Devising (3) - An Idea!

Outside of our lessons, Rob came up with an idea and then told it to the rest of our group at the beginning of this lesson. His idea combines Lewis's idea of a school child / student and our group idea of social media. Rob said about having a child in class, being bored so he checks his phone. However, every time he opens any social media, something paranormal happens - only little things though, like something appears to be in a different place, or something falls off a shelf. Things would then progress and he would go crazy - perhaps seeing things, i.e. having visions. We created a rule in our group that we could not say "no" to something, unless we had another idea or suggestion - therefore (as none of us had any ideas and were willing to experiment) we decided to go along with this idea and began discussing what we could do for an opening.

The ideas that the other three of us got from Rob's short story were the following: Ollie mentioned imaginary friends, leading Lewis on to the idea of inner-demons. This then made Ollie and I think of mental health issues again. From this discussion we formed a short flow chart:

• He's not mental, just ultra-intelligent
• Main guy is misunderstood
• He's innocent. Brain waves are too strong.
• Brain waves cause lights to flicker and computers to go wrong.
• Everyone thinks he's mental

As we had discussed the idea of mental health, we then thought that our opening could consist of Ollie walking really slowly from one side of the room to the other. He would be followed by Lewis (the psychiatrist) and the lights would be flickering for the entire time, with a buzzing noise underneath it all. We thought it would be nice to keep the opening unexplained and quite unusual, as this would confuse the audience and hopefully intrigue them. We would not be over-whelming them with a frantic scene, but keeping it eerily quiet and slow to create a level of tension (as the stimulus "ghost stories" has connotations of tension).

We wanted to have a school classroom setting at some point in our piece, so began work on a scene that would involve this - we have decided to work on random ideas and try to put them together, rather than creating an entire story. We wanted to have an unusual structure anyway, so we thought that it would be okay to devise in this way. We set places for a school classroom to form stereotypes (but also to break them as well) - as "ghost stories" are often quite typical and predictable. We put Rob DSR to present him as a teacher's pet, Lew and I centre adjacent to each other but with a gap in the middle (to show random school children) and Ollie centre back. We put Ollie in this position to make it look like he is a trouble maker, doesn't want to learn and is a bit of an outsider. This goes against what the audience expects - as later on Ollie turns out to be extremely intelligent. The only idea so far we came up with for this scene was Ollie getting out his phone, and as he does this, the three of us suddenly lean in towards him (as if strongly magnetised) and then lean out when he puts his phone back down.