How research material was gathered and used within the process.
At the very beginning of the production process we split into several pairs. Each pair was given a drug to complete some scenes on, part of the producing of the scenes required some research, so therefore each group attempted to research their given drug, and obviously anything they felt would benefit the whole group. The drug my pair was given was LSD, we conducted research using the internet and found several accounts of people’s experience on drugs. We use their recollections of ‘trips’ to construct a ‘trip’ for the character Ellie. The research told us that when ‘tripping’ on LSD that things become very fluid. Lifeless objects seem to breath, or beat like a heart, and it’s possible to taste and smell things like colours.
Our research also taught us how LSD-induced ‘trips’ do not create things, only warp something normal that we might see. For example, a house with its light on may seem, on a ‘trip’, as a house on fire. I myself spoke to someone who has experienced a bad LSD trip, in which she believed she was being chased by giant ‘Mars Bars’, they were, as she found out later, just wheelie bins. We therefore realised that there must be a trigger. We created a ‘bad trip’ scene, in which the audience experiences through Ellie’s eyes a ‘bad trip’. We positioned Ellie in the centre of the stage and had James, her brother, walk around the very edge of the stage. Ellie, confused, calls out for James but he ignores her, slowly moving around the stage…he then advances towards her, and circles her slightly before lunging towards her. There is then a ‘snap’ back to reality and James is trying to make Ellie ‘wake up’. To add to the tension we discussed the possibility of adding loud and heavy breathing or a heartbeat over the top of the action – and to possibly time the action to the breathing. This would link back to the testimonials which say that everything appears this way during a ‘trip’.
