Unit 3AB 

Ribena Advert https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTOP6TOJwOI

The target audience for Ribena I believe is around the age of 6-21, beacause this is a soft drink it would be more suited to people at a younger age, so what they have done with the advert is made it reflect their target audience, they have made it fun, funky and a bit annoying, annoying is also catchy so they have done a good job on making that the way it is. In the advert they use a slogan "You can't get anymore Ribenary" this slogan doesn't reflect the advert and has a bad finale for the advert, after such an intriguing advert, it is brought down by a bad slogan. In the advert they have bundle up a lot of random things, unrelated to a fruit drink I struggled to find a connection, the meaning I found behind this is a couple are out on a picnic and they open up a drink, that drink happens to be Ribena, this provokes a reaction from the animals making them go crazy for this drink (Ribena), doing so I find myself playing back images of a rabbit in sunglasses and a hedgehog flying, which adds a sense of fun and for a kids drink its something you associate with a child (fun), adding this buzz really gets people going and they sing the adverts song when in a happy mood, doing this it would get people asking where that song is from and then it spreads until many people know about it and its just because you have managed to drill a sing into peoples mind.

The more technical side of this advert is really impressive, they lower the music at the end so you can hear the slogan. The music/sound effects, is very well put together and each thing in the advert has a synced queue for, adding a very drawn in effect, because if you want to make an annoying catchy advert, you would need it to be in some way. I really do like the and colour scheme in this advert, the text is very funky and fitting to the advert and the colours are very retro and bold and also in the text the shading of purple really does fit in with the product. Ribena have been very original in the shot they have used, a landscape shot going across peacefully wouldn't be seen as a landscape shot with lots of crazy animals doing unimaginable things.

BBC Three 60 Second News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2MMQKKqMhY

This news program is held at different times through out the day so I believe they are trying to appeal to an audience that would be of all ages, I certainly don't think children enjoy watching the news so they have done a good job of making it more mature for older viewers to watch it. The news is covering lots of topics (Sports, Education, Law, etc...) this keeps the viewing rate up, so people find it more enjoyable to watch. This includes just one reporter covering something as quickly as possible, to fit the broadcasting time and wanting to get the latest news can drag on so I believe having the viewing time so short that you can quickly find out is going on, is better than having a long detailed news report that not many people will want to listen to, because they have made it so short and snappy. The way how the report is set out is very good, because they include the title of the report and then a very quick summary so they can move on to the next thing nice and swiftly. The program has covered news that would concern the world but is aimed just at UK and Ireland, so they include Scottish teams, English actors not anyone abroad (such as Spain or America). The report is talking straight at the camera creating a one sided conversation between just you and her/him. They change from an image of the reporter to an image of the news report and the reporter keeps on talking as the moving image plays on, this is good because you don't have to use imagery and for even the simplest things, you can clearly imagine them, with a simple clip about Celtic vs Rangers. There is not extreme events that take place in this news report but when they are discussing a topic the report will include why they want to do this (when they were discussing that all children should learn their times table by the age of 11) you don't just straight away think that's cruel, because they supply it with a reason, but with other things like a football match, the end result is going to be something you can disagree with because theirs nothing you can disagree with.

Matrix Scene (Dodge this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggFKLxAQBbc

In this it is very controversial because the man in the suit aiming the gun at Neo  is said to be invisible so the girl (Trinity) being able to catch him this off guard is very unheard of, making that thrill factor rise up very quickly. The movie is rated at a 12a but I believe when it first came out it was rated as a 15 because of all the gun violence and language used, as technology advances movies do get down graded because they aren't as scary as movies similar to them that are more recent, the target audience for this entire movie would probably be middle aged males that enjoy violence and lots of gun action. Some common sense in this scene is a bit shaky, when Neo is stood there dodging the bullets, why isn't he shot in the legs then? so typical things like that are done not to change the story line to significantly. The characters used in this movie are typical characters you would expect to play these roles in any action movie, Keanu Reeves is the main guy, can look like a geeky coder but also a guy that gets in to trouble and fights bad guys, then the girl in the movie is super skilled and thinks she's better than the guy and everyone else, but under everything the guy is the dark horse. The meaning to this movie is questioning humanity and what if we are just living in a massive dream that no one can figure out, because our world has been taken over so we are trying to hide from the truth, for example, in our entire life what if we are lead to believe that the colour red, isn't actually red, it is green.
The Matrix (when filmed) was filmed in the Modern era and every thing was normal, but then in the so called reality, it was set in a different world, but you can't really specify the date, everything looks futuristic, so it may be set further in to future. In this scene you can see how the relationship is very bad with the Agents compared to Neo because they are all trying to take him out, Neo's friend (Trinity) has a very awkward relationship with Neo, they have lots of chemistry, but they aen't anything further than friends, but behinds that it does look like they cover each others backs and have a strong friendship with each other.

