My thought of the day

My thought of the day

Today we worked and developed ideas we have for our show in order to whittle them down and understand what we like and don’t like for the final performance ideas. We first split/made the skeleton of the story up into 5 important points (shown in the picture). We worked mainly with shadows and made these using various torches and tents. We used both the inside and outside of the tents and thought about the audiences perspectives when using both of these ideas and seeing how the shadows work best. I think it would be good if for the performance maybe we could use both the inside and outside of the tents to take the audience on an adventure and give the piece different perspectives so that the audience could move along with us on a sort of journey. I also like the idea of chopping and changing from stories like one minute it will be the main story of Beowulf then you carry on to another tent/room (maybe) and it would be a different version or a different story with bits of Beowulf thrown in or something like that. I think this would work well. The main themes we have stuck with for the piece so far is a creepy or comical theme these both work so well and it is going to be hard to choose between them unless we try to merge them somehow. I think we should discuss this further in lessons. The main ideas that worked well today where:

·         Putting faces in the tents- Having the actors outside so the audience can see faces from the inside

·         Far away lights- This works well for the shadowing effect

·         The “creepy” theme

·         Puppetry

·        Music- Having music in the background created a fantastic atmosphere for the audience. I liked when the audience (me being part of this) was in the tent and one of the actors was playing the piano spontaneously this then started to sound a little like a nursery rhyme (weather or not this was intended I'm not sure) which made the atmosphere very creepy and I personally felt almost on edge as I didn’t know what was going to happen next and where the actors where outside the tent.

·        Changing the angles of lights- Having these lights appear from random places was really interesting to watch and especially when little stories where happening in different places this kept you on your toes

·         Stroking the tent and making noises on the tent in different places

·         Strobe lighting or an orb of light

Most of the ideas we had today where very Arteudian in the way that they were all very dark, creepy and kept the audience on their toes. I love these ideas for the show and think it is so interesting to work with. I feel that our ideas are starting to almost link now and we are starting to get an idea of what we would like for the show which is great.