Character Study - Audio Book

CHARACTER PROFILE –  My character in this book is the main protagonist and narrator of the story, her name is Tessa and she is a shadow hunter. This extract is from the third and final book in the Infernal Devices trilogy.

WHO ARE THEY? (Avoid one work answers -expand below where possible)

NAME: Tessa Grey

AGE: 18

FAMILY BACKGROUND/LIFE: 

JOB: Shadowhunter

KEY RELATIONSHIPS: Jem - Fiancee, Will - In Love With

HEALTH: Good

INTERESTS: Literature, Dickens, Travel

LINKS TO KEY THEMES IN THE BOOK: Love - Relationships with Jem and Will

LINKS TO KEY CHARATERS IN THE BOOK: Jem - love interest, Will- love interest

CHARACTER DESCRIPTION/PERSONALITY: Tessa is a young woman in the 1800's in London, she loves to read and because of this has a very active and romantic imagination, because of this she also finds going into the shadowhunter world a lot easier.

WHAT HAS HAPPENDED TO THEM and how are they affected by this?

BEFORE THE BOOK – She has accepted Jem's proposal and also defeated the Dark sisters, this caused her a lot of difficulty with the shadowhunters as she is not one and yet is.

DURING THE PLAY – CHARACTER JOURNEY AND THROUGHLINE -During the book she faces a lot of struggles with love and loss and victory and also failure, these themes are a huge part of the book detailing the struggles of a young shadowhunter, the journey of Tessa is that of every young person, to find their purpose in life and figure out what life is all about.

WHAT DO THEY WANT?

Character Objectives – Tessa in this scene wants to get her wedding dress just right to please Jem.
Characters obstacles - In this scene Tessa is finding the fact that she is so young and getting married difficult at the same time as seeing herself in her own wedding dress.

ACTOR CHOICES AND CHARACTER PORTRAYAL:

VOCAL CHOICES – In this speech I chose to do a very melancholy voice,  this was because I wanted to have the sadness that Tessa feels at having everything happen so fast because of Jem's illness and also the loss of her childhood.

Character Study - War of the Worlds

CHARACTER PROFILE – 

My character is a reporter from New York who is a radio broadcaster working on music for the city and further, she also helps to report to the people the goings on during the alien invasion. 

NAME: Imogen de Ste Croix

AGE: 24

FAMILY BACKGROUND/LIFE:

JOB: Radio Broadcaster

KEY RELATIONSHIPS: She holds a friendly relationship with the other reporters on the alien case

HEALTH: She is in good health

INTERESTS: Radio Broadcast, World news, Reading, Tennis and Cricket

LINKS TO KEY CHARATERS IN THE PLAY: The other reporters, she corresponds with them to bring information to the public 

CHARACTER DESCRIPTION/PERSONALITY: She is a very structured reporter who is very serious about her job and because of this tries to up-hold the perfect radio presenter even during the alien invasion and can come across as a bit stiff but is trying to be a good reporter.

WHAT HAS HAPPENDED TO THEM

BEFORE THE PLAY –Before the play my character was a woman who had worked her way into radio broadcasting and is very serious about her job because of the work she has put into her career, this has made her quite hard in personality as she won't let anything come between her and her radio, due to this she comes across as cold.
DURING THE PLAY – CHARACTER JOURNEY AND THROUGH LINE -The character is reporting on "Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra" just as the news of an alien attack from mars hits, she is then reporting on both the music and the attack, until she cannot do so.

AFTER THE PLAY – Due to the nature of the text and the ending, I would guess that things would not end well and that the lens would take over just as they harmed the other radio presenter and the other civillians.

WHAT DO THEY WANT?

Character Objectives – Has to have the audiences attention, has to deliver breaking news.

Characters obstacles -  Has to negotiate around the alien invasion to keep the radio show going.

Character Super Objective - To deliver a good radio show without interruption. 

ACTOR CHOICES AND CHARACTER PORTRAYAL:

VOCAL CHOICES – I chose to deliver this part in a partial monotone voice, to add the presenter effect, this I wanted to push so that when the alien invasion started to happen I could show the fear of the presenter and have that come across in her voice.

