Evaluation

Overall I think this whole devising unit was a very good unit to do, the thing I enjoyed most was being able to take control of what we were creating and didn't have to many barriers of what we were and weren't allowed to create and if we did it was because they were barriers we put in place to suit the overall performance.  
This devising process started off quite slow as we found the stimulus to be quite narrow and we didn't know where we could go with it but after research and loads of brainstorms we eventually got to the Gang idea and we were going to stick to this, the first thing we did was workshop as a group a scene of the gang raping our only girl, we knew we wanted a love story but the Gang didn't want them to be happy so we came up with the rape idea, this rape scene then turned out to be called the attack scene with the boss of the gang beating up and eventually killing the main girl Tess, and through audience feedback this was probably our most successful and powerful scene.

After a week of more brainstorms and research we added on this author idea, the author was writing the story but had someone else above him controlling him, it was very puppeteer orientated at the start but then we moved away from that and developed that the person above the author is in fact the author himself and he is slightly insane. We all really liked this idea as a group but we didn't quite know how to intertwine the author with the story and as the author (me) wasn't actually in the same story as the other characters this meant for most of the devising process I was just sitting around or coming up with ideas for other scenes. As a whole I think our group worked extremely well together when devising ideas and if we had more time we would have been able to workshop the ideas that we just didn't use as we didn't think they would work, so if I was to do this unit again I would perhaps try and workshop a lot more ideas before getting into creating the final piece.

With this piece we really wanted to get as many techniques in as we could but making sure they were all in the right place and not just put in for the sake of it, e.g, we put in slow motion in the middle of a stage combat scene, movement, dance, composite set, drumming, split screen and maybe a few others. I know for a fact from feedback that thinks like our drumming worked extremely well with our attack scene which was also stage combat, our movement piece worked very well too.

Things we could have improved on as a group probably could have been more focused at the start as we didn't have a massive time scale to get this one and in the end we did and it worked well but I would have preferred to get the devising and creating done fairly quickly so we could have moved onto perfecting everything as we only really had one week to do this, and this made me very nervous as our tech run before our performance was in fact awful. At the end of the performance the author is supposed to be so stressed that his story didn't end happy after rewriting the ending three times, he hangs himself, we wanted to do this in silhouette as it would be quite graphic but also another technique that would have suited that particular death, we never tried out the silhouette until the day of the performance, we realised that it didn't work so we quickly had to come up with a new ending, this was stressful as we should have planned that ending a lot sooner so we knew we would have been able to do it, in the end I had to just get a gun and shoot myself, which is not a bad way to kill myself off but I don't feel it is as dramatic as hanging and also by not doing the silhouette we missed out on one technique which we had the idea of using right from the start. In the attack scene with Tess we had her get killed behind blocks so all people saw was the boss punching, we put fake blood on Tess's face to give it a more realistic effect and also try and get a reaction from the audience, but from feedback we gathered that it was very obvious the blood was painted on and it was too neat, it needed to be more splattered. 

I think if we had more time we would have been able to work on our story line a bit more and really develop it so it made more sense but we had to create a piece with roughly a thirty minute limit so we couldn't stretch out our story too much. From audience feedback we found out that our piece was border line too much stage combat, I knew it would be but that was the main focus of our piece really, and we only used the stage combat twice but we also had a movement scene that was also quite stage combat like, this movement piece could have been perfected during the middle of it, it was very quickly thrown together as we were never quite sure on what three endings we wanted but eventually this one would lead to the death of Fin (the second ending out of three)
Another thing with out three endings would be to make sure its more clear that the endings don't connect it was in fact my character, the author rewriting the endings each time because he was aiming for a happy ending but could never get one.

Due to the fact my character wasn't in the same scenes as the other characters it gave me the opportunity to do the lighting for our performance which I loved. I really thought out what I wanted for each scene and how it can make the scene better, I spent around two weeks plotting all the lighting then an additional week working out all the fade ins and outs, I feel my role doing lighting was very professional and worked seamlessly with the performance and perhaps enhanced some scenes, doing the lighting also meant I learnt something knew which was how to use the lighting desk, how to set up all the lights and connect them all together, and now I feel I could do this again with confidence and ease.

As a whole I was extremely pleased with how our whole performance went on the day and also how well my group worked together, we only had very small arguments between two people once or twice but each time we never let it affect our piece as we carried on devising and creating, if I was to do this unit again I would happily be in the same group as I feel we all worked well together and the ideas the we shared were then improved with the opinions of the other group members.