPS to pull Hunter away from him.
• Shanice feels Hunters face and stares at him deeply, Clive uses FPS to pull Shanice away from him.
• Hunter falls to the floor as he's pulled back. Both Clive and Shanice go to help him up but they freeze mid lunge, then retreat to standing.
• Clive walks towards Hunter slowly and wraps his scarf around Hunter's neck. Hunter tries to pull it off as he's struggling for breath but gets it off quickly.
• Shanice walks towards Hunter, caresses his face then kisses him on the cheek. Hunter tries to wipe it off as if it were poisonous acid.
• Hunter lies down, face up, facing upstage. Shanice and Clive lie either side of him leaving a two foot gap between each other.
• Shanice sits up, uses FPS to pull Hunter towards her so that he's laying across her.
• Clive sits up, uses FPS to pull Hunter towards him so that he's laying across him.
• Shanice sits up, uses FPS to pull Hunter towards her, but mid roll he gets up and walks to the front seat and sits on it.
• Shanice and Clive run to him immediately and get on both knees either side of Hunter. They beg for attention but Hunter ignores them.
• Clive uses FPS to move Hunters hand toward Clive's face but Hunter resists and moves his hand away before he touched Clive's face.
• Shanice uses FPS to move Hunters hand toward Shanice's face but Hunter resists and moves his hand away before he touched Shanice's face.
• The pair go to reach out for him but their hands freeze midway and he stands and walks downstage.
• The pair stand and start pulling Hunter back using FPS but Hunter shrugs his shoulders forward and the pair jolt forward as if the strings had snapped. Shanice and Clive exit. Hunter steps backwards and performs his monologue.

I feel that this scene is very effective at portraying the loss of emotion in Hunter now as he realises the mistake he's made and that he doesn't the love of his old school friends. It's also effective at illustrating the competition between Shanice and Clive both fighting for Hunter but resulting in nothing. It represents Clive's confusion as to why Hunter left him and Shanice's forgivingness as she just wants him back.

When deciding the music to use with this scene, I wanted something along the lines of a slow song, perhaps a ballad, but one's which conveyed a similar message as the scene itself. Here are some of the songs I thought were suitable originally:

• Stitches by Shawn Mendes
• I'm A Mess by Ed Sheeran
• Jealous by Labrinth
• Angels by Robbie Williams
• When I Was Your Man by Bruno Mars
• Stay With Me by Sam Smith
• Make It Rain by Ed Sheeran

The main issue, however, with these songs, is that they were mainly compsed of actual lyrics and the instrumentals were very gappy. Make It Rain by Ed Sheeran wasn't gappy at all and was a personal favourite of mine but it didn't have enough variety and stayed pretty constant for around a minute and a half.

Upon further searching I came across Madness by MUSE. I found that the instrumental had a lot of variety and the message conveyed from the lyrics and title match very well with the state that Hunter's life has turned into: Madness!

Next lesson, I share with Hope and Charlie this new scene and workshop anything that needs to be changed and hopefully film it too!

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 15 - 05/02/16

Today we devised the still image scene between Shanice and Hunter and performed our entire piece from the beginning up to the end of Clive's monologue.

When creating the still image scene we wanted to show the couple's relationship evolve but we didn't want it to be too cheesy. Originally we wanted to have a series of still images with thought tracks but I came up with a potentially better alternative. I thought instead, we would have them mime what they were doing for a few seconds then they end in a still image of them holding each others hands. I thought it would be cute if they were holding hands on each still image but that may come across as too cheesy. We could also have thought tracks here too but for now we wanted to see if the mime to still image idea worked first before adding more to it. Below is the scene outline:

• DI Sanderson asks Shanice what her relationship was like after that first date, he's sat on the left side of the table while Shanice is on the right chair. She talks about how her relationship was perfect.
• The pair move their respected sides chairs to the front and sit in them. DI Sanderson has changed to Hunter via rolling down his sleeves and wearing his cap. Hunter tries to grab her drink but she mimes saying no jokingly but seriously. He taps her on the opposite shoulder while she's not looking and she turns behind her.
• He sneaks her drink to where she laughs and frowns to seek attention. He puts the drink back when he's done and holds her hand. They freeze for a few seconds.
• The pair then lean back in their seats and act as if they are driving with Shanice in the passenger seat.
• The pair then move their seats back to their respected sides and sit in them as if they were eating dinner on a date. Hunter gets up walks over to her and proposes to her.
• They get up and start hugging each other in a frenzy love. Shanice sits back in her seat and DI Sanderson sits back on the table.