Radio - 2

Solo Project:
I began with my solo project knowing that at some point I wanted to work on an audiobook, this is because I think audiobooks have so much potential such as with portraying all of the emotions and internal thoughts that a character in a book would have an having to bring that across to your listening audience. Books themselves are also something I love as I am an avid reader, this made it quite hard to choose a book let alone a section of one to work on and use that piece without constantly changing my mind. I finally chose the first chapter from the book The Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare. I chose this piece because as an avid reader I seriously enjoyed the book, I also knew that no matter how many times I read the book or the part I chose for my vocal project I could never be bored with it.  I also chose the piece because having also listened to the audiobook and admiring the reader of the book I saw a lot of potential in the piece. I also began to look at how I would work on the extract myself making notes on the selected part and seeing how to engage in the emotions of the piece as it starts out with the traditional wedding folk rhyme, I saw this to be a nostalgic part of the piece and so wanted to make it somewhat down hearted and monotone at the same time showing the melancholy in the extract. Going into the actual scene we have  one of the maids who presents a cockney accent, I have found this to be a little more difficult as the accent was not my strong suit, so to work on this I looked at youtube videos to give me a better insight and of course had to go and watch My Fair Lady to give me the real Eliza Dolittle cockney tone. The book is set in the late 1800's and so the poem at the beginning has real meaning to the piece as it was an old rhyme always said around a wedding, just as the "something old something new" rhyme still told today. As a book it is written in a very descriptive way and  you need to convey the description and the emotions felt with that to show the character's feelings and what is going on around them. This can also be shown by the pace of the piece such as when a scene needs to pick up pace if a fight is going on or to slow down when they are trying to process a piece of vital information in the story. 

The second piece I chose was a sonnet, number 116. I chose this as my second vocal piece because I had performed the piece before and knew that there was still more that I could do to it. Such as expanding on the notes that I already had for the piece and since it had been a while since I had actually done the sonnet It was very beneficial to re learn it with the notes I already had. It was also interesting as I was able to take on a new view point having not done it for a while I was able to see it from an insiders perspective but also and outsiders perspective. I began by going back to basics looking at the time the piece was written and the themes it contains. I was looking at how during Shakespeare’s time love was not really seen, most marriages were arranged and not real, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t find love outside as most would find it elsewhere from their marriage. It was a time when the social aspect of love was considered a fantasy and not really something for the everyday life, most would marry for money or for stability as for women, not many jobs were available and for men they needed to create their down line. This piece relies on the listener understanding what it is saying, the sonnet is written in shakespearian and so is not as easily deciphered this is where the voice is heavily relied on, it is the one thing that will show the real emotion that is aching to be released from the poem to the listener. The pace of the piece changes with the different themes, showing the different stages of a sonnet, the intro, crisis and resolve. It needs to convey the question of the piece, then explain the crisis and how this is conflicting the person and finally the resolve the answer to the question and crisis. You could say that it is in a way a story, and every sonnet is the same, they all tell a universal story that everyone can relate to, different themes and problems but all have a resolve. Allowing the listener to understand that is crucial. 

The final piece I chose is a radio advert, the advert in question is for a ballet and saying that you can enjoy memories with the gift of tickets for your family to see the one night only production. This piece is modern and so the social, political and economic constraints are what we see today. These constraints are as follows, the economic situation is that there is not as much money going around and so the piece pushes the memories part of the the advert, aiming to persuade the listener into spending their money on tickets. The political situation right now is that the government are spending money we don't have, this is what is being encouraged in this advert. The social constraints of this time are that everyone wants to go to gatherings like this and take their families, it's a social venture that involves the family and is something that you can make memories with as the advert suggests.
The advert relies on the listener to understand what it is saying and also be coerced by what is happening in the advert to want to buy the tickets, this is also reliant on how persuasive the voice of the person who is talking on the radio. The pace of the piece needs to be quick enough to get everything across but also enough for the listener to understand what you are saying at the same time as being enticed into buying the tickets. I worked on all of this by listening to a lot of adverts on the radio or youtube and studying how they used their voice, vocal tone, pitch and pace to really make the advert as effective as they could, I have tried to add this into what I am doing to make the tickets more appealing for the families and others intended that are the target audience.

Radio - 1

To begin this blog entry I am going to tell you what I have and am doing in the radio section of my two year course. I will be explaining what why and how the script for group project was done. I hope to be able to give a good idea into how all of these choices came about and inform you on the way radio is produced and recorded.