GCSE Drama Devised Performance

Rationale

The image of melting clocks, is a very thoughtful piece of how precious time is, as we humans live our days on and on, our time is beginning to melt away and become nothing but a small spec that once lived. It is a very deep thing to look into and has a very large aspect of surrealism based in the photo, these circumstances could be related to something in the real world very easily, in our performance, the play is hurried along because the thought of losing the professor is heart breaking, but the professors brother just wants it over and done with, leading to a worse scenario. The dramatic irony is represented very well, seeing as the professor can't handle the experiment and kills himself and the test on the subjects (students) also isn't very successful. The Professor can't handle time and therefore his time is melted away (rather forcefully) 

In our play we have incorporated time, surrealism and memory, this all ended up coming under the genre of surrealism. To start off with we believed that time would have been a good form of surrealism to use, we set out hinting certain oints of the play and different outcomes of the play to relate to time, although we could have based our play more around time, the time aspect was still quite strong in our performance, maybe just a little to much left in the background. after the first 2 weeks we slowly found ourselves basing ideas off of phobias, phobias is such a strong topic that our idea of time wasn't as strong as we hoped anymore and we focused more on memory. In our play the back story isn’t very strong, we have decided a professor is recalling his best students. He is on the edge of dyeing and he needs his students help; for something unmentioned, whilst the students are at the professors house they start having nightmares based on traumatic experiences they had when they were younger and they then could relate the nightmares/phobias to the professor because he was the one that was the expert in this area. Our performance pace stops and starts a lot, by doing this we include lots of jump scares to distract the audience and add that element of fear and paranoia, doing this it makes it crueler for the viewers. The props we will be including are going to be very abstract and simple, we have taken this idea from The Curios Incident of the Dog in the Night Time play we went to see, and I think that this added lots of surrealism to the play, so by doing this  it creates a better theme allowing us to make our play more surreal, also our lighting was adjusted to fit our themes. another idea we took from The Curios Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was when they were showing large parts of the play time lapsed, By adding strobe lighting it made the audience think that they were watching hours/days/weeks go by with the quick flicker of a light. 

Following the genre of surrealism we are adding dream scenes, based upon phobias , we are not only trying to scare our audience, but make things happen that they won’t expect to happen in the scene, we are also having a very simple approach to our set, making it simple but also quite scary and surreal in all of our dream scenes.
We have chosen to have Artuad as our practitioner because his use of surrealism is very different to over plays and allows our performance to have a certain edge to it that others don’t, I particularly liked his use of the audience, allowing them to feel included but also scared at the same time.
The scene I ran was the Clown Dream Scene, I came up with the idea of people overcoming their phobias, but the phobias were scary. Clowns are very scary and are easy to play with, I was able to turn a simple birthday party into a scary deserted house with clowns invading it. 

Development

We began developing are characters by coming with names to fit their personalities, doing this you can really get in to the other characters shoes, making it easier to act as them.

In our surreal play we have decided the characters are going to be normal everyday people that wouldn’t expect to have something like this happening to them. By doing this is makes it very surprising to see such ordinary people suffer such strange circumstances. 

My character (Clide) is the rebellious type that is always unsure about what the professors says and it seems like he is in a different world compared to the other students ,that seem to be in awe of what present the professor would like to give them. My characters dream is based on clowns, making a dream about clowns can sound quite straight forward but it is very technical and physical, as the clowns are moving figures that are trying to scare Clide and then in the dream it is meant to test if Clide could stay alive, sadly to the professors despair Clide is killed by the clowns, doing this is quite hard as to make a dying scene it needs to be flowing and realistic. Clide was originally a normal guy, but to show outstanding difference between all of the students, we decided to change him into a know it all boffin, I spoke with a slightly posh voice and my script was adjusted to fit my characteristics. The clowns movement was a big thing to be adjusted and the idea of making them move around like puppets, so that people could understand the fear and abnormality of CLide's phobia.  

All characters are being exposed of their phobias/fear, we have decided to have a drowning phobia and an abusive father as one of the phobias, the background for the abusive parent is obvious, but for the drowning phobia/fear hasn’t got a background and it doesn’t really need one either, because it’s clear the actors scared of drowning. Whereas for me I have decided to add a bit of background to my scene, it is set at my 7^th birthday so the audience will have a clear understanding that when I was younger I had a traumatic experience with clowns.

In my Clown Dream Scene it includes physical violence which is hard to act out to I have to have dramatic jerks making it as obvious as possible that I have been pushed, even though the audience knows I have not impacted in any pain, so by doing this it is making it more believable for our viewers.

For multiple scenes we have to put on scary and creepy voices, which is which are hard to force out and scare the audience at the same time, so adding that surrealism is actually harder than it looks compared to movies and plays that you watch. The way we have decided to overcome this is by going up to the audience members and trying to make them feel included, but in a way that scares them. To keep our scenes flowing we decided it would be a good idea to remove the creepy voice in Charlie’s Drowning Scene (we aren’t removing all creepy voices that include the audience), having these in the background left gaps and they weren’t effective enough for us to say that it made a change to the scene. We decided to change our body movement in the scene so it could look a lot more surreal and it wasn’t awkwardly and constantly interrupting the scene, giving the audience more to look at.

