Single - Brainstorm Analysis

This is one of our first brainstorms for the piece called “chasing pavements” , when we looked at what the title of the devising piece was, we looked at the lyrics to the Adele song. The lyrics say “Should I keep on chasin’ pavements, even if it leads nowhere?” .The word chasing seems to be a key term in our ideas as it’s based on people chasing hope that they can make a change to this futuristic based piece.

So in this photo the group decided that we would focus on more of our story line than what to base the piece on.

(1)    As you can see we had rules out characters in which we wanted to play and we tried to make it so that everyone wanted to play the part that they wanted to. This way we all would get to do something that we would put as a target and attempt to achieve. So at this stage, I wanted to play a soppy character as I tend to always play an angry character who shouts a lot.

(2)    This is when we started to talk about our previous ideas and tried to come up with some sort of plot for the piece. Eventually we had got a rough idea on what we wanted to perform however we just needed to attempt them and see if they worked and if we felt like they could have been used well enough when performing. 

 Once we had got to the next stage of developing our brainstorms. We had our introduction sorted and our 'training' scene also sorted by this point which left the rest of the story. We originally was going to have a physical theatre piece however due to some people being dancers in my group, we developed it so it became a movement piece. Also originally my character was going to start getting depressed and anxious as the girl he loves is cheating on him, he isn't 100% sure, however he has suspicions which lead to the whole depression thing, Personally I wanted it to stay like that as it would have made the audience feel more sympathetic for the character and therefore people would have felt bad when he gets killed off.

This is our final "plan" and as you can tell we have added a lot to our piece over the few weeks, Instead of opening the piece with the whole Graffiti on the wall thing. We had recorded some footage so that it started off with a news report which helps set the scene of "Chasing Pavements". It then goes into the original opening, we added a lot of stage combat into our piece as well, I think that it was good to use as the whole setting of the production is based in a post apocalyptic setting and you would try and defend yourself as much as possible. However I think in some cases it too much. We have added the "mission planning" scene to the plan as it allows the audience to get an understanding of how some characters think and feel (Craig). Instead of having Spencer and Jeremy talking all night and then having Sam and Ruby talking all night, we decided that we could use monologues as it gives us a chance for our audience to learn about their pasts. Personally I think that was a good idea as I find monologues rather easier to perform as it helps me think and feel like my character. Instead of having a 'cheeky' little affair going on, we worked out that it could potentially be better if we have two different relationships. However doing this meant that the audience wouldn't see that anxious side to my character. We added in a split screen and another report to show how the 'rebels' feel about their previous tasks and also to see how Jeremy starts to change from a fairly loved up character (When around Sam) to someone who will threaten to beat up a fellow member of the group right in front of her. So instead of having a whole piece on depression etc and making the audience feel sad, they are meant to feel sad due to the fact that he gets kicked out of the base. Personally I still think that the depression idea would have worked better.