Sydney Baker
The Bamboo Tree
Our company aimed to devise a performance to show in the Cockpit Theatre in London. The process of creating this piece was definitely challenging at first as although we knew we wanted to create a performance, we had no requirements for it and thus it really tested our company's creative independence. Additionally, having lots of workshops when we started our symposium sessions left our discussions on the piece sporadic and slow-moving. As we had little time to just sit down and properly begin discussing our performance, we had a very slow start and did not make the most of our initial discussions. I think that in the early stages of devising we somewhat procrastinated having the important establishing discussions as we did not have any set goals for our piece or an idea of what we wanted our performance to be about. I found it especially hard to pick our initial themes and ideas, which I think is because this was the first time I was devising in a group without a stimulus to inspire me. Working from scratch in a group highlighted to me how difficult it can be to create something out of nothing and taught me how key it is to outline the tone, goals, themes and structure in the initial stages of devising because even if those things change as the performance develops, having a strong foundation to work on will help you to keep ideas flowing. If we were to do this again, I would definitely suggest having an initial ideas session where everyone just throws out things they might want to incorporate into the performance to help us get the ball rolling and to get everyone on the same pace earlier on in the process so we could make the most of the little time we had.
To get the ball rolling and find our main theme, we each tossed out suggestions of things to centre our piece around and we quickly came around to the idea of grief. We then thought about different ways grief could be caused and represented so we could narrow down this theme which would give us a specific direction to gear our piece to. I made a mindmap about different things we could centre our piece around that relate back to the theme of grief.
Once we had all these ideas, we looked through them to see which ones most appealed to our company.
One idea we floated around but did not end up going with was the idea of children dealing with a loss. We thought it may be interesting to comment on the realities of what it is like for people exposed to loss at such a young age and how they are often sheltered from it instead of being given the space to be able to process it and as a result this grief builds up in a way that they are unable to express and/or process it until much later on in their lives. I think this definitely would have been a thought-provoking road to go down however, we went in a different direction. Although the concept of children dealing with loss did not develop in our final piece the element of not being given space to process grief did influence our performance greatly, we wanted to create a show in which the characters are “forced” to process their grief so we wanted our performance to centre around an ensemble in close proximity being faced with their grief and learning how to process it.
Another thing we considered when deciding our focus for our performance was whether or not we wanted a comedic tone. A play that presents grief in a way that I really enjoy is Vera Vera Vera, which is a blackly comic play in which many characters grieve the same person very differently. I think what I enjoyed about this play was its realistic viewpoint of grief and how his family and siblings fight over who Bobby was as a person, I love how it illustrates the different ways in which people deal with the death of a loved one and thus I wanted to incorporate this into our performance too as I think it made the characters in Vera Vera Vera much more realistic and relatable.
British humour is generally very satirical and oftentimes incorporates sarcasm, insults, taboo subjects and wit in order to make fun of the realities of everyday life. The reason why so many British people use dark humour is that it allows us to deal with difficult subjects in a lighthearted manner and thus I wanted to use dark humour in our piece to mimic how we Brits use dark humour to talk about uncomfortable things and bond with each other by taking the pressure off of an otherwise serious conversation.
Settling on a concept
We liked the idea of the play being about a group of people spreading the ashes of a loved one and came up with the idea of the piece following the group on a road trip to Scotland to spread their friend’s ashes. I loved the idea of not all of them knowing each other very well so the characters could bond (potentially through dark humour) during the long journey to Scotland. Setting the piece in a small car and having the majority of our interaction occur within the confines of this car, was a very fun way to get our characters to confront their grief and challenge our ability to use dialogue effectively, it helped us to challenge ourselves to develop interesting characters, display subtext and create tension without much additional support from an elaborate plotline.
This focus on dialogue also allowed us to incorporate lots of humour into the piece which was so much fun to play around with. We all had a conversation where we brainstormed a lot of moments we could incorporate into this piece to give it a comedic tone. One of which was a moment where everyone waits for the driver to finish eating something at a rest stop after an intense moment, this inspired Gwen’s character, Gary, who is an eccentric bloke in denial about his friend’s death.
We also wanted to incorporate some humour into the way the ashes were spread such as the ashes blowing in their faces, them not being able to find the specific tree they wished to be scattered under so they had to spread them elsewhere, or it raining upon arrival so they have to tip the ashes out of the car window next to a Chinese restaurant.
