Week 35

 Monday 7th October 2024

We started off today by exploring some new warm ups that had a main focus of physical movement. As a second year task we have to, in small groups run a warm up activity and today was an experiment on that. The rest of the day was then spent exploring the new ghost light tour  script, getting a chance to fully imagine the scene and start learning my lines. I also starting throwing some ideas together and getting a few concepts on it feet 

Tuesday 8th October 2024 

Today we spent time going over our Dear Evan Hansen duologues, and got the chance to break it down with our tutor- which was really helpful for me as I got to openly discuss the character headspace and choices they make throughout the scene. I also got develop the emotions that my character has in his head more by doing this- adding objectives into the scene to hence this and allow me to access the mindset truthfully. Recently I've been finding it difficult to get out of my head when acting, but found that openly discussing the scene helped break away some of the anxiety that pushes me back into my head. 

some rehearsal photos from today:

The second half the day was spent having a chat with an ex student from our acting course that has recently graduated from Bristol Old Vic theatre school. This was really helpful to hear and learn about his journey with acting, not the just the enjoyable parts but the hard parts and the set backs. I personally found it really comferting to hear that success within the industry and drama school inparticular isn't a straight line, and that a knock back doesn't mean failure. Everyones journey is different, and I personally found it really helpful to hear that so when things don't go exactly I hoped that its just me taking a different or longer route in my journey. I'm also applying for Bristol old vic theatre school, so it was also good to hear his experience with the drama school and the application process.

Thursday 10th October 2024 

Thursday started with a session focused on our monologues for drama school. I've been working on two contemporary monologues and two Shakespeare monologues, but for this session I was just showing my contemporary monologues. I have a habit of dropping my volume when acting, but specifically when doing naturalism, so it was good to get some notes on this so I can become more aware and work on it. I'm going to find some exercises that can help me with my projection in preparation for auditions. 

We then had a session on acting for screen, using some of the Meisner techniques of instinct to highlight the importances of in the moment realness when acting on screen- more specifically in close ups. When acting in a close up it's really easy for the audience to see the characters thought process. And if they can see that there isn't a thought process the audience don't believe it, and that's when the characters story line and the story itself becomes unbelievable or fake. Some of the hardest close ups to do as actors are the ones over phone calls, because you don't actually have another person on the other end of the line, so you just have to imagine that conversation to yourself and perform it as if they were talking to you. This is just the first Layer of difficulty, you also have to switch of the large amount of people watching your performance and the camera right infant of your face. Because of how difficult they are we were then set the task of breaking down a phone call monologue, and writing the other end of the conversation to fit it. This is a task we will continue working on, and it will later then be filmed to go towards our individual show reels. 

We then had some time rehearsing our ghost light tour segments. Here are some images of what I was rehearsing: 

The last part of the day was spent doing some work on the songs for Pinocchio, as after the half term we will have the auditions for it straight away. I've been struggling to narrow down and figure out what character I want to go for in Pinocchio, so hearing the songs was helpful for that. I'm thinking of going for Stromboli as I know it will be a big challenge, especially with portraying the physicality of the character and tackling his songs. This is something I will definitely be working on leading up to the audition and in the upcoming weeks.