In today's lesson we created a scene order and then ran all of our scenes, but pausing after each scene to make notes on what needs improving. Our scene order is as follows: "Party" --> "Game show" (3) --> "Chasing Pavements" --> "Conversation with best friend" --> "Chasing Pavements reverse" --> "Sound scape". We thought it would be interesting to start with the Party scene as the audience would think the rest of the piece would be fun and crazy (as it starts with Ollie and I pretending we were at a party), thus making the events to come more shocking and hard-hitting. Starting with this scene would also confuse the audience as to what style we would use to portray our narrative/ideas (as we are using dance and story-telling and acting as children in one scene). We chose to do our "Game show" scene after the party scene as this is the scene that would make the audience feel really uncomfortable, and having this scene after our "Party" would form a massive contrast in atmosphere and techniques used (as the party is movement based and story-telling, whilst the game show is scripted dialogue). Having then done three dialogue scenes in one, we thought it best to have our movement scene of "Chasing Pavements". As we created this scene at the same time as our "conversation" scene, we had already worked out a smooth transition from "Chasing Pavements" to "conversations", so we decided to put the "conversations" scene straight after "Chasing Pavements". We knew we wanted to close our piece with our "sound scape" scene as we thought of an effective ending for it, so we put our "Chasing Pavements reverse" section as our penultimate scene. Also it is quite effective having the "Chasing Pavements", then the conversation about it, and then the reverse of it.
Below are our scenes and what we have left to do for each of them now. This lesson the improvements we made were the ending scene final position, the blocking of the Game Show and the staging for the conversation scene...
- Party / Story book: --- Mix the music track --- K&R learn lines --- Strengthen the book with card
- Game show: --- Make boxes --- All learn lines --- Get the theme tune and voice overs sorted
- Chasing Pavements: Complete
- Conversations: --- Learn lines
- Chasing pavements reverse: Complete
- Sound scape: Complete
For the sound scape, we decided to alter our final position. Originally we finished with Katya and I hugging, and Robert and Ollie off stage. However, we decided it would be nice to finish with all of us on stage and we thought we could make our ending deeper. Therefore, we decided that Katya and I could turn opposite sides and lay down in the foetal position - this would bring people's attention back to the foetus that the situation is actually about (as they probably would have forgotten about the life inside of the girl and were focussing more on the couple). Moreover, we decided that whilst Kat and I lie as still as we can, Rob and Ollie would stand behind us looking at the book. This would create a sort of cyclical structure as we began with the book and ended with the book.
