13/09/10 - In today's lesson we were put into groups of three to carry out a research task to search on the internet for possible campaign topics. As a group we decided to carry out research on 'domestic violence'. We had to give a report about the campaign we had chose and talk about what their approach was on addressing this issue and how they present it. After we had to write about techniques that could be used to promote our campaigns once we have developed them.I found out many interesting things about domestic violence campaigns and their approach which will help me with my own campaign.
15/09/10 - In today's lesson, we started by doing warm-ups to prepare us for the lesson. We were put into groups and were given various articles based on serious events and had to choose one to re-enact. Amongst the article, we had to choose five words or phrases that best described the article and then create freeze frames based on them. Our freeze frames were about ' a mother hiding her dead children in a cupboard and then was caught and put in jail.
20/09/10 - In today's lesson, we did a lot more practical work on issues and had to create scenes out of them. We were put into groups and we had to devise a piece of drama based on the issue of 'Tinie Tempah becoming prime minister' and portray the reaction of the society towards this happening. This activity was a fun and interesting one to do and developed my acting skills and familiarised myself with taking on unusual/abstract roles.
27/09/10 - In today's lesson, we presented our group presentations that we did about what we think a campaign is about, the purpose of it and the kind of techniques used. For our presentation, we did it about domestic violence and looked at a campaign called mensaid which is about domestic violence to men. This is an unusual campaign which is why we decided to use it. We had a presentation and I did a monologue that was based on a case study that I found out on the internet.By doing all of this, it developed my understanding and purpose of a campaign.
29/09/10 -In today's lesson we did some more warm up activities and then was split into our two groups for campaign. We had to decide on a title and theme/reason for the campaign. For our project we chose the name 'She's abused' as it fitted in with our chosen theme 'women in the media'. Our chosen topic was about women and the different forms of abuse.
13/10/10 - In today's lesson, we had a visitor called Alex who was a professional actor who came to give us advice and techniques that could be used in our performance. We did various warm up activities so that he could get to know everyone and for us to get in the mood for role plays.
In todays lesson, we began to identify each individual character for everyone within the group for the performance piece that we are going to create for the campaign. We started to look at the role that you were going to play and there characteristics.
We the began to devise the first scene of the performance. We all contributed our own individual ideas on how we thought the opening scene should go and then combined these ideas to produce a unique scene. We then had to show this rough draft to the other group and they then gave us feedback on it.
This was extremely useful as it allowed us to get the opinions and criticism of the scene from a third person and then use this criticism in order to improve the scene and create something even better.
01/11/10 - In today's lesson we did some research on how we can promote our campaigns effectively so it is eye-catching. We also worked on blocking and building our performances.
03/11/10 - In today's lesson, we worked on developing our performances. We then did some activities which consisted of us working as a team, improvising and expanding on dramatic techniques.
08/11/10 - In today's lesson, the professional actor Alex Brown came and visited us again to work on building performance techniques and so he could give us feedback on how to improve our role-play as well as other suggestions on acting skills.
09/11/10 - Today we went to the half moon theatre to watch the show 'Time for the Good Looking Boy.' We are going to do a review on this show.
15/11/10 -In today's lesson, Alex came in again with another visitor, Richard who to was a professionally paid actor, to help us with our campaign role play project. We started the lesson with warm up games and exercises which prepared us for the actual lesson.
We went off into our role play groups and recapped what we had done previously. Alex worked closely with our group, reviewing our ideas and watching our performance to give feedback.
We decided to go over the scenes in detail, working on every aspect of the scenes and where everyone should be within them. We managed to complete the first scene and become familiar with it and went on to the second one, devising it and rehearsing it. Once we had completed the scene, we were given a challenge to choose one of our completed scene and perform it as if it was on a stage. However, we were given an unusual stage to challenge our creativity. Our group was given a circular stage 'In the round' to perform on and we had to adapt our performance so that the audience could see us from all parts of the circle. This was a challenging thing to do but we managed to do it.
I think today was a very productive lesson and I really learnt a lot and gained experience from it.
22/11/10 - In today's lesson we put all the scenes together and started to work on blocking the speech for the role play so that everyone knew what they had to say and when.
06/12/10 - In today's lesson we worked on the character development of our main characters and started to look deeper into their actual personality, the way they dress, the way they act and began to concentrate on their emotions ad feelings.The character that I will be playing is a girl who is physically abused by her mother. She has a twin sister who is also abused but not physically. She is mentally and emotionally abused. The things that I decided to focus on is what she is like as a person and the things she does in her everyday life.
