Wednesday 10th February

Today we met with Tina Gardiner, the Head of Design at the Guildford School of Acting (GSA) to have a design workshop. She and the students from Brookfield were late so we didn't properly start until 10.ooam, half an hour later than we had originally wanted to start (at 9.30).

To start off the day we took part in some drama warm up exercises where we had to stand in a circle and move around to get us away from our friends and out of our comfort zones. Once we'd finished that game we played another which was called 'Zip, Zap, Boing, Pow' where we had to point left, and say 'zip', point right, and say 'zap', when you 'boing' it bounces back the 'zip' or 'zap' and when you say 'pow' you point at someone across the circle.

After finishing these games we moved onto our workshop and sat around in a horseshoe and watched Tina show us how acting is not particularly important when trying to set a feeling and to get the audience to feel something or find out where it was set and when. She did this by taking Jacob Rogers and a girl from Brookfield, sat them next to each other and played some music which made us think that they were in Italy, at night riding down the canals romantically, possibly? Tina showed us various different scenes, changing a slight thing every few scenes to see what was different to us and what it made us feel.

Tina thought that we should have a go at it ourselves by using the props she'd brought with her we were to create two scene, in groups of four, and get the audience to comment on what they thought had happened. I was in a group with Ben Knight, Sophie Foster and Nikki Mattravers and we created one romantic scene, with two lovers having dinner at home, our second scene showed the female lying dead on the floor and the man holding the candle stick, that had previously been on the coffee table with their dinner, in his hand and looking shocked. To create these scenes we used the following props:

- Coffee table

- Dress

- Two bowls filled with spaghetti and two spoons

- Candle

- Sofa

- Two champagne glasses

We also used music to set the scene and create an overall atmosphere about the scenes. For the romantic scene we used the song 'Cosmic Love' by Florence and the Machine, and for the death scene we used the song 'Blinding', which is also by Florence and the Machine.

Once each group had shown their two scenes Tina got out a set model, which was a 1:25 scale model of the stage that they have at GSA. She told us about most of the roles that take part in the theatre (director, stage manager, deputy stage manager, designer...) and talked about her role as a designer. She showed us the props that she had designed for the scale model and put them on the miniature stage. She explained everything thoroughly.

She also showed us lighting and one of her filters, a red one which would be placed over the light to show that a murder had taken place, or some other form of bloodshed (such as a war).

Overall the meeting we had with Tina was very inspirational and very enjoyable. Once it had finished we made our way back down to our Diploma room (E1) and wrote our blogs about last week and the morning we had just had. Once we had finished our blogs we were to move onto continuing our mood boards (which are still far from complete!!).