We also thought of a few other stereotypical road trip moments that we could improvise and incorporate into the play, such as characters fighting over the radio/aux cord, putting the radio on to liven the mood but the first song that comes on is a really sad one, people sleeping on each other's shoulders or the driver getting mad at everyone for asking “are we there yet” or turning on the light in the car because “it's illegal”.
We also thought that with this piece we could have moments of improv in our final performance to keep things fresh every time and find other little moments of humour in our piece. One way in which we did this was when the characters were driving through Liverpool and trying out scouse accents, having a moment where we could play with accents as our characters was very fun and was helpful in giving our audience a glimpse of how the group would bond by the end of the performance.
Outlining
Now that we had our concept, we began outlining the structure of our performance, and we decided that to show the whole journey we should break it up into chunks to represent different stages of their journey. We ended up breaking it up into three different locations, London, Liverpool and Scotland each of which we spent roughly five minutes representing different points in the journey. In the first chunk, we wanted to establish the general tone and plot of the piece, one by one introducing the characters and the reason for their journey, this was pretty quick as we were able to have the characters introduce themselves to each other because not all of them had met properly before. Then in the second chunk, we would show the characters beginning to bond over their grief at a rest stop, such as having three of the girls talk about missing their friend and then playing a game like truth or dare to diffuse the tension. We especially wanted to do this with those who were very unlike each other such as Gary and Charlie (the younger sister who is very “type A”) who argue whilst paying for petrol. And in the last chunk, they face their grief together and scatter their friend’s ashes. We also spoke about how we could show changes of location through music, at the beginning of the piece we played a song by a band formed in London, when the group were driving through Liverpool we played a song by the Beetles and at the end when they're in Scotland, we played a song by a Scottish band.
I liked the idea of the group going all the way to Scotland to find a special tree only to arrive at a Chinese restaurant so when we were thinking of ideas for what to call our piece I was thinking of naming it after a punny Chinese takeaway like “Wok and talk”. We had floated around with the idea of it including the word tree as we wanted to continue with the idea that the aim of the road trip was finding this specific tree that he wanted his ashes spread by and the name “The Bamboo Tree” came to mind.
This name got me thinking, what if the guy who died knew that he was telling them to go to a Chinese takeaway called “The Bamboo Tree” and so instead of telling his friends the truth, he told them that some guy in Glasgow managed to grow a field of bamboo trees and he had decided he wanted his ashes spread there, so he gave them the address knowing that they were going to have to travel all the way to find a takeaway just so he could have one last laugh. I was excited to try out this premise as I felt as though it matched the comedic nature of our performance and the dead character’s personality. The idea that this whole thing was a prank on his friends so that they would at least be able to laugh again after he died, felt very right for his character.
When we were thinking of other ways we could show this character's comedic personality through the way his ashes were spread, we thought about how some people like their ashes to be in funny containers such as empty coffee tubs. This gave me the idea of having his ashes in a hot chocolate pot, as it felt like something he would do for a laugh. This led to a few other ideas about his ashes, originally we thought we could have two hot chocolate pots that get mixed up and someone has to taste them to check which is which, we thought this really aligned with British humour where pretty much nothing is off limits. Although this exact scenario didn’t feel right in practice, a similar scenario made it into the piece where two characters question if their friend is actually dead and think about the “what if” scenario of him just performing an elaborate prank on them, so one of them tastes the ashes to check if it’s really him. I absolutely love how this scene played out because it comes right after a sweet moment of bonding between the characters and gives the audience a chance to see the characters' humour bringing them together. It also later led to a joke in the letter at the end about the guy wanting it to specifically be a Cadbury hot chocolate pot which also got a laugh from the audience. I also thought it would be funny to label the hot chocolate pot with his name so that we could hide it until someone asked why they brought a hot chocolate pot with them, this was very successful in rehearsal, Harriet’s character was holding the pot to herself when Gwen asks about it and Harriet just slowly turned it around to reveal the name whilst maintaining a blank expression. I loved this moment so much, the audience laughed, we laughed and it felt like it was something all the characters would associate as something their friend would’ve loved too.
