19/09/22 - 22/09/22

 Week 3 of Milly's acting journey:

Monday 19th September = Queen's funeral which meant we weren't in college for the day to pay our respects.

On Tuesday 20th, we spent our morning with Kane where we focused on the use of voice work, how it can convey different types of emotion and also what professions require the ability to do it well. Much like last week, we watched two scenes, one from Catch Me If You Can and one from Stronger, but instead we removed the video and only listened to the scene which allowed us to pay more attention to the actor's use of voice and how they conveyed a certain type of emotion strongly. In the Catch Me If You Can scene, Tom Hank's character remained quite shouty and loud, but just by listening to his voice you could tell their was a sense of fear and urgency for his and Leonardo DiCaprio's interaction to end. As well as this, you could tell my Leonardo's character that he was more calm and at ease as his voice was normal and didn't flicker massively to the volume of Tom's. This was spotted just by listening to the scene even without the video being shown which highlights the level of acting they remain at and keep going beyond it. To be able to showcase sadness or even jealousy through just the voice is something I'm still trying to get right, which is why learning about it's importance is so important to learn about. We also had the Stronger scene which had Jake Gyllenhaal convey anger and also disappointment in himself, as you could hear small voice cracks like he was holding back his sadness and replacing it with so much anger due to the volume of his voice. We were then joined by the 2nd Years where we had to continue with our small scenes based on a sentence starter, then followed by showing it to Kane and getting his advice and feedback on the scene.

On Wednesday 21st, we were joined for the full morning by the 2nd years where we continued our focus on improvisation and began our three part improv on the lonely heart's column seen and used by real people in magazines. We were each given a piece of paper that had a name, age, who they were and what they  were expecting in a person. My person was called Heidi, she was 29, golden blonde and wanted something who was tall and loved the countryside as much as she did. I used the countryside fact and decided that that would shape my understanding of the character, so added to her background that she helped out with her father's farm on weekends and worked at a bakers on the weekdays as both sort of have a semantic field of nature and I could envision Heidi living in a small village where there is only one bakers and that's where she works. To further add some depth to our character, we went round in a circle being hot seated by Kelly where she was asking basic questions one would ask on a date like 'What makes you happy?' or 'What do you do on a weekend?' etc. We had to listen to other people's characters to get a slight understanding to who we think our characters would want to go out with and date which was interesting as even though we weren't all being hot seated at the same time, we were still all in character going inside our chosen character's minds. We left with a clear view of our character and their background and what we wanted to achieve the following wednesday.

On Thursday 22nd, we were joined by the film students again for an hour and a half where we were showing Kelly our chosen CopyCat scenes and lots of information along with it, like where would it be set, where would we costumes from, each character and who they were being played by and a schedule of how long we would want to spend on our scene. Since we knew that one minute of a scene show take an hour in filming time, we explained that our 2 minute 30 second scene would need 2 hours and 30 minutes to record and finalise. We each chose roles that we thought suited us all and how well we would portray it, so I'm playing Ella in the scene from Ella Enchanted in which I'm looking forward to rehearsing and practising for the screen. Kelly when shown our power point, thought it was a great idea for a scene, and was giving us further help with costume ideas, like a blue cape she has that would work really well. After such a successful start to our afternoon, we continued our duologue work where myself and Adam were working on The Audition scene, and showed each other the character context we had thought of in hopes it would co-inside with each others ideas. During the lesson, we had also been given the idea to come up with a secret that would give the scene some interest, without letting our partner know what it is. My secret was that I secretly wasn't surprised that I failed the audition as I hadn't prepared for it at all. This made my character interesting, as I had to show my secret through my character whilst trying to act like I was shocked my audition went really bad. 

https://youtu.be/IBPc_SnNPzo = Our CopyCat scene from 0:18