In most of our scenes we are scared or curious, which includes many pauses so we have to make sure that it doesn’t sound like we have forgotten our lines, if we nails this and have it on point then our performance should run very smoothly.

When we watched the curios incident of the dog in the night time and we decided to take the idea of a time lapse and added that into our performance, we began by just walking around and doing everyday activities very quickly, this didn’t look effective enough, so we decided to add flashing lights, this worked well with our performance because it made it look like a series of photos put together and it was being observed by the audience, it also looked very surreal, due to the fact we were in an enclosed room.

In rehearsals we did lots of peer observing, so we would watch a scene we aren’t in and say our thoughts as an audience viewer, this helped to make it look more flowing and clear for the audience.

For the beginning scene we decided to add a green light, this idea was good because it allowed the audience to feel fearful in such strong lighting, on top of that our neutral expressions really did make the scene more twisted with a robot like stance. When we added the strobe lighting to all our speeded up scenes, it moved the audience from thinking, why are you moving so quickly? To this is clearly a time lapse. Not having to put that question mark at the end of our audiences mind.

In our research we worked of an original story line and then rehearsed that. We decided to adapt some of our practitioners (Artuad) techniques into our performance, when we included Artuad’s techniques it helped boost the surrealism in our performance.

As a group we developed our piece gradually every week, ready for the performance, we had all the correct resources needed for our performance, we just all needed to develop our characters. This was a big challenge because we had worked on our characters already, we just needed to make them look stronger and actually stand out. We didn’t want our characters to drift off and become less realistic. To start off with I approached my character very casually and he was just a normal guy, but when we were pin pointing the differences between each character it was clear mine didn’t have a lot going for him, so I added a mild boffin voices to him and that seemed to make a massive difference. An effective rehearsal technique I decided to share with our group was still imagery, we could display to the audience what was happening in the scene and how a character out wits another and also use it to spot light a person when a large conversation is taking place.

I created my main scene of the play, making the clown phobia scene meant I had to create lots drafts to fit around everyone’s characters. This was something I then developed into the final scene, in the clown scene, I decided to direct it so that we were using Artuads techniques, my approach to directing this scene was particularly helpful, because it aloud my scene to stand out and be very memorable for the audience, in a very un-comforting way. For example I decided the clowns must move in a puppet like stance; by me developing the characters in this way it allowed us to show a large difference between the characters portrayed in other scenes.

Performance

My performance role was the character Clide, I think I managed to portray Clide’s character very well, I tried to adapt my script to my character as much as I could. A couple of weeks before the performance I thought I could adapted my character more, so I worked on my voice, I came up with a slight posh accent to add to my character, by doing this I effectively sounded like a boffin/know it all. This was very positive for our performance because it managed to show a big divide between all other students. We wanted to show a divide between each character so it didn’t seem like we were boring students that just came out an office.

In our performance I think if we had prepared our lighting more, it would have affected our performance. If we had decent understanding on our lighting script, making it look, more sharp and professional; I think if we did manage to do this our scenes would look smoother and it would have affected our performance a lot more for the audience. We could have also simplified our stage, because in between transition it did take longer than expected to set up for the next scene and having excess props wasn’t good. Even though having to change the props on stage suddenly wasn’t our strong point, I believe our capability of running a flowing scene was very strong and it added more realism to it (on top of the surrealism) for example, at the start of the performance, we were simply knocking on the door, but I decided we should apply it more than just knocking at a door, we decided Charlie would knock first, Ben would trail behind and say “hold the door” then we would leave a small gap (not a massive gap) for me to arrive. We decided just to add small touches like that would be good to keep the realism and keep our audience amused.

My individual performance was as strong as I could show, but my interaction with the group could have been a little bit stronger, I wanted my character to look a little bit awkward around the group and I believe I managed to show a difference between my character and the others; I did this by having awkward interactions with others, But I don’t feel all my interaction where smooth enough. As a group we could have worked on our interaction skills with one another a lot more, as I feel that was one of our weak point in our performance. The transitions between each scene was very smooth in our acting but we could have made it smoother. The group worked well, helping to develop other characters and scenes so we could keep our theme of surrealism going.

Our theme was surrealism and we showed this in the memory genre. The professor had a cure for traumatic memories in our childhood that had led to having a fear of our chosen memory which we described as a phobia. These phobias are mainly exploited in our dreams, in these dreams we usually end up dyeing, but what the professor wanted to show was us managing to live. Incorporating dreams and phobias helped our performance relate to our chosen practitioner (Artuad). We also added Artuad’s famous technique of including the audience in his scenes, we didn’t represent this in every scene, but we were able to use it when necessary.   

We set our stage out as basically as we could to allow the surreal factor to remain there, we separated our stage with a shadow screen, so we could show the professor and the students/subjects segregated from each other. We could have made our stage simpler by not including as many boxes and excess props.