An idea I had for this scene was to have a soft instrumental of You Don't Own Me as a backing track. I thought this would be great foreshadowing of the events later to come.

After devising then performing this new scene, we continued to run through what we had. Upon completion of this runthrough, we made a list of any major issues we encountered:

• As DI Sanderson, Charlie kept calling Hunter Charlie due to us previously having our characters share the same name as us. We will determine next lesson whether we'd change the names back to our own names or leave them how they are.
• When performing the, "Elastic Heart," scene when we reached my monologue, the song kept on going which required us to manually turn the song off. By next lesson, I will have edited the song so it fades out at the right time and I will also add and cut any other music we have in our piece. This includes:
• You Don't Own Me (edited)
• Text tone
• Marimba ringtone
• Phone call conversation

Next lesson, we will work on devising the remainder of our piece then focus on sorting out any issues we have.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 14 - 04/02/16

Today we finished creating our placards for the, "Asking Out," scene. We completed the painting process then created a script for what we wanted the texts to say. This is the script:

Charlie: Yo x
Hope: Hey x *monkey emoji*
Charlie: Can I ask u a question b? x 
Hope: yeahh go for it x
Charlie: Do you want to come & see Deadpool with me? x
Hope: yeah sure x *monkey emoji*
Charlie: Friday yeah? x
Hope: At 7 x
Charlie: Yeah safe b x *kissy emoji*

We then printed out the emojis and wrote out the text onto the placards. Upon first writing the text, we realised that the text wasn't bold enough to be seen from a distance by our audience. We weighted out the text and then finished by glueing the emojis too the placards.

Next lesson, we will focus on creating the still image scene between Hunter and Shanice and possibly recap on everything we've done so that we have an updated running time for our piece.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 13 - 02/02/16

Today we began making our text message bubble placards for our "Asking Out," scene. To create these, we used card and watercolour paints. We were originally going to paint them light blue but after not being able to find the right colour, we went with a green instead as it was a much easier colour to form.

Next lesson, we will focus on completing these placards by painting the remaining few then adding the text/emojis to them.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 12 - 29/01/16

Today, we began by creating a full production outline including a scene list, prop list and costume list! This production outline is pictured right. We did this as it gives us something to refer back to if we are ever unsure on what to do next. This out line features highlights detailing what we have done, in the making or not even started yet. Having these highlights also helps us when we're unsure what to do as it says what we have done and what we have left to do. 

In this outline we also had labelled next to each scene what we had/wanted to have in them. This would highlight the main technique used in each scene. For example, we wanted the You Don't Own Me scene to feature lots of physical theatre so from this we've based our positioning on possibilities for movement. Also, this helped us decide what we'd want from our scenes we hadn't devised yet. When writing, we only wrote down the techniques we had used in the scenes we had done then from this we thought about what we hadn't yet used much and then decided which would be suitable for what we wanted to show in each scene.

For costume, we wanted to have our characters to wearing quite fashionable, modern clothing as piece is set in modern day London. We wanted the change from Hunter to DI Sanderson to be very distinguishable but quick. Baring this in mind, we have Charlie take off his hat and roll up his sleeves.

After this we began discussing different ideas for Hunter asking out Shanice. One point that Charlie pointed out was that we take a significant jump from the pair's teenage romance to domestic abuse. With this point brought up we decided that we should make the asking out scene much longer by adding on the end how the pair's relationship blossomed from a school crush to engagement. We agreed that we'd discuss properly how we'd show this later but our first impressions were to show it with still images/freeze frames followed with either narration or thought tracks.

