We began today's lesson by running our final scene of "Fantastic Mr. Fox", the song. Oliver and Charlie had already worked out their movement section last lesson, but James and I established ours today. We began our section by skipping in and being playful. We then did a turn to the left and then a turn back to the right. Charlie joined us both, putting his arms around our shoulders on the line "there isn't anything that I wouldn't do for you". On the next line the three of us do a little hand shake, then Charlie starts "dad dancing" so James and I look at each other and run to the side laughing. Everybody else worked out there little movement sections as well, whilst James and I choreographed ours. Whilst it is not our time in the centre, we stand at the sides and step from side to side smiling. The piece ends with a final position, as if it was a family photograph. We all end waving to the audience.
After this, we altered the farmers first scene. They shall now begin their scene with Bunce running on with a Boggis's chicken leg. Thinking that Boggis can't see him, Bunce begins eating the chicken. Boggis spots Bunce and is not happy. They are fighting over the chicken leg when Bean then enters. They then have a moment of bobbing up and down at different times to the music. The song we are using for this section is "I've got a brand new combine harvester" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjvffx-h2KM).
After developing this scene, we began our first full run-through. This run was used to see what scenes needed the most work, which ones we weren't confident on, what transitions needed sorted and to see if our music choices worked. The scenes that need the most work are "The Great Feast" and "The Chase". All doubts that we had have now been sorted (e.g. where we need to come in from, and how we are going to end a scene to go into the next one). The transitions were better than we expected today, despite a lot of them being guessed! The music we chose was very effective! We decided to have some eerie music for whenever we dig towards the farms and back and a choir singing the sound "ah" as if being enlightened/rejoicing whenever we arrive in the right place and see what we've been longing for (e.g Boggis's chickens!).
What we need to work on as a group is having more energy throughout our performance (as our audience is very young so have a short concentration/attention span) and getting off of scripts by next rehearsal. We would also like to start rehearsing with all our props and costumes as soon as we can as to get used to them and to sort any problems we may have with them sooner rather than later. We also set ourselves and each other some individual tasks and improvements. What I need to do is learn my lines for "Bean's Cider Cellar" scene, make my voice even more exaggerated as Rat to have a bigger contrast to the fox cub, and to finish making the props.
