The other actors in my group performed really well on the day, using good body language and gesture’s and their speech and facial expressions were clear too. We all came up with the idea that too show the audience that time was slowly moving on, we would move to different position on the stage but making sure that our backs were never facing the audience, which we all thought was very effective. In rehearsal’s, Joe came up with the idea that because we were acting in light, but it was supposed to be dark, we never actually made eye contact with each other until all the characters eyes became used to the dark! I showed the audience in one particular scene that it was dark by reaching out and seeing if I could find a wall. In one particular scene, Josh and me were involved in a fight, but before that scene, me and Josh showed signs of tension between us and the odd glare at each other. Josh’s character had a short fuse; this showed his violent side when he eventually decided to have a go at my character.
In one rehearsal we spent the whole time hot seating each other and we were deciding what kind of body language we should use and what kind of personality they had. With my character I had a lot of thinking to do on weather to give him odd body movements, if he was cold blooded and so on. On the day of the performance, I improvised a lot with his body movements and facial expressions and it made my character a lot better. I didn’t really do a lot of research on my character but the group and me had decided that he would try and be like the character from The Phone Booth were he would make the victim do things that we would never really do and also make odd comments and know a lot about him. The similarities that character has with my character is that he knew a lot about all the group, like their names, and their age but he didn’t let them know until half through the play. I developed some skills during rehearsals like hot seating. It helps a lot because you feel more like the character you are playing and when you are hot seating another member of the group you know their character better too. If you know your character better, you act much better which I found out and the audience also believed I was Richard Winters and not me! I did make a few changes to my character, like giving him a twitch, which I didn’t set out to do in the first place, and I also made a change in what costume I was going to wear. Originally, I was going to wear bright orange overalls but I ended up wearing clothes that weren’t the right size for me, and not done up properly. The reason I made these changes was that it made him look a bit more odd with him having a twitch and with him wearing bright orange overalls, the group thought that it would be to obvious so we made him jus blend into the group that little bit more.
I felt that we didn’t really have any inspirations for our play, I think that with my group just putting our heads together we came up with some ideas, we then just wrote them down on a piece of paper and we came up with what we all thought would be our strongest storyline to work around. Because we didn’t really have a main inspiration, we all agreed that we had to be very creative during our rehearsals we had to be very creative. I thought the progress we were making in class were good but I felt that we needed some extra time to make our play much better and realistic too. We had an idea of one member of the group who thought it would be good to add a small fight scene into our play because the pace was quite slow and it wasn’t very exciting because of the mood we had created so we all thought this was a great idea, so we worked on this one particular scene and it developed into one of the best parts, and most important parts of the play!
I think our visual presentation was one of the best out of the whole class as we decided to use light, and sound and most of all costume! With the sound I think we created a feeling we made the audience feel as if they were in the cellar with us, by playing thunder storm in the back round and having dripping sound and most effective sound effect was the gas coming out of the vents which made it realistic for both actors and audience. Costume was probably our best feature because we were all wearing something different to each other, or gave an idea to our jobs etc. You could tell that I was the odd one of the group because my clothes we abnormal compared to the rest of the other characters, and Joe who was a businessman so he wore a shirt and tie which matched his character to a tee. Lighting was only a small factor in our play where at the beginning of the play it was complete darkness for at least a minute and a half to give the audience an idea on our dark it was supposed to be and then we acted as if it was dark, but in light which we found hard but we managed it. We used our stage well and we made sure that we used proxemmics too.
The pace of our play was slow from the beginning, so we clearly had to fasten the pace up, by doing this, it would make the audience a lot more interested in the play. We did this by adding a fight scene into our play so that upped the pace a lot because there was a lot of movement on the stage and we also had to make sure that our timing was good to just in case we hurt someone during that scene. We moved around the acting space we had quite well, like each character changed position to show that time was moving on.