Group Project:
We began the group project by being put into our groups, mine consists of Paige, Dan, Reece, Charlotte and myself. The group started to get into working as a group on the media of radio by reading together an old Flash script from the 1930's which was interesting because we were able to see how radio was performed and annotated in the 30's. Learning about radio for us began with the beginning where the shows performed were quite primitive and the sound effects weren't that good, it gave us a good indicator as to how we didn't want our piece to sound like and how we also wanted it to sound. The choosing process began with each person in the group bringing in a radio script of their choice mine was, The Importance Of Being Earnest. I chose this script because I had previously heard the play on the radio and very much enjoyed it and thought having a go and trying to do our own radio version would be a lot of fun. We all had a look at the different scripts everyone had brought in which presented us with a wide range of choice, in the end we chose Paige's piece which is, The War Of The Worlds. I felt that this was a good choice for our group as it gave us a lot to work with in terms of characters and plot line, The War Of The Worlds is a radio drama that is based on the book of the same name by H.G.Wells the play was originally narrated by Orson Welles and was performed as a special Halloween episode that was so believable that it cased chaos and Orson Welles was forced to come back on air and issue an apology for any problems this may have caused any of the public or anyone else. The drama is dramatic and holds a lot of potential and so it was chosen as our piece. We began by reading the chosen drama through a few times to get a feel for the piece and find our own pace to the play. Once the pace had been established and the play was far more familiar the part choosing began, this was done by finding out which characters we needed people for and then matching everyones strengths to their suitable character choice so as to have the best effect for the piece. We also wanted to get started and start to annotate and learn our roles so that we would find working on the play a lot easier in the long run when we do our final performance and need to be at our best. Once we had finalised all of the main details that we needed to begin such as casting and the play itself, everything started to work a lot faster. Now we are reading and re-reading our script in our roles to try to establish the correct vocal tone and pace that will suit our part, this includes accents, pitch and also annotating so that we are able to remember when these things come into the play and need to be used to create the best performance we can. We started to work on choosing the sound effects that would work well with the piece, this included searching through different ranges of Spanish music for the Ramon Raquello section. The Spanish music was interesting to sort through as we wanted it to retain it's Spanish influence and yet also reflect the atmosphere of the piece and set the scene. We then also chose where we felt sound effects would be appropriate, such as scenes where there is supposed to be an explosion or a crowd behind the reporter. During this process we also went through the script a few times as a group using the effects alongside our words to not only get a real feel as to how the end product would sound like but also to see where we might have missed something and needed to add in the sound effect to make it a better sound piece.

The British Broad Casting company (BBC) was formed in 1922 on the 18th of October, the first play that was written for audio was A Comedy Of Danger and was broadcast on the 15th of January in 1924 this piece was written by Richard Hughes and was revered by the critics, the play was a huge hit mostly because it was written for Radio and not originally as a play it was specifically for the format of Radio Broadcast. Before this monumental step the only type of play that had been shown on Radio was a version of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, this was broadcast on the 16th of February 1923, this was also well received by the public as it was a new form of entertainment that could be enjoyed from the home. This was a new form of entertainment for the country as it showed that the country was developing well, the 20's were a time of innovation and new trends, the world was changing and so was the aspect of broadcasting. This was the time when plays and dramas were written especially for Radio and it was a huge hit with the public and more were commissioned and so the art of Radio Drama was born.  This changed the way I engaged with my character because of all the things going on in the background of the era. The war happened a year later and even so political tensions were high, this meant that as a reporter I needed to add that level of caution to my voice. The Social and economic situation at the time of the original broadcast was dodgy, there was a recession and nothing was going smoothly especially with the threat of another world war. This changed my ideas of how the presenter would report the bad news of the alien attack, it made me think that a lot more caution is needed in the voice to show the delicate social, political and economic situation. This play uses sci-fi and realism to engage it's audience, creating the realistic approach to a real broadcast on a main channel allowing a lot of listeners to hear the show. The show relies on the way that it is written, with real reporters acting in and producing the effect of a real studio broadcast, this in turn created the mayhem that happened with the original show and made people believe that the alien invasion was real. The original show was done with one narrator, we changed this to a few instead to allow each member of the group to have a good part, we did keep the monologues in as we felt that they made the whole piece more dramatic but divided them up between group members. The pace of the piece is varied, it changes from reporter to reporter, with the main reporters it goes in a much slower and monotone voice, when the reporter is talking from the scene it goes a lot quicker as they are reporting a scene that is changing very quickly.

Film and TV - 1

This term we have begun our Film and TV unit studying camera technique and how being on stage and screen can be so different not just in technique but also in the acting itself. We began with talking about which films showed our favourite actors and what we liked especially about each of their performances, this then gave us an idea as to how things would work in the situations shown.

The first week (I really was there as I had been at a drama school audition) we looked at filming short scenes that we ourselves had chosen. The brief was to choose a dramatic scene from a film or TV show of our choice with our partner, so naturally Zach and I chose to do a Phoebe and Joey scene from FRIENDS. This did not go particularly well. We had chosen a scene that was comedic although sort of dramatic at the same time, in our minds, and it turned out that the weirdness of being on camera got to us and we didn't try to make it our own or try something a bit more normal, we tried to imitate Phoebe and Joey which did not turn out very well. When we watched the other groups who had chosen some much better scenes we also got to see some better ways that you can act on the screen. I learnt a lot more about camera angles as well and how you have to stay so still when the camera is behind you filming the person in front of you and that every shot is precisely lined up to your head and the other actor in the shot. Learning how the camera works is also in a way learning how you work because you need to act as though you are the same person because the camera needs to be your friend even though you can seriously fight!

So it's been quite interesting so far and we've really just been learning the basics to do with filming, it's a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. The technicalities are much more complex that I originally thought, so although it's a learning curve and there's still much more to go I am enjoying learning about how things work and finding a different side to my acting and how to morph yourself to act on the camera.

