12/09/22 - 15/09/22

Week 2 of Milly's acting journey at college:

On Monday 12th September, we were given our first piece of homework to hand in where we were told to write a piece on either an actor who inspired us or a scene from a film that did the same. I did my piece on the actress Toni Collette who has starred in films such as Muriel's Wedding, Sixth Sense and much more. Her acting inspires and intrigues me whenever I watch a film she is a part of which is why I knew she was the person to do my piece on as I was confident I had so much to write about due to how much I loved her work. Beside this text, is the first page of my homework as it is double sided with two other pictures of Toni Collette included. On Monday, we also had our first two proper lessons with the Year 2 actors, which allowed us all to bond a bit more as a group and get to know each other. We also wrote down ideas as a group of what to do for the Stockton Globe Halloween event on the mirror, this consisted of things that made us fearful and we were scared of in order to see what would make more people scared on the day of the event. We also decided to make it a bit more of a what if Halloween project, meaning make the audience feel scared of what could happen more than what was happening. This would make the audience more on edge of the fact there were so many possibilities of how the night/tour would end. This was productive in our understanding of the project as it had all of us talking for the rest of the day about different ideas we all had and couldn't wait to explore. 

On Tuesday 13th, we spent the morning with Kane where we focused on body language and facial expressions actors use when in a scene to enhance it. To get an understanding of how effective it can be, we watched two scenes, one from La La Land and the other from Whiplash, but watched them without the sound. We spent a long time analysing La La Land as a group, and saying how Ryan Gosling's character Sebastian portrayed frustration subtly by rolling his eyes and not speaking for a while and sighing to highlight he was thinking what to say in order for him not to regret it. I found this really useful as even though there was no sound, both actors conveyed such strong and powerful body techniques that you understood who was in the wrong, that they were both disagreeing with one another and who was trying to stay calm for the sake of their relationship. You could also tell who felt more hurt by the words spoken, which in La La Land was Emma Stone's character Mia, as she would also take pauses but different to Sebastian's as you could tell she was trying to digest everything that had happened, not what her next words would be. Kane presented us with a task to in groups, make a short scene without any dialogue that would highlight our understanding of body language and facial expressions. This was then showed to the 2nd Years who had to figure out what our scene was about based on the range of body language shown, in which our scene was guessed correctly. With the 2nd Years, we then had to get into different groups and come up with a short scene based on a sentence starter given to us that we could act out. I was in group with Sienna and Latoya from the 2nd year as well as Freya, Emily H and Adam from the 1st year like me. All of the sentence starters handed out to the groups were Halloween based making them all eery and open to the imagination, so we as a group decided to add in a flashback to create a sense of mystery for the audience.

On Wednesday 14th, we spent the entire morning with the 2nd Years and Kelly where we focused on improvisation and why listening to others and communicating makes scenes so much more impactful when improvising. One of the activities we did was to get into groups of 3, in which I went with Adam and Sienna, and were told to each have a certain role. We were a family where Sienna was the mum, I was the daughter/ sister and Adam played the son/ brother and alongside that one had to be a prosecutor, one a victim and the other a rescuer. We took this in turns making sure each person had took on each role and seeing which one fitted their character within the family better. I felt I was better as the victim as when I tried to fight back, I was shot down and I tried to act on that. Sienna felt better playing the prosecutor as since she was playing the mother, there was a reason for her verbal abuse as she was the authority figure within the scene and had the most power out of all of us. Adam felt better playing the part of rescuer, as since he was playing my brother to the sister I was playing, his part of rescuer was highlighted since there was a clear reason that he just wanted to protect his sister. This activity focused in on family dynamics and because it was all improvised, it showed why we had to listen to one another to make each persons role feel like they fit their character.

On Thursday 15th, we had our first lesson joined by the film students who will be key in our acting journey here at SRC. They will be the ones who look out for who to give the main roles to and who works well with others and listens to what they want you to do. As well as this, we were also introduced to our first acting assignment called the CopyCat challenge where as a group we have to word by word copy a scene from a film, making sure the body language in perfect and looks almost like a replica of the original scene. In our CopyCat group, we have Adam, myself, Freya, Emily H, Millie and film student Alex who has helped us so much and showed us what we can do to make our scene look as close as we can to the original. Our ideas as a group blend perfect and we already have costume, set and camera ideas sorted. We spent a while as group trying to come up with scene ideas, originally thinking of doing the makeover scene from Princess Diaries but decided that since we don't have anywhere that looks like a royal house, set would be tricky and also due to the lack of lines each character would have, only the person playing Mia and Queen Clarisse would feel that they were being tested as an actor. However, we kept with the Anne Hathaway theme, and decided to do a scene from Ella Enchanted called the Kick Butt scene where each person has around the same amount of lines and is constantly moving around and using their body language and acting techniques to the full. After we met with the film students, we were with just the 1st years and we focused on duologue work. Me and Adam worked together on a piece called 'The Audition' which focuses on person A who is consoling person B after they don't get through to the next round of auditions they had prepared for. Kelly told us to create names and background stories for our characters in order to add some depth to our duologue, so that it wasn't boring and you could see the clear relationship between both people. I was called Robin and Adam was called Spencer and we decided that we were both close friends, and since I was playing person B who was upset that they hadn't gone far in auditions, to show that bond Adam would hug me and showcase a sense of underlying sadness on behalf of me since he felt awful for his friend. Me and Adam went away with Kelly's advice and decided to think of other background material we could use for the following Thursday.