UAL Level 2 Week 3

Monday 26th September

Blog Lesson:

• Continued writing out blogs about school work and events

Acting Lesson

• First started to get the ideas for our piece on 'Identity'. To start off with we had to pick a piece of paper with the word our scene will be based around, for example my group and I had the paper that had the word school on it. 
• Then moved onto creating a scene which had a laid-back teacher in a classroom with other students, the scene progressed by having one of the students mess with the other student, this then led to a confrontation which ended up with them both being sent to the headmasters office where the scene was ended by having one of the students taken away of the school grounds for the possession of a knife and the intent to use it against another student. After looking back on this we decided that it would be better to not have the knife in the scene at all so we decided that next time we would leave it out and try and adapt it with something else.

Tuesday 27th September

Acting lesson in which consisted of:

• Lining the chairs up against the wall and we each had to write down what we identity meant to us, we then swapped them around and had to read them all out.
• Getting back in the groups we were in last time, my whole group moved to a different Drama room to practice our piece of work and link both our school scene and the other groups detention scene together. We did this well with the use of flashback scene which began from the words "I'm here cause I was fighting this guy", after that it transitioned into my scene and remembering our decision before we decided to carry out the scene without the use of the prop knife, this ultimately worked out better as it meant that both students could then be sent to detention for fighting with further benefits the link between both the scenes. This ran on to the end of the lesson and instead of performing to the class what we had come up with, it was to late and we had to go home which then meant that we did not get the feedback we needed to improve on our work and think about ways to make it better over the Wednesday we are not in.

Movement Lesson which had us:

• Working with a partner dancing, better developing our movement skills
• We had to choose a character that we wanted to portray then move as if we were them, our partner then had to try and replicate our chosen character as best to their ability, for example for my first choice I decided to choose the character of Charlie Chaplin and me and my partner had to move as if we were that person.
• Then moved onto various stretching exercises allowing us to improve flexibility and more easy movement skills. 
• We then continued to further develop our core strength doing various abdominal workouts as before.

Production lesson where we:

• Worked in groups looking at themes of Fairness and Prejudice. We looked at a presentation which made us look at different people in order to see who got the role as the Engineer. Before being allowed to choose who we want, we had to look through each different aspect of their personality and make an unprejudiced decision about firing each one based of who they are but also what they could offer to the job, for example someone was bisexual but had no engineering history whereas they had a competitor who was Transsexual but had a history of engineering so was the better choice for the job.
• Looked more in depth about our essay roles, for example we looked at different roles in the theater, roles such as Publicity and Marketing Manager, Props coordinator, Set Designer, Costume Designer, Makeup and Hair Designer and Technical Director, looking at these different job roles helps us as it allows us to gain a better understating of our own job roles and how we work, where we work in relation to the Theater and who it is that we work with, for example looking at the Technical Director allowed us to get a better understanding of how they with the Lighting and Sound managers and how their job roles link in with each other in order to make it happen.

Wednesday (No Lessons)

Thursday 29th September

Acting Lesson where we:

• Worked more in the theater on our 'Identity' piece. We worked with the teacher trying to link different group pieces of work together in order to make larger scenes and to make the actual production of 'Identity'. Working on our piece of work for the majority of the lesson, it allowed us to develop more on our scene and make certain things better  I find that it is better to work in the theater rather than the classroom as we get a better understanding of how and where to project our voices, it also allows us to practice our set up and know where it is best to have the layout of the scenes to best benefit the actors in correlation to the audience. 

Friday 30th September

Blog Lesson:

Worked more on our blogs about recent events and lessons.

UAL Level 2 Week 2

Monday 19th September

Blog Lesson:

• Just mainly focused on the continuation of the blogs.

Moved on to another Acting lesson where we:

• Focused on doing more vocal warm ups and exercise of diaphragm muscle in order to further develop our speech, helping us with things like depth and ability to make our voice reach further places, for example if we were doing a scene between 2 people, the use of our diaphragm muscle would help us to make it louder so even the people in the back rows could hear it.
• Worked more on our improvisation work on our ideas of identity and had to make scenes of our work based on the ideas we had come up with over the weekend, for example I came up with an idea based around the themes of the film 'The Truman Show' and acted out my idea with my partner Benedict.

Tuesday 20th September

Movement lesson in which we:

• Further developed our flexibility and our ability to stretch
• Worked more on the abdominal muscles and core workouts continuing to improve strength through movement
• Continued the clapping rhythm and tried to further adapt it by adding different dance moves into it, this proved difficult as it was hard to incorporate the dance moves immediately to the pace of the beat required.