Shakespeare - Blog

The play we have been studying is Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, it tells the story of a man called Julius Caesar and how he came to power and was assassinated by his most trusted advisors because they felt that he had too much power for one man. The scene that my group were involved in was where Caesar is persuaded by his wife Calphurnia to stay at home after she had a dream that he would die if he went to work, Decius whom I play is sent to fetch Caesar to the senate house only to arrive and find Caesar refusing to go to work and needing him to go so that the assassination can happen Decius works his magic and convinces Caesar that the dream Calphurnia had was actually a dream of good fortune for Caesar's fortune which in turn convinces him to go to work and complete Decius' part in the assassination plot.

During the first week we mostly spent our time trying to connect with our characters, to embody them. This included jumping into their shoes thinking how they would think and finding their stature, how they walk, talk, eat and how their facial expressions are displayed. This caused some tensions within my group (as we were all separated into different scenes that would then be compiled to create a birds eye view of the play) because we were all quite on edge with finding the character and trying out their emotions which can sometimes be difficult for an actor and as we only had two weeks to learn, block and perform these scenes it was somewhat harder and easier at the same time.

The challenges we faced in the first week were mostly down to the lack of lines learnt and that made it very hard to be able to animate a scene, as holding a script occupies your hands and your face as you are reading the lines. We managed to conquer this by learning a few lines at a time and then putting it all together and having only one of us as a prompt so that we didn't feel too much pressure over the lines and that made it all the more comfortable to just be free and easy with the scene. We also started to block scenes so that we could begin to associate certain movements with particular lines.

In week two we were a lot more panicked as it was all coming at us fast and we still had a lot to do, luckily we had all learnt our lines and so now were working on our facial expressions and our hand movements and figuring out how our character would react to the other characters lines and looking at the characters have to haves, what they need out of a scene. It was also a time for looking at costume and seeing what they would wear, because of the difference in status and the time period it meant we could do a lot. I wore all blacks and then a leather jacket to give the impression of an army style jacket, Joe wore a make-shift toga to give off the typical Caesar vibe and Alicia as Calphurnia wore all blacks to show how she is almost the mediator in the relationship and situation between Decius and Caesar.

In the final few days of putting these scenes together it was more or less just rehearsing and re-rehearsing the scenes to make sure that the scene was in order. When the day of the showcase came around we were all a little on edge which is fairly normal, and were both excited and nervous creating a brilliant atmosphere. The show was going well and then it was our turn and it started off well, then one of the group forgot their lines and skipped a big chunk of the scene, this was not a problem as we were prepared and just went onto the next bit and it went un noticed by the audience and turned out to be a good performance. I felt that my specific performance went a lot better than I thought it would and and was pleased with the outcome, I felt that I managed to convey the jealousy of Decius and the intent of the assassination without having that shown to Caesar and kept my agenda hidden. I wanted to work on how you could look at Decius and see the good friend of Caesar and then look at my eyes and see the dark plan behind the facade. Overall I was very pleased with my performance and enjoyed working on Julius Caesar with my group and learned a lot more about Shakespeare and the history of the play as well.

Decius - Character Study

Decius Brutus

A minor character in the play Julius Caesar Written by William Shakespeare and based on the real life events of Dictator Julius Caesar. Decius is an instigator to Julius Caesar's assassination and a Roman politician. He was also Caesar's cousin and was heir in the second degree to caesar in his will.

Decius plays a key role in the assasination of Julius Caesar as he is the one who persuades Caesar to come to the senate house after he had said he would not go due to his wifes worry over a dream she had of his death. Decius is one of the men who all join together to kill Caesar after Caska attacks him first and they eventually kill him and become his murderers.

Decuis is a very cunning character who knows just how to persuade people to go agains their own decisions to get his own way, the way he persuades Caesar to come to the senate after his wife calphurnia has begged on her knees that he stay home is a fairly good example of how he can make others trust him, even over those who are far closer to the subject that he is trying to seduce.

Decius seems to in a way distrust Caesar, even though he is his cousin. Decius treats Ceasar almost like a child recognising how in his own mind Caesar was not fit to be the Dictator of Rome and took it into his own hands, this could also be seen as jealousy from Decuis, himself thinking that he is the lowly cousin and wanting to have the power that Caesar has.

In Conclusion I think that Decius is a very messed up character he has had to live in the shadow of his cousin and feels so strongly about this that he even conspires and ends up killing his cousin Caesar. We also note that Decius is a very deceptive person and incredibly talented at persuading people to do what he requires them to do, or to gain information from them. This overall makes Decius a very intersting character even though his part is limited without his persuasive talents Ceasar would never have been assasinated and so in turn the entire outcome of the play is due to Decuis' cunning persuasive gift.