13/12/10 - In today's lesson I worked on the worksheets needed for the campaign unit and doing further research.
15/12/10 - In today's lesson we continued to devise our performance and went over what we already had. We then had to show what we had done to the rest of the class.
10/01/11 - In today's lesson I did some more worksheets and other blog research work.
12/01/11 - In today's lesson, we did activities that didn't focus on our campaign assignment, but did exercises that developed our drama skills and contributed to the development of our campaigns and the approach we take.
At the beginning of the lesson, we played a game that actors use to get to know each other. This warmed us up for the lesson and made us feel alert and focused.
Then we looked at the story of "little red riding hood." There was different fragments of the story written on separate pieces of paper and we had to put it in order and then act it out in our campaign groups. After each group performed, we had to think of ways that the chronological order of the story could be rearranged and what techniques could be used. E.G. Flashbacks, thought-tracking etc. Once we had devised a piece of which the order of the story was changed, we had to think about how we could interpret these ideas into our own performance piece and how this will be effective.
I think this lesson was very productive and beneficial for our campaigns as it allowed us to add even more depth and creativity to our own performance and made us think on an even wider scale.
16/01/11 - In todays lesson, we continued to do the paperwork for campaign, completing worksheets and updating blogs with journal entries and finishing all incomplete work. It is essential that we do this as it shows evidence and updates of the course progress and shows the understanding of the project as a whole.
This lesson was useful as it allowed me to gather any extra help or support that I needed from our teacher which can not be attained at home.
20/01/11 - In todays lesson, we studied the use of physical theatre, tried doing our own physical theatre and discussed how physical theatre can be incorporated into our role plays. Also we started to use soundscape and looked at how soundscape can add effect to a scene.
In the beginning of the lesson, we started by doing a warm up where we had to make up an action for each letter of our names and then teach it to a partner and vice verser. Then we had to combine the two names and creatively come up with a new routine. We did them to two different types of music. One was up-beat and gave off a happy feeling and the other was more serious and sharp. The music effected the way that the routine was performed and this also was a key point.
After this exercise, we started to look deeper into physical theatre and soundscape. We listened to a song/poem by Tracy Chapman called 'Behind the wall' which is a poem about the abuse she can hear coming from a neighbours house and how the police take to long to come and can't even interfere with domestic violence. This alone shows the period she is writing from and that it was from sometime possibly in the 80's. In our groups, we had to take three of the lines from the poem and use physical theatre and freeze frames to show them. We chose
"loud noises behind the wall"
"the police never got involved in family affairs"
"I think we all need some sleep"We then had to create transitions to flow from each freeze frame and then show it to the class.
Afterwards we did an exercise creating a soundscape for rain and then interpreted these ideas into our physical theatre to add effect.
Today's lesson was very useful because it gave us ideas on how we can make our own role plays more interesting by using physical theatre and sound scape.
31/01/11 - We focused today's lesson on improving what we already had created in order to get a strong performance. So we rehearsed the scenes we had created and got our teacher to watch it and give us feedback on the strong points and points that could be improved. We also created contrasting freeze frames about good and bad times, the bad time being someone being abused and used it to create an eye-catching opening sequence.
07/02/11 - We continued to update our blogs and complete worksheets today and made the paper work a priority.
14/02/11 - We decided to devise the last scene so that it could help us come up with the scenes that go in between making it easier to complete the whole performance. We decided that the last scene was going to be like a revelation for these characters using though track about their wrong doings and need to change their lives for the better. We would do this by having an alley way that each character walks down saying a short monologue about what they can do to improve their lives and help themselves.
01/03/11 - Today we had a very productive lesson and I feel we made great progress. To begin with we discussed the order of the scenes and what needed to be added so we looked at story lines we could use for the ending. We decided that because we couldn't all agree on one effective ending, we would use forum theatre and let the audience choose the ending. They will be given two choices in which they will have to vote and give a reason why they chose this ending.
11/03/11 - We discussed our decision that we had made in the previous lesson and talked about what we needed to improve in the performance. We also spoke to our teacher about our choices. She suggested that we have a 'joker' to host it and talk to the audience about their choices. We then decided on the two endings for the audience to choose from and worked on the two scenes for the possible answers.
22/03/11 - Today we did a technical run through of the performance, deciding on the lighting details for the performance. As a group we discussed the order of the lighting transitions and how we wanted it to be with our lighting technician (Mr Mackintosh). We spent a long time sorting it out so that it was suitable for the performance.
