This week so far we have worked out the dance that the two main characters do when they first meet, we roughly choreographed this last Thursday but spent one lesson on Monday cleaning the dance and adding some more lifts in to hopefully make it more interesting for the audience, I think this dance is really good as it shows love at first sight with a more graceful and sweet way, its a slow elegant dance that isn't too long with some interesting lifts. 
We also worked on the scene that leads into the dance when Tess and Fin first meet, this is also quite a short scene as its set in a speak easy and we didn't want too much content before the dance as the dance and these two characters meeting is the main feature of this. 

Today we worked on an argument scene between the gang and Fin, the argument happens because Fin spends too much time with Tess, this argument ends up turning into a fight, in this we used stage combat, this is one technique that I wanted to look really good as there is nothing worse than bad stage combat, we perfected all the kicks and punches as much as we could and some of these look really real. 
The  argument scene is good but at the moment its not really an argument, we may need to spend more time working out how to make the dialogue of this scene more interesting and argument like instead of just questioning Fin.         

Brainstorm

Opening Scene

This is the first scene we have done on our new devising unit after choosing or idea, we wanted the scene to be pitch black to create more of a sinister atmosphere, we also wanted to have the lights come up after the gun shot to show the dead body in the chair with a bag on their head and blood on the bag, this would hopefully have an affect on the audience and show them that the gang involved are notorious and also good at staying in the shadows. 

Brain Storms

These pictures include all the brainstorms we made for coming up with ideas and developing them slightly, it includes some of our ideas like the gang idea or the stranded soldiers idea, it also includes research we did into our stimulus song chasing pavements.

New Ideas

In todays lesson my group did no practical work, we sat down as a group and discussed the existing ideas we had, we then tried to come up with new ideas of develop older ones. I came up with the idea that we could use the gang story with the love story entwined into that but have a more sinister atmosphere to it that was quite outside the box, I decided it might be good if we started with a silhouette of someone hanging themselves and then we went into the story of how this happened, I thought it would be better to not reveal who kills themselves at the start of the play and create some mystery and engage the audience immediately, the story is there was a sort of author/ puppeteer controlling these characters and stories as he has someone above him that is controlling him, the story the author is trying to create is a love story that ends happily but he slowly learns his story is doomed and can never end well, the love story ends badly three times (Break up, suicide and murder.) Due to the authors story ending badly three times and the pressure he is under from the mysterious person above him the author hangs himself, this is when the audience learn that it was the author who had hung himself at the start of the play.                   

The group then decided that I should play the author, this is going to be a massively challenging role for me to play as I have never played a character this serious with a huge amount of emotion behind it, I think I will be able to play this really well but I just need to gather the confidence and let go and really give this part my all to show that I'm not just the comedy boy. My main challenge will be showing this characters gradual break down and driven to kill himself but I'm sure with a lot of practise I can pull this character off and really create a moving piece.                                                                     

Devising

Today we properly started our new unit devising, we were split into our groups and we then had to come up with various ideas around the stimulus chasing pavements, one of the ideas was our piece has a old fashioned mafia gang to it and one person is trying to get out of the gang for a better life but the gang find out and kill him/ her, I really liked this idea and we had a few more brainstorm ideas off that idea so we already have a well thought out storyline for that idea, one problem with this idea could be making it seem childish or not having a well thought out story line for the reason of the gang member leaving and it not really making sense. 

Another idea we had was a group of soldiers get dropped in the middle of nowhere due to their mission going wrong and have to get back to civilisation, but there is a road that seems never ending and because of dehydration and lack of food they slowly grow insane and turn against each other. I had the idea that then one of them dies and this person speaks to the rest of the boys as a ghost and spurs them on leading the soldiers home, I thought this would be a good idea as it could get the audience emotional and it seems like something we haven't really done before. 

All these ideas were created just from the stimulus chasing pavements, we then started elaboration on this with never ending road and stuff like that and getting images off Google to try and develop our ideas even further, these are some of the photos we found

 

                                                 

These are two examples of the style and atmosphere we would want to create with our American style gangsters

 

For these pictures we say the first one as how the soldiers would see the road at first, full of colour and hope but towards the middle/ end when they have lost all hope this is how the road would seem, dull and lifeless, if we were to choose this I think we would have these pictures projected on the back wall as the play progressed so it slowly got darker and darker to show how they soldiers are affected.