Production lesson which we:

• Talked about our essay roles and what they meant and how they work with the other parts of the production team, for example we were talking about where they work, how much they earn and other parts of their job role.
• Spoke about how best to structure an essay
• Began the writing of the essay till the end of the lesson

Wednesday (No Lessons)

Thursday 22th September

Drama Lesson where we:

• Worked in the school's theater, this is good because it helps us to get used to the space that we are going to be performing in for our first full theatrical production. It also helps us to know how and where to project our voices to when we are actually acting out with the live audience there.
• Played various games such as It! which helped us to warm up our bodies so that we could move more freely, Famous Person which helped with our improvisation skills as we had to subtly give away clues whilst thinking of things to say on the spot to that person. Improvisation alphabet which further developed our improv skills as we had to try and make conversation out of the letters of the alphabet.

Friday 23rd September

Blog Lesson:

• Worked more on our blogs 

Moved onto an Acting lesson where we:

Spent the majority of the time playing games with our group where the 1st part we had to look at our partner's face and body then close our eyes and try to describe as much about them as we can, then moved onto a different game where we had to challenge our partners speaking by talking at the same time as then and had to force the other person to stop by talking over them, then for the final part of the lesson we played a game called mafia which helped our improvisation skills. 

UAL Level 2 Week 1 

Monday 12th September

Blog Lesson:

• Set up our timetables 
• Looked at ProPortal

We then moved onto an Acting lesson in which we:

• Did voice warm ups including things such as things like repetition of the letters C, G, L, N, D ,T, M ,P, B, then BAH, doing this activity helps with speech confidence and pronunciation.
• Focused mainly on name games and group concentration activities such as Zap
• With a partner did a hand-leading exercise in which Partner A led partner B by the hand for a few minutes and then vice versa.

Tuesday 13th September

Beginning with a Functional Maths lesson where we focused on:

• Recapping and revisiting what we learnt previously at GCSE level with things such as Addition, Subtraction and Division techniques, for example the Japanese Lacross method and the Boxing Out method.
• We were then given various different practice questions in order to consolidate and practice the methods we just recapped.

We moved onto an Acting lesson where we:

• Voice warm ups,
• Movement acting  
• Improvisation work in which  my partner and I were given a sheet with a few lines of dialogue which ended with the lines "Sorry, it's just...", we then had to make a small improvisation piece, we did this to get used to performing in front an audience and acting with the people in our group.

Moved onto a Movement lesson with Mandy in which we:

• Wrote on a sheet of paper how to be safe in the dance studio including things such as appropriate clothing and no distinctive items such as phones
• Started doing stretches to improve flexibility and movement and also did various abdominal exercises in order to improve core strength.
• Tried to replicate clapping rhythms 
• Worked in groups trying to make a movement sequence to the beat of one group clapping and the other moving to it.

Went to a Production lesson which consisted of:

• Learning different Production qualities and techniques and how they are worked and how they operate.
• Watching different performance acts such as Cirque de Soleil and Blue-man Group and had to write down the different forms of production that would be required to make it happen, such as lighting, choreography and sound.

Wednesday (No Lessons)

Thursday 15th September

Starting off with an Acting lesson we:

• Did voice warm ups (as before) such as things like repetition of the letters C, G, L, N, D ,T, M ,P, B, then BAH, doing this activity helps with speech confidence and pronunciation.
• Group acting
• A group improvisation piece in which we were given a piece of music and had to make a scene based around that music, my group and I decided to take the music as being in a sort of dream state and then created the perfect hotel world. This helped to improve our movement skills as we created a near silent scene so we expressed emotion mainly through movement and facial features, this helps because it allows us to adapt to not only having to use our voices, we can also make creative pieces from movement.

Moved on to a Functional Maths Lesson where we:

• Learnt about Highest Common Factors, Lowest Common Multiples and Prime Numbers
• Learnt the definitions of HCF, LCM and Prime Numbers
• Worked out how to make various different numbers products of their factors

Friday 16th September

Blog Lesson:

• Started the creation of our Blogs, first posts and edits where we spoke about work and what we did in the previous lessons.

Had an Acting lesson where we: 

• Did voice warm ups (as before) such as things like repetition of the letters C, G, L, N, D ,T, M ,P, B, then BAH, doing this activity helps with speech confidence and pronunciation.
• We then moved on to an improvisation piece of acting where we had to make a scene based on the 3 lines we chose from the screen, my group and I chose the lines, "If I've told them once, I've told them a thousand times", "He sat there" and "I didn't think you would be here". After choosing our lines we thought it would be best to make the adaptation a scene about seating places on a bus and took references from the black and white seating rule from the white racism of early Pentecostalism in the USA.
• Started to begin our work on 'Identity' which gets us used to working in front of audiences and better helps our ability on improvisation work, 'Identity' is our first theatrical production of our level 2 course. We started off the lesson by brainstorming what 'Identity' meant to each of us or what it could mean to another person, so for example my group and I described how 'Identity' could be identified, so we wrote down words like Religion, Background, Wealth, Fashion, Family and Friends as these were the words we thought Identity was associated with.