Devising: Day 10/11

Yesterday, we were made to sit down and think about the style of our piece. We had to think about what we wanted to achieve in our performance and what kind of style we wanted to give off to make it seem original. Our ideas are below, sorry that it's upside down.

We want our style to be a dark and clever one. We want to get the audience thinking and draw them into a really sophisticated and intelligent piece in which they build up real connections with the characters, but at the same time, maintain a sense of the time period. We were also asked to consider what our style would be like if he were a person.

   It is obvious from this that our piece will be very sick and violent. It will be dark and sinister, but slick and refined.

Baring this activity in mind, we went onto creating the attack scene further. We toyed again with the idea of introducing music to the scene, but all decided that composing a drum piece would give something different and favoured that idea more. We allowed Tom and Ellie to compose the attack scene themselves, whilst offering second opinions for a movement or how we could stage a section of it. I think an important aspect of the piece is that we wanted to combine movement with more naturalistic pieces and have a very much mixed style of the scene that portrays the brutality of the attack, but shows it in not just a simple way of beating the living daylights of Tess. There were many ideas that we came up with but it was important to pick the best pieces to allow the piece to look as effective as possible and not immature, which is why we cut the rape aspect out of the scene. We simply did not have the facilities like strobes to stage such a scene. It was a very difficult topic and as we couldn't think of a way to stage the scene without making it look silly and immature. So we decided to get rid off it and move on, killing Tess instead of a rape and kill.

The next twenty minutes or so was spent on running through the argument scene again as we were to show it to the rest of the class as we needed to make sure we were comfortable with it. We set up lighting very briefly and performed it. At the end we recieved feedback on the lighting and discovered that the red wash concealed our faces so our facial expressions were not seen, so in future we will use a lighter wash to allow our faces to be seen.

The next day we worked extremely hard on the attack scene. Tom and Ellie focused very hard on the movements they could use where myself and Dan considered the lighting for the scene. We thought that we wanted a spotlight on Ellie (Tess) to keep the rest of the stage in the shadows as we wanted to have noises coming from offstage to add to the tension and to reveal Tom sitting in a chair as soon as he speaks to make him flash up quickly and add to the fright. We decided that a blue wash of LED's would look quite metallic and add to the cold look we were going whilst adding an extra layer of light to the scene. We set up red lights in the back corners and pointed one up the wall to give the whole corner a deep red colour to symbolise the danger of the gang and to foreshadow a violent death. We kept the main lights very dim throughout to aid the darkness of the scene, the lights only come up slightly for the actual attack as do the red lights as you can see below. 

We do have music to the scene, composed by our drummer who came up with a piece to play in the scene, of course this may change but I think it would be very effective as it is. We also looked at a piece of music to play over our argument scene called There's A Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered Honey by Panic! at the Disco. We think an instrumental version may work for the upbeat pace of the scene, but it will mean that we would have to re jig the scene to make it fit the music.