Lewis & Clark Moodle

Hey guys! 

Just an update: We have been working very hard on our scene this week. We've got our lines down to a science. Now its just us getting our cut offs and beats correct. That's what we've been doing all weekend. We ran through our scene a least 30 times so we can be well prepared to show you guys (the class) our hard work. 

We show our draft tomorrow and we hope to get good feedback from you!

Here's a little teaser trailer of our scene

Sorry for the delay guys. This blog is about Wyatt's and my rehearsal process for the second week of scene work. 

So Wyatt and I have met up a few times out of class to run the scene, over and over. We have run it so many times I feel like I am saying the lines in my sleep. I really feel like the only way I learn lines is repeating the scene indefinitely. I also noticed that when I feel like were having some sort of breakthrough with the scene I forget my lines or change them without noticing because something new is happening inside of me. 

When we get bored and feel like we are repeating the same thing we talk about how if feels and of there is something we can do to mix it up. One time Wyatt suggested just doing a really melodramatic run of the scene. Surprisingly that run actually felt the most "real," I think this is because we were just doing something different so our reactions were a surprise of the moment and we weren't afraid of being bad because we felt comfortable enough to be bad. We would also try the scene with different mop positions, sitting down at various times, and really just experimenting with anything we could think of. I think our scene has come a long way but I still sometimes feel like our performance is stale and actors actin and sometimes I actually feel myself cry a little but at the end because I find little ways that Rose relates to my own life, and just life in general. I wish I knew the difference in what causes each feeling and how to hone the really real feeling. It can't simply be luck, but right now thats how it feels. Randomly we will have a run-through that feels moving and randomly I will just feel like it sucks. I guess thats just part of acting 

Anyways, thats what our week 2 was like, thanks guys! 

After another week of rehearsals I feel like good progress is being made on our scene. This past week has been used mostly to incorporate all of the helpful advice and criticism we got after we performed on Wednesday. Having done our best to look through everything we heard I think the scene is already much stronger, but more rehearsals are definitely needed.

Hello, everyone! 

Falcon and I come with many updates on our progress. This has been an exciting and productive week for us. We began by preparing the first few minutes of our scene. This meant running lines, blocking, and, of course, practicing. During our brief showcase this past Monday, I realized that a lot more work needs to be done to really flesh out all the moving parts of this scene. As Falcon mentioned last week, Peter, my character, only appears in this one scene. There is not a ton to go off of, therefore I have been busy testing out different "versions" of this character to experiment with what I have been given in the text. What if I play him like he wants to fight with Sara from the very start of the scene? What if I try acting like he is a bit more conflicted? Does he empathize with Sara at all? If so, how much? I am curious to see which one works the best! Falcon and I originally wanted Peter to be super standoffish right from the get go, but upon further experimentation, that seemed to be a little much. I've dialed it back a bit since then, and I think Peter is more believable now, and more complex.

So far, this week, we have been working on the latter part of the scene—lines specifically. I was surprised to see how quickly we had them memorized just by talking through them with each other. We ran them while walking around an empty classroom, which was surprisingly helpful. It allowed us to stay focused on them... but not too focused. The lines quickly became second nature—which was exactly the point!

Our scene is definitely shorter than some of the others, which means there are less lines (which is kind of disappointing for me since I enjoy talking a lot) but it also means that we will have a chance to really dive into each moment and sculpt it into the best version of itself. I'm really looking forward to getting into the weeds of this project over the coming weeks!

-Connor

Amber and I have been working on blocking and memorizing lines so far. When we met outside of class and rehearsed, we tried to make the set similar to what we noramaly use in the black box and ended up placing the furnitures like this (the picture below).

We first read through the lines roughly and decided how we do physical movements for each beat, but when we actually move and speak the lines at the same time, there were some parts felt wired to do, which made us realized that doing actual action rather than thinking in a head leads us to make better decision about physical movements.

Any way, we still need to work on memorizing lines, and once we get done with that, we need to just rehearse a lot!!!!

Victor here. Once again we haven't had many chances to meet to rehearse in person so our effort has been focused on individually reviewing lines. This video is after our first major out of class rehearsal.

This week consisted of ‘just doing’ the work to memorizing my lines.  I had a hard time starting the process of finding the right way to memorize my lines.  It took me a while until I realized I just had to do the work to get the results I wanted.  Though it was tough for me to get started, I found that the easiest way for me to memorize my lines is saying them out loud again and again.  Repetition is the only way I will be successful in my last performance.

This week Abdo and I plan to meet with one another multiple times to make sure we are on the same page with what we are doing when we are not together.  As for lines, I am confident that we will know what the stakes are so that we are able to stay grounded within ourselves and with one another. It is very exciting seeing how our scene is coming together slowly!

“When the going gets tough, put one foot in front of the other and just keep going. Don’t give up.”

It has been fun but challenging so far, just been trying to be as authentic as we can.

What We Wanted To Do:

This week we mainly focused on just getting memorized. I know, booooorinnnnnggg, but you know what? Not everybody is presenting on Monday. 

What We (Like Actually) Did:

We met several times both in and out of the Blackbox theatre to rehearse our lines. At first, we thought about doing them without blocking, but it soon became evident that we would need to practice with it just for cohesion as well as a way to help us remember our lines by tying them to specific movements. We actually could only get into the blackbox once, and that time we had to cut down our practice time because the class that was in there went a little late. For the next time, we practiced in an unused Howard classroom, which is when we decided to use the classroom chairs to actually plan out/perfect our blocking. We also tried to rehearse once using outrageous accents in order to try to help remember our lines even with extraneous circumstances!

What We Learned:

The activity we did looking at what happens directly before the scene starts helped us quite a bit here. The awkwardness of the scene really comes from a large amount of places, with the majority coming from Sam and Rose's history, but also from their change in management and recent talks with both the new management as well as Avery. This kind of paints how exactly we act in the scene, as well as how and why we have that 'pinch ouch' reaction to some lines. I think the self imposed accent exercise also helped a bit. Probably. Maybe. Hope so!

Problems We Encountered:

The only real problem we ran into was the same one we ran into in prior rehearsals, the same thing pretty much everyone doing the Flick will be able to relate to, which are the pauses. A couple of them just feel out of place, or unnatural. To remedy this, we cut out pauses any time there wasn't explicitly a pause in the script, and shortened some pauses that the script specifies as longer. Next time we'll also likely use video to record some stuff, and I won't have to write out long boring paragraphs!