We then focused on the beginning of the, "Asking Out," scene. Our initial thoughts were to use projection to display texts happening between the pair but we wanted the projection to a video of the texts happening but we were unsure how to do this. I then came up with a new approach featuring placards. Below is the outline of what our new idea:

• Shanice and Hunter would enter and sit on opposite sides of the table and go about their normal lives in their bedrooms as if the other isn't there. This creates the abstract barrier between the pair.
• Hunter would decided to message Shanice. I would enter in all blacks with placards. Once hunter had sent the text, I would play a text tone to signify Shanice has received it and hold a placard shaped like a text speech bubble above Hunter's head from behind him. We would all freeze giving the audience an opportunity to read it then we'd continue this throughout their conversation; conversation details Hunter asking Shanice out on a date.

After all agreeing on the idea, we decided that next lesson we were going to make these speech bubble placards.

Single - Devised Unit (CP) - Blog 11 - 28/01/16

Today in Single, Hope, Charlie and I decided that as we had so much done already in the short time that we've spent on this unit, we've focused this lesson on recapping previous scenes and perfecting them. We decided we'd time our run through so we could have an idea on how long our piece would last with what we already had. Doing this activity helps us remember our movement and speech and approach our piece with a more analytical mindset.

We ran all the way up to meeting Shanice in the canteen when Hope brought up some flaws with the meeting of the future fiancées. These flaws are listed below:

• When Clive mentions his bullying to Hunter, he says that everyone hates him, yet when the pair go the lunch hall, Shanice calls Clive over to sit with her; this goes against what Clive said earlier.
• Also, it would make no sense for Hunter to not get told off for hitting Kyle.

We have now changed the scene so it makes much more sense baring in mind what would actually happen in a school environment and the relationships between students. Here is the new outline from where we made changes up to the beginning of Clive's next interrogation scene:

• Clive mentions to Hunter how all the guys bully him for being bisexual (we make it clear that the guys, in reference to all the boys, are the ones who bully him which covers up the issue of Shanice and Clive's friendship).
• Hunter exits then re-enters holding his fist, he asks Clive to help him to the Headteacher's office as he doesn't know where it is as he's new.
• **TRANSITION** Lewis and Charlie exit, Hope enters and takes the left chair and places it to the left of the front chair. Lewis and Charlie re-enter. Lewis takes the front chair and faces it towards the audience while Charlie takes the right chair and places it to the right of the front chair. This is outside the 
• Clive and Hunter enter and sit down in their seats explained above, and greet Shanice. Clive introduces Hunter to Shanice. Hunter then has to go to the headteacher and exits.
• Shanice asks Clive about Hunter and they discuss where he came from and whether Clive has his number. Hunter then re-enters.
• Hunter tells them about his 3 day exclusion and Shanice nudges Clive saying "Get his number." Clive suggests Hunter texts him tonight as he has to get to sociology so asks for his number. Hunter shows Clive his number, Clive gives Shanice a look, then he reads the number out loud slowly. Shanice frantically types the digits into her phone then proceeds to smiling at the pair nonchalantly.
• Clive picks up his chair while saying goodbye to the pair and places where the right chair would go and he sits there ready for his next interrogation scene. Shanice says that she needs to see the headteacher next and then leaves taking her chair with her and places it back in the left chair position. Hunter then stands, places the chair in the front chair position and then sits on the table with his hat off to represent the character of DI Sanderson.

With these changes made our story hasn't got any plot-holes we know of!

We continued running through the piece skipping over the parts we hadn't devised yet and pausing the timer when we needed to. After our runthrough the length of our incomplete piece is 16 minutes and 10 seconds! As our piece only needs to be 20-30 minutes long and we still have a couple of scenes left to devise, I feel we're very ahead of schedule and we'll be able to have a piece with the correct length.

Following this recap activity, we decided to sort out part of our new scene which shows Hunter's breakdown after leaving both of his partners due to his overwhelming guilt! We recorded the phone call between Hunter and his boss after him not coming into work. We first scripted the conversation as it made things a lot easier when it came to actually recording the conversation. We arranged the scene so we would have Hunter receive a call and he would say his part live while his boss would be recorded. The conversation goes like this:

Boss - Hello. May I speak with Hunter Andrews, please?

