Atmosphere And Its Creation

Recently we have been doing a play whilst trying to create an atmosphere.

The idea behind this unit was to create an atmosphere that was seasonal at

this time of year, which is winter. Normally when watching a film, which has

a wintry atmosphere it, would be something like a Dracula, Ghost stories,

Murder Mysteries etc, so one of these ideas would be ideal for a play, as

ancestors & scriptwriters have described to us in films and stories for

hundreds of years.

Before we got into groups and started the improvisation we did a few warm

ups to help. Some of these warm ups helped us to express our emotions more

fluently, there was one activity in particular that was particularly odd. In

pairs we had to do an improvisation based on a game of chess, however this

was no ordinary game of chess, this game of chess was arranged with "Death"

the grim reaper himself and an innocent human playing for his/her life in

which the grim reaper would then posses. During this improvisation we had

show many different emotions contrasting with this event such as fear,

stress and nervousness. I used a few small expressions like biting my nails

and hesitating whilst taking my turn, which showed the audience that I was

careful/cautious. However I wasn't performance wasn't extremely effective in

persuading the audience that I was.

When we had finished all our warm ups we were assigned into groups of five

or six in my case it was six. My group consisted of Sami, Christopher,

Sinal, Shane, Claire and myself. I was happy with my group as it contained

many people that I knew were capable to make our assignment successful, I

also knew most of them, which made everyone more relaxed, therefore it was

easier to co-operate with each other.

The idea that was first thought up by Christopher was the very one that we

took further to develop as it was a extraordinary and well thought out. We

also new that we could make this idea well developed, as we were sure that

we could make a brilliant improvisation from this unit of work.

The basic idea of the plot was a simple murder. The idea had three main

characters which were D.C.I Summers, D.C.I Winters and The Prince, there

were also three other character which were the queen, the outcaste

stepsister and Miss MoneyPenny. The people that played these characters were

Shane whom was D.C.I Winters, Christopher whom was D.C.I Summers, Sami whom

was the Prince, Claire acted the part of the deformed stepsister, Sinal

played the part of Miss Moneypenny (the secretary) and I played the part of

the queen. The idea of the story was based around the murder of the queen

and two detectives were assigned to this case. We made the story difficult

to define the murder in the story in order to keep the audience in suspense

and also to keep them interested in the story. In the end, with the sharp

thinking of the rather dim-witted D.C.I Winters, the murder was then

concluded to be D.C.I Summers.

When we started to practice our improvisation we realized that our biggest

dilemma was our spacing. As we had a lot of activity in our play we realized

that it would become difficult in keeping our faces to the front, instead of

turning our backs to the audience we figured that we could overcome this

problem if we were careful in making sure that our bodies wouldn't fully be

turned around. instead we would be turned at a certain angle to attain our

professionalism.

The exercise with the famous nursery had helped me a lot, it helped me to

enhance my voice. I learnt how to extend my voice fuller. I feel as it had

helped