I kind of forgot I had a blog. Oops! (Part Trois)

Third blog of the day woop woop! I'm gonna be all blogged out by the end of this.

YESTERDAY! Thursday 30th September
So I woke up late and got to Uni half an hour late thinking it started half nine when in fact it starts at nine. Again, don't ask. I don't even know? Anyways I walk into class and see photoshop up and my heart cried a little bit. Me and photoshop = failure.
With Michael we're going to be "called upon to apply our creative skills to projects that assist in the development of our work - this could include marketing, administration, or graphic design". Yeah, I copied that off the sheet.
So yeah, in this assignment we're gonna have to design a poster for our performances on the 14th of November using Adobe Photoshop.

Michael went through a couple of stuff we could do with photoshop and made it all look quite easy and simple. He then told us to go to our computers and play around with it. So after being rejected by a few computers and finally logging onto one, I attempted to use photoshop and surprise surprise I felt like slitting my wrists (lol OTT much?). But it was a bit of a struggle, but by the end of the lesson I managed to make a bit of a picture blurry and ublur parts of it! Was quite proud of myself actually. But yeah, hopefully by next month I'l get the hang of it all.

After Michael's lesson we had Siobhan and did a mixture, of practical, and theory work. For the first hour and a bit we worked on our scenes. Our scene begins with Masha and her husband Kulygin. Kulygin is majorly inlove with Masha however a fire has just happened and her brother Andreyusha lost some money therefore Masha is ignoring Kulygin's lovingness towards her and is still a bit shocked about everything that has just happen causing her to be a little bit blunt to Kulygin.
We decided to work on that scene and fortunately Chris agreed to play as Kulygin. We all thought that Kulygin was around his mid twenties and is very comical and naive.

After working on our scene Siobhan got us to watch a documentary on Anton Chekhov while we wrote down notes. I found it highly beneficial. The documentary consisted of a lot of relevant information about his personal life, his plays, and how his life experiences influenced his stories and plays.

I kind of forgot I had a blog. Oops! (Part Deux)

BONJOUR! Again.

So here's Tuesday!

Tuesday 28th Sept
So on Tuesday we had Nick! We had to work on character development again, however we started off concentrating on the staging of our scenes. He drew us a little diagram showing us some drama staging terminology such as centre stage, upstage left etc etc. It was quite beneficial for Me as I had forgotten it all and had to follow a friend of mine when Siobhan asked us to go upstage left. Clever Me! The diagram looked a little like this

Although the diagram I drew looked a lot more like one of those football formation thingy's. Anyways! Because our scene is set in a dinning room as a group we decided that for our staging and props we would need:

• Dinning table
• Chairs
• Sofa or a sheet to go over some chairs to create a sofa
• Screen (for Olga to be behind)
• Plates and cutlery

After listing what we would possibly need and use for our scene we decided where everything would go roughly. So far we thought the dinning table should to CSR but in a diagonal angle, the screen would be USL andthe sofa would be placed CSL. Which would give us enough room to move around at the centre of the stage. However, we have yet to try this out therefore we might have to make some changes later on when we rehearse with our props and staging.

As a class we then had to do a presentation of our character to everyone. I found this activity very interesting as it immediately helped me identify everyones character to an extent and gave me a brief outline of how the characters personality might be like. Nick then asked us to create an Emotional chart (plotting the patterns of events your character goes through your the scene) or a timeline (allows the audience or reader to gain an understanding of the events your character has gone through). 

Irena is usually shy, and reserved throughout the whole play but has always wanted to go back home to Moscow and is also longing to find love. However, in the scene I'm doing she has a bit of a breakdown while Olga and Masha attempt to calm her down. Thus, my emotional chart gradually goes higher as Irena gets more and more annoyed and angry in the scene.

Afterwards, Nick decided to have each group to perform to the class. He would then change bits of the performances to show us how altering and adjusting something small can have a bigger impact and look better (there was a word for it but I can't remember it).
Nick then decided to wrap up the day by playing games in the last half an hour which included trying to get to get your group (four of us) to the other side of the room using one piece of paper, and wink murder. YAY!
Oh, and Mario hurt his thumb. Sad times.

I kind of forgot I had a blog. Oops!

Bonjour!
Yeah, I haven't used this in like over a week. Truth is I forgot I had a blogger account :/ Yeah don't ask I don't even know. ANYHOW this week was pretty full on. Loads of character work and all that jazz. I might as well just break it down into the days of the week other wise it will just look like a massive paragraph of turd.

Monday 27th Sept
So on Monday we finally got to use the studio theatre in our uni/ college which was pretty exciting. It was a really, small intimate thrust stage which I really liked. Happy days! So Siobhan kick started the session with a bunch of Stanislavski concentration and relaxation exercises to help us erm... yeah concerted and relax obviously which actually do work to be honest! Although I can't help but hope my stomach doesn't decide to make noises when the whole room is quiet.
But yeah after that we proceeded on doing a character development exercise where we'd have to imagine there was a mirror infront. Then we'd have to:

1. Close our eyes and picture our character's appearance
2. Say what our character is wearing out aloud while putting on the costume
3. Open our eyes and walk around the stage saying what we're wearing

Then we had to get into a circle and go into middle and tell everyone in character,what our character is wearing (which was pretty scary for some strange reason). I play Irena in 'Three Sisters' written by Anton Chekhov and I pictured her wearing a black shoes with a small heel, a black skirt, corset, and a white puffy blouse. How very trendy!

After the whole character development thing we were asking to create the setting of the scene we're doing. Again we had to close our eyes and picture it for a moment, then use the stage or any other space available to move around our setting and describe it. We then individually had to go on stage and describe it to the whole class and Siobhan which again was really scary. So much exposure ah! Well to be fair, I am doing performing arts after all so silly Me should be used to it by now.
So yeah, that was basically what we did on Monday. Oh, and Me, and my group (Shakira and Mikaeda) went through our scripts and discussed how we thought our characters should be portrayed etc etc. Good times!


Wow this blog is long. I think I'm gonna make another blog in a moment talking about Tuesday, and Thursday. Fun stuff...