Hunter - Yeah, speaking

Boss - Hi, yeah, it's Steven from work

Hunter - Oh! You alright? What's up?

Boss - "Whats up?" Maybe the fact that you haven’t been showing up for work in the last week and when you did before that, your service was terrible, I must have had roughly 8 complaints about your appalling service in the space of four hours.

Hunter - Oh, I'm sorry, it's been a rough week and a lo has been going on. I won't do it again!

Boss - No, I know you won’t because you won’t be coming back to this shop again for a long time, I called head office today and they are sorting out terminating your contract right now. Come in and get your stuff from your locker and sign your end of contract papers and you can be on your way. Thanks.

Now that this is recorded, we have that one less thing to do which gives us more time to do more complicated tasks and recap old scenes!

Next lesson we will focus on making a scene, prop and costume list and how we were going to complete our unfinished scenes.

Single - Devised Piece (CP) - Blog 10 - 26/01/16

Today we devised a brand new scene for our devised piece. This scene was to represent Hunter calling his relationship off with Clive. We decided before that we wanted to make this scene very physical as a large proportion of our scenes so far are very dialogue based. We decided to take a route which we wasn't obvious at first: Hymn Hands! Below is the outline for our scene:

• Clive and Hunter enter, Clive enter happy, Hunter enters sad. They each pick up the a chair from an end of the table and place it in front in the form of their respected emotions (E.g Clive would delicately place the chair while Hunter would chuck it about aggressively)
• The pair sit on their seats slightly apart. Clive moves his seat closer to Hunter but Hunter shuffles back away
• Clive places left hand on Hunter's right leg, Hunter moves it back to its original position
• Clive puts his left arm around Hunter's shoulders, Hunter moves it back to its original position
• Clive lifts his left hand with his right on to Hunter's right leg, Hunter moves it back to its original position
• Clive attempts to place his left arm around Hunter's shoulder again but Hunter stands before he gets there
• Clive stands and goes to hug Hunter but he rolls under Clive's arm (using Round-By-Through) and stands in front of the chairs
• Clive grabs Hunter's left hand and spins into his arms. Hunter pushes him out and sits back down, facing forward
• Clive sits facing forwards too, but with his head turned to Hunter. Hunter looks at Clive and shakes his head while Clive nods back desperately
• Clive places his right hand on Hunter's left shoulder, Hunter shifts his body away from him. Clive leans in for a kiss but Hunter covers his mouth with his hand
• Clive latches onto Hunter hugging but Hunter gets up and leaves
• Clive lunges towards him, trying to reach out, but its too late as he is already gone. Shanice enters during the lunge as she shares the feelings that Clive has
• They step back out of their lunge and hold their chests with crossed forearms. They then fall to the ground and pound the floor three times which represents their anger and frustration
• After the third pound, they roll left and act as if their arms are chained to the ground. They then break out of their chains and sit up to their left. They look around lost as they have nowhere to go
• They stand and stomp in anger, then mime pulling a rope from the right and Hunter appears. He walks past like a ghost, unaware of their presence and they reach out for him but can't get there
• Shanice flies off with him but Clive looks around as if he were lost then sits back in his seat and performs his monologue

Below is a video of the performance:

We decided on using the instrumental to the song, "Elastic Heart," by Sia as our backing music. We chose this song as the title pretty much summarises the past 8 years of Clive's life as his feelings and emotions have been toyed with, in his eyes, and he's always felt like a victim.

Ways to improve my performance:

• My movement with Hope needs to be in time with hers.
• My facial expressions need to be constant for each mood.
• My gestures such as nodding need to be more exaggerative in order to get them on camera.
• My tone of voice needs to be appropriate to my characters emotions at the time during my monologue (e.g. Sad when sad, angry when angry).
• Take time with my speech and speak louder.
• Articulate my speech as it becomes slurred.