Next, we began outlining our characters so we could each create a character profile and have a better idea of how the characters would interact with each other and the events of the story. We started by working out what relation to the person who died, as we wanted them to all have varying levels of closeness we decided on having a few friends, his girlfriend and someone related to him in the car so that they all have varying levels of familiarity with each other. We also wanted to incorporate the five different stages of grief into each of the characters so we assigned each of them a stage which we then separately researched to help us develop our characters individually. Initially, my character was going to represent the anger stage of grief so I did some research into what this stage of grief looks like and began forming my character.
During the anger stage of grief, people tend to question the reasoning behind why their loss may have happened and they may outwardly express their anger surrounding this. This stage is especially present and hard for people when the loss has been unexpected and so I thought that I could definitely use this for my character as the loss of her friend would’ve been a shock to her, as he was so young. Anger manifests as a control-seeking behaviour, it is used so that the grieving person can regain a sense of control over their environment, often by asserting aggression so they don't lose the feeling of control.
Anger is expressed in many different ways and directed at many different people such as: At yourself, for what you did or did not do during the life and death of the loved one, at the medical staff for failing to save the loved one, at the situation that left you feeling powerless, or at others for being happy when you are not. I planned to show anger in my character by making her impatient, irritable and cynical, having her be more sarcastic and dry would add to the humour of the piece whilst showing the anger the character is experiencing.
We felt that the character of the sister (Charlie) was better suited to represent anger as her character felt very driven by control from the beginning and it would've been an even bigger shock to her that her brother died as despite being close, he had not warned her, and she most likely wouldn't have found out he was ill until late on as he had been living away from home at the time. Thus we ended up deciding my character should represent the bargaining phase instead and we settled on the following characters.
Road Trip Films
One thing that gave us some inspiration for this performance was road trip films, I thought a good way we could get ideas was by watching films that reminded us of our piece.
One film I found that was similar to what we were aiming for was Breaking for Whales which is about a brother and sister who are forced to see each other despite not getting along as they have to go on a trip to fulfil their mother’s final request of having her ashes scattered in the body of a whale so that they can receive their inheritance. This was interesting to watch when developing this piece as despite our performance not showing a sibling dynamic, I think the way they childishly dig at each other is somewhat similar to how we begin our piece. Despite the
American humour in this film being very different from the British humour we used, I feel like the way this film had a humorous approach to a serious subject was close to how we used humour to tell our story.
Another film that surprisingly inspired a lot of our performance was The Harry Hill Movie. The absurd humour used in this film was something that we wanted to incorporate elements of in this piece. A
specific moment that inspired us was when the character Nan, leaves Otto To be raised by a pack of wolves and gives him nothing but a packet of BBQ Beef hula hoops, We thought that this could be what the driver eats whilst everyone is waiting for him to finish eating especially as we could incorporate a moment where he sits and puts a hula hoop on each finger before eating them one by one. We tried some improv during one of our first run-throughs of this moment and at one point Ella put two hoops on her fingers and then swore at Gwen we thought that it was
such a funny moment that worked for the characters so we had to keep it in, especially as it is alongside a somewhat serious moment between two other characters. Another thing that inspired us was the name of the Hamster that the film was dedicated to, at the end of the Harry Hill movie a video of a hamster plays and underneath is written in memory of Dylan the hamster. At this point in our process, we were beginning to figure out the personality of each of our characters including the unseen character who died. We felt that he was definitely someone who loved a good laugh so it only seemed fitting to name him after Dylan the hamster.
Discussions
To help us get an idea of all the characters in our piece and give us ideas for our character profiles, we had a discussion on a live stream that was saved to our Facebook group so we could look back on it.
This discussion helped us understand how the group would function together, and interact with each other as we were all able to weigh in on our different perspectives and ideas for each character. Speaking about the fact it would be a lengthy journey also helped us come up with ideas for how the characters would be through the duration of the journey and not just in the 20 minutes that we show, getting to grips with the idea that it is a whole 7-hour journey that they're going on helped us to also show moments realistic to an actual road trip such as people looking/feeling a bit carsick, people falling asleep on each other's shoulders or even people struggling to use the manual handles to roll down the windows.
We also spoke about how when Charlie organised the trip she told everyone to bring something of theirs that reminded them of Dylan and what each of our characters were going to bring and why. Charlie brought a drawing that Dylan made of their family when he was younger with an apology note on the back which meant a lot to her, Amanda brought his journal, Abbie brought a magnet from Magaluf where she, Dylan, and Gary went on a trip that they all loved, Gary brought Dylans flat cap that reminds him of Dylan as he used to wear it all the time and Lily brought a painting that Dylan made and left to her after he died. I had a painting at home inspired by Starry Night that I brought in for this prop which later helped me when I made her character profile.
