Improved Romance Scene

We looked at the love triangle today and thankfully the dance we created last year was forgotten so it forced us to create something new that actually looked good. We first have Jeremy take Sam up on a roof where he has a picnic for her and they sit and talk and look at the stars with romantic music being played quietly in the back. The next day Spencer asks if Sam wants help training with a firearms weapon and they have a romantic time where Spencer helps Sam out the when she hurts herself he is there for her and eventually he gets out a guitar and plays her a song.

I much prefer these date scenes than the dance thing we were trying to create last year because they are more intimate moments for Freya, Toby and Kai to perform and are better to watch than the dance.

My New ideas + Show developments

Over the holidays, I watched the movie 'The Theory of Everything' and watching Steven Hawking slowly be reduced to life in a chair it gave me idea's for a performance we could do.

Idea One:

the lead is diagnosed with a terminal illness and the play is about how they cope with it until they die but also about how their family and friends cope during and after their death.

Idea Two:

The entire cast is diagnosed with a terminal illness and the play is how each of them cope with it, fight it/suicide/live life to the fullest etc.

After going back to school everyone liked the idea but weren't comfortable scrapping our old idea for this new one, so we incorporated the idea in a way. For our performance we will have a timer occasionally appear on the back wall/ceiling that is counting down. when the timer hits zero that is when Freya kills us all and we find out the countdown was how long she was willing to let us live.

We improved on the sleeping friendship scene that we created lest year. we changed it so we all are asleep then one by one we stand up and explain our story of how and why we ended up fighting Jamie. This forced us to create back stories for our characters and helped us develop them.

My back story is that I was working as an officer in the army but the Jamie took over and started to force us to kill civilians, I refused and was threatened to do it or my family will be killed so I gave up arguing and went on the mission. I went in killed everyone before they could react and fight back but afterwards I found out that it was my family I was sent to kill, I realized I killed my family. So I ran from the house and kept on running until I came across a little band of people planning on taking Jamie down and I signed up and helped them the best I could and supplied them with as much information I had, I was a turning point in this rebellion.

Love Dance

We wanted to create something that portrayed the love triangle and how Sam is cheating on both Spencer and Jeremy. We eventually decided to show this in a dance, we tried to choreograph something that could show this but our best dancer/choreographer was away so we weren't doing that well. I think this scene is definitely something we need to go back to and show Meg so she gets her input for the dance and hopefully improve it.

Sleep scene

In our plot we wrote that we will have a scene that shows Ruby and Sam's friendship and Jeremy and Spencer's friendship. So we created a scene to show just that, after we agree to let James in we are sent to bed due to curfew so we all lie on the floor, then after a moment Spencer wakes Jeremy up and the talk about the girls they like and show a bond between them. Spencer then leaves to use the toilet and that is when Sam wakes up and talks to Ruby about the fact that Ruby has a crush on someone and they show a bond there. To be honest, I don't really like this scene because it seems really boring and Ashley, Dom and I are just lying on stage with no point. The conversations seem really dry with nothing that interesting happening, so I think we can either write a script with a better conversation on it or change the idea completely.

Induction Training Scene

After the opening we wanted a way to show that James wasn't cut out for working with us, so we created a movement piece that shows him going to each of our stations and trying to do what we do but fail and after we kick him out. The scene then carries on for us to plan our next move but as we decide what to do James mentions important information so we let him stay but I don't trust him and I talk to Sam about it but she just tells me to keep an eye on him. I like our idea to show James not being very good but I don't think our movement piece is that impressive or nice to look at, so I think we need to go over that and improve on it.

Opening

We want to open with a monologue (voiced by me) played into the room giving context to what the future looks like and explain how Jamie took control and what is happening. We then created a soundscape to show our first mission and to get the story started. (link here to see the opening) I feel that the basic idea looks good but we need to work on timing and our characters, I think that if I say something like "it's all clear, Jeremy do your thing" then Toby enters it will look better, and if Dom says something like "Sector One cameras are down, good job team" so the audience understands what is happening. I also think we need more reaction to hear that our activities are being noticed like Freya turning to Dom and saying "Tim can you work on deleting all video evidence of us in Jamie's Media network. Spencer, Take a message to all our informants, telling them to lay low until we give the all clear. Ruby, go topside make sure this punk wasn't followed here. Craig, check social media, find out how famous we've become."

Idea development

We wanted to develop our idea so we created a rough story line that we can work of and created characters for each of us to play. We changed the character Simon to Jamie because we wanted the leader of our rebel group (Sam) to actually be Simon and the throw the audience off we assume Jamie is a boy the entire show but have him turn out to be a girl in the end. We decided to have Freya play the role of Jamie/Sam because we thought she could play the role of a leader very well and  I think to include the character change at the end will allow her to show a new type of evil character that we haven't seen from her yet. We wanted a character to enter the rebel group and be new and inexperienced to fighting, I also wanted us to suspect that he is a spy for Jamie. This character was decided to be played by Ashley and is called James, I like the Ashley is playing this role because there is an essence of an underdog/outsider to his character that I think he can pull of. We also wanted a Character to fall in love with Sam, so when she betrays us and kills us, we get to see a hesitation when killing the character to give some more depth to the character of Sam. When deciding who to play this role we had a slight problem because both Toby and Kai wanted it, so to settle the argument we created a love triangle between the three but Sam is dating both of them without them knowing. Toby's character of Jeremy, we decided to be the rebel groups close combat and Kai has the character Spencer and he is the groups weapons expert and runner. I feel that Dom has a look of intelligence and not so much a field agent, so we created the character Tim our groups Technical Adviser. I wanted a role that was really different to other characters I have played, so I am playing the role of the ex-soldier, I have left Jamie's Army and now am fighting against him, I am the character who strongly thinks James is a spy. We created the character Ruby for Meg, our groups sharp shooter, she is sort of our groups assassin. I like Meg playing this role as she can really make the role a Fem-Fatal character, beautiful yet dangerous. We want her character to fall in love with one of us and I think she can cry over the dead body of whoever she is in love with at the end.

New idea

As our would you rather idea has been dropped we decided to go to our roots, we asked ourselves "From the title 'Chasing Pavements' what can we create?" and the idea of people 'chasing' their freedom. I wanted to set the performance in the future because the other group was setting theirs in the past and I want to do something different and I also thought that the future will allow us to play with lighting, sound and props and be creative with it. I think as a class we got inspiration from the school musical 'We Will Rock You' and films like the hunger games and Divergent as we wanted a Dystopian world to rebel against. we created a concept of a big brother state where 'Simon' is always watching, a new way of looking at the game 'Simon said'.