Wednesday 28th April: Workshop at Brune Park & Parents Evening

Today we went to Brune Park, after we finally managed to get a minibus and a driver to get us there. We had a workshop with Tina Gardiner and two of her degree students, PJ and Bobby, from the Guildford School of Acting (GSA). They started with some drama exercises, a few of which didn't go down very well (such as the exercise when they were to act like a fairy). We were soon put into groups and began the workshop that we were all there for.

In our groups we were to think of a short story, or freeze frame, to create to show to the rest of the group at the end of the day. After we had come up with our ideas each group had to nominate someone to collect props for their group from a huge pile of junk at the front of the very large hall. Ben was our nominee and he got so much random stuff that we had to somehow use in our amazing idea. Other groups were more successful at getting what they wanted than ours but we dealt with what we had.

At the end of the day we all had to perform our stories to the rest of the large group. There were junkies dying in alleyways, mermaids answering their 'shell' phones, immensely stupid astronauts getting their rockets repossessed, an intense self image performance, crazy people with telephones strapped to their heads who are convinced that the Germans are attacking and pirates on a sinking ship

Although the day began off rather rubbish, with everyone from Portchester Community School not wanting to go to Brune Park in the morning, it was a really good, creative day. We all enjoyed the workshop and want to do it again, but it's a shame that we didn't do it at the beginning of our Artefact Unit - hopefully next years Diploma group will be able to do it before instead of after their unit of work.

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Later that evening we had parents evening and mine went fairly well, I just need to be more confident.

Wednesday 24th March

Today was our first meeting together after 2 weeks of work experience. We were a tad behind as we had not met up throughout work experience.

Our plan for the day was to pull the project together and to finish making the artefacts. We started the day by working out which parts of the project we had achieved and what we still had to do to make the work decent looking. There were quite a lot of print-outs and plastic wallets used up today and some of the projects were beginning to take shape - finally!

Common problems were:

• research copied and pasted from the internet with no thought given to what it meant for their artefacts
  
• research nothing to do with their artefact
• no planning of what they actually wanted to make
• no photo diary
  
• artefact not finished
• no evaluation of their work

The end of next wednesday is the final deadline of the project... hopefully it will all be done by then (fingers crossed).

Work Experience

Throughout work experience we didn't have to go to Diploma days over the two weeks, which then lead to us being two weeks behind on the Artefact Unit.

On Thursday 11th March most of us (except from Ben and Lewis due to work experience commitments and no Nikki or Nathan for unknown reasons) met at the Ashcroft Arts Centre to see a performance by the Spike Theatre Company, 'On Top of the World'. The show was amazing. It followed the journey of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as they attempted to conquer Everest. The show was hilarious and very creative, as it involved the audience throughout the whole of the play. They used a variety of props to create the set, mainly involving ladders, but also using white clothes, elastic, ropes, cotton wool and bags. They used projections, puppetry and recorded voiceovers to make the show even more fun and it gave it an even more creative feel. One scene was especially funny, where two actors mimed the actions whilst the third actor made sound effects into a microphone. Sometimes he would make the sound effects out of time for a comedic effect.

It was really funny and I'd love to see it again.

Wednesday 3rd March - Paper Birds

Today was a weird, busy one. At 9am some year 9 students from Portsmouth schools, Priory and Mayfield, came over, for a Diploma taster day. Because they were in this morning we didn't have to come in to school until 11am. When we came in the year 9 students had created some good props and were really good at making things in such a good time. They spent the afternoon writing up a presentation on their process and production, whilst we were in the Gymnasium taking part in a workshop.

At 1pm the Brookfield crew arrived at our school and so did our workshop guest Ellen, who is a designer for the Paper Birds Theatre Company. She asked us to think about how we may create an atmosphere, character background or location with just props that can be easily moved on and off of the stage.

She then talked to us about the idea of creating a set in a suitcase, creating a character's whole world in just one small box. They would walk on to the stage with a suitcase, open it up and their world would be created. With this thought in our minds we had a go at creating some suitcases of our own that would create a set. We would first create a story line with four scenes and then we were to design four different suitcases that contained these worlds.

After we had all designed our suitcases we had to present our ideas to the rest of the group... we really need to work on our presentation skills but other than that our designs were good.

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That evening we travelled by minibus, thanks to Miss Flux who drove us, to the Ashcroft Arts Centre in Fareham to see the Paper Birds production of 'In a Thousand Pieces'. The performance followed the story of three young eastern European girls who had been promised new, exciting lives in the UK but they are then sold into the sex trade. The story was very strong and was a very graphic piece of theatre. It was a real shock for us all as we didn't know what it was about before we went into the theatre. The way the play was performed was very interesting, as it involved 3 actresses playing the same character. A tape recorder of 'her voice' with recordings of her speaking was repeated throughout the play, giving it a real impact. It was really shocking.

Wednesday 24th February

Today we finally started to create our props. Miss Hoad had all of our orders in their boxes on the table and, as the first job of the day we unpacked the boxes and ticked off what we had received on the order sheet. Unfortunately, the felt did not come in the order (as they did not have the colours we needed) so we'll have to wait until next week until we can begin to use it.

After unpacking everything we set up our tables where we would work and began to fix up some paper mache. We put half into each of the two buckets and set one on our table and the second bucket on the main table. We blew up balloons for the bases of our masks and began to shred newspaper to put in the paste. We began to layer our balloons with the newspaper and once we were happy with our base layers we hung them from the ceiling on string and put sheets of paper between each balloon, to stop them from sticking together.

Once the balloons were finished with I went with Ben to the Technology block in school to cut the large dowel stick into small 24cm sections. Once they were cut we went back to E1 and cut out cardboard stars to stick on our smaller dowel sticks. We cut them with a scalpel, from Graphics, and stapled each corner together so the dowel stick wouldn't move in between the two cardboard stars. Once it was stapled I coated the cardboard with paper mache until it was fully covered and strengthened. Unfortunately the dowel stick kept falling out of in between the cardboard so I had to cover it with super glue (twice!) and hold it down to make sure it stuck. Once it was glued down I took it to the girls' bathroom to dry it under the hand dryer. Once it was dry I took it back to the classroom to paint it with gold paint. Whilst the paint was still wet I put a lot of gold glitter all over it, to cover the hold star on the wand. Once I shook off the excess glitter and pored it back into the tub I took the wand over to the heater and placed it there to dry the paint (we'd cover it with watered-down PVA glue to make sure that the glitter would not fall on the floor when used by classes in the future.

That was all that we could make today so instead of beginning to make something I got on with my blog.

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!!).

Wednesday 3rd February

Today we had two hours to get our presentations ready, even though they should have been finished last wednesday. After break we had to present our projects to our client, Miss Page (Deputy Head in English) who came to our Diploma room so that each group could present their project and what they had done to complete their research.

Most groups were ready on time, ours on the other hand was battled against the clock. All of the groups needed to rehearse because most things went wrong, but ours seemed to go pretty smoothly. I think we all learnt something about how to present projects in a mature, professional way.

Once the presentations were over and it was decided that our presentation was the best overall (A Midsummer Night's Dream) we spent the the following three hours planning our props and creating mood boards

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Next week we, and the students from Brookfield, are meeting with Tina Gardiner, the Head of Design at the Guildford School of Acting. Looking forward to hearing some great stuff from her and finally finding out what the whole meet-up is about (we've only been told that we need a blackout room, or something along those lines. So it's all a mystery).