The conversation gave me lots of insight into Lily’s character and helped me see another side of her which in turn, made me more excited to play around with her in the piece. I got to understand her artistic side and how her and Dylan’s shared creativity bonded them together. Initially, I was worried that their friendship would come across as somewhat superficial and surface level but having this discussion helped me explore the bond between them and so when creating her character profile I was able to understand that their shared passions brought her and Dyan closer and so it made more sense to me why she had been included on the trip. Lily and Dylan shared the same passions but also were able to let their hair down and relax with each other and get drunk like very close colleagues who are close in the sense they have intellectual discussions and a really good working relationship rather than talking about a lot of personal things such as medical problems which is why Lily wasn't told by Dylan about his health. We also floated around the idea of Dylan and Lily maybe planning to work together in the future or do something related to their art together which worked with the idea that Lily was very unwilling to let Dylan go. Realising this helped me to understand the bargaining phase Lily was in as it made more sense for her to be bargaining and not ready to let her bond with Dylan disappear as she had plans for the future with him and had most likely never experienced a friendship like that before, this also is why Lily is still trying to do everything in her power to keep that part of Dylan alive.
Then we saw the first extract of the script that David prepared for us and tried putting it on its feet. This helped us see how our performance was coming together and the direction it was going in which was very positive. Now we all officially had names and were beginning to explore our character's personalities through the script we could see our naturalistic yet funny style begin to work, to the point where we even spoke about it making a good short film or even a full-length film as our basis provided so many things for us to play with and thus we thought it would be nice to not have to cut it down into only 15/20 minutes.
Lily's Character Profile
At this point, we were very confident in what we had come up with for our characters so we each made a profile for our characters so we had a solid idea of them in our heads.
When creating Lily’s profile I looked into Van Gogh and Post-Impressionist art as I felt as though it matched her personality in lots of ways. Vincent van Gogh is regarded as one of the most significant individuals in Western art history. Bold, symbolic colours and dramatic, spontaneous, highly expressive brushwork, which helped lay the groundwork for contemporary art, were hallmarks of his work. Van Gogh and his art gave me lots of inspiration when thinking about Lily’s character, I felt that his colourful and expressive Post-Impressionist style was very similar to the personality I had envisioned for Lily. Post-Impressionists disapproved of Impressionism's emphasis on the realistic portrayal of colour and light, instead preferring to focus on symbolic content and placing emphasis on the picture's artificiality. This movement’s rejection of limitations largely inspired Lily’s character, I felt that she would love this artistic movement due to her independent and colourful personality. I felt that Lily would particularly be drawn to Van Gogh’s work as he used his art to portray his mental struggles and display the beauty in his pain such as in his painting The Starry Night. On May 8, 1889, Van Gogh was admitted into the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum and from there, he created The Starry Night which displays the view from his room shortly before dawn which included an imagined village. The stylised cypress tree in the foreground of Starry Night is also symbolic of mortality and Van Gogh's final suicide, according to analysts of the painting. However, the cypress also stands for immortality so Van Gogh may have been making a more optimistic remark than is often believed. This reminded me so much of Dylan’s story, how he was always trying to spread hope and positivity even when he knew he was going to die, I think that Dylan could have purposely left Lily his painting inspired by The Starry Night so she would be reminded of the good memories they shared.
I also did some more research into the bargaining stage of grief which she represents so that I could build some of those character traits into her personality. I found that people often resort to bargaining as a protection against the helplessness they feel following a loss when they find it difficult to acknowledge the truth of their loss and the extent of their power over the circumstances. This made so much sense to Lily’s character as I felt it aligned very much with her self-sufficient personality, her character needs to have the feeling of control over her life so when going through the death of a friend she finds it especially hard to deal with the fact she has no control over the situation. It is very common in the bargaining stage of grief for people to attempt to negotiate with fate, a higher power, God, the universe, or even themselves which stems from a want to believe that acting in a particular way will make things better. This gave me the idea to have Lily try to quit certain habits of drinking, going out and partying in an attempt to feel less guilty about Dylan’s death, it is extremely common for people to think about all the things they could have done to prevent their loss when in this stage of grief and I think that Lily is most likely in a state of blaming herself and thinking “what if I had noticed