Photographers

Hello all, this is Tom's email, as i'm sure you want to thank him for headshots. i will invite him to blog and maybe he can share some beowulf pictures with us.

dolman.photography@gmail.com

WELL DONE EVERYONE! PICTURES

WELL DONE EVERYONE FOR CREATING AN AMAZNG SHOW, I LOVE YOU GUYS WAY TO MUCH!

Just a few photos from this week, staring with the best one!

Molly & Jess did an amazing job with my makeup!

Charlotte's and I's back looked so cool!

Amber & I: The makeup people who came on stage to make us 50 years older had to have some sort of black mask (so it matched us)

I thought it might be a nice idea to get a photo of everyone's makeup, I love seeing the differences which gives us all a unique feel

The amazing fire, where the audience members burned their fears which we asked them in the tents to write down (some of them found it very therapeutic)

Production Day 17th

These were just some notes I wrote down during Production Day and we were given actor notes:

Notes:

- Talk about the goats, tents & your own story (dragon) to the audience when they come in or else the goats won't make any sense

- Pick up the pace of the whole show, quick, snappy - One extreme to the other

- Hand King&Queen - Resources (both hands Jakko & Charlotte), Faith (my hands over cross Jakko's and Charlotte's), Freedom (all of our hand waving up in the air), Blackout (all hands go down, apart from I stay up there until Victor has sung his song)

- React to Hamlet (Dan, waffel)

- Reacting facial expressions to actions - Buto walk, army like - War

- Head down - "The story ends in a FUNERAL"

- Prepare paper&pen and put into the tents before the audience come in (before the show starts)

- Pronounce every word, slow down, it's all about diction (I wondered if we could watch back the shows that we have done to see what we are doing wrong/right? - Would be very helpful)

- At the end of the show say, take a bow, thank Dee, thank Production team and Chefs who created the soup

Ideas:

- Why don't we separate into two lines for the buto walk - the same lines we are in for the boat when we meet Hamlet?

Audience thoughts:

- They wondered why we didn't get the goats from outside and put them into our tents when they were singing their song? We told them that we could go out there as Grendel's mum is coming and we didn't want them to get eaten. 

Creating a characters

Throughout the whole process of Beowulf I really wanted to create a strong character like I did in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time", I loved played around with different accents, physical movement and personality to come up with the best overall character which I felt I did in the last show. So I wanted to do the same this time around, I started off just being me saying the lines but that didn't seem to fit with what I was saying so I switched to American, which was great for sometime but I thought the accent would be better suited to a different character in another show. I tried a few accents and decided to take it upon myself to learn some new ones, which did work for a while (Liveapudalin) but nothing seemed to fit. I believe this was because I couldn't get my characters physical moments right so I decided to rewind and work on physical movement first and then find a accent that suited it. After a long thought and several classes later I finally decided to stick with an excitable character, which I love to play as it sort of relates to me and it gave me room to grow and develop my character.

Although I really loved playing my excitable character I felt like I didn't play her correctly, I think this because I found my character to late in the process whereas in the last show we did together as a group I got Mrs Alexander character early on so I could branch new ideas to fully grasp her personality and mannerism, whereas this time around I didn't have the time to fully find my character. I shall bring what I have learnt from this process as well as the last one on to the next show we do.

When I got given the speech to read out as the queen, I read it though aloud and immediately thought of Professor Umbridge in Harry Potter. I really liked how her mannerism came though in her speech, as well as her physical movements with her hands and facial expressions. Although I had to just say the lines behind the crash matt while Jakko was creating the facial expressions for me I found it rather hard to extract her mannerism, trying to create a happy, light character with a slight dark effect to her attitude. Another reason why I decided to base my Queen character around her is because Ami's Queen was lovely, polite and respected and I wanted to create the same sort of personality but with a slightly darker twist.

A question from the costume lot

Hi everyone (just letting you guys know) I’ve had a message from the costume lot asking if it’s ok after our headshots on Monday if we could go to costume so that they can take pictures of us in our costume for their sketchbooks!?

Bravissimo!

Really lovely work, very proud of you all and pleased for you all - a great collaborative performance which you demonstrated increasing levels of ownership over the material and your relationship with the audience - playful, honest, and at times hilarious, you let us think and feel, rather than telling us what to think or feel, thank you!

P.S Everybody work on your diction!!!!!

Lisa

First review of our show

Amazing show – funny, intelligent, visually rich and surprising, sonically sensate……moving…..….I could go on.

Brilliant ……enjoyable …..

Thanks everyone ….please pass on to all I have missed on the list  and all the students

Nick Gardner

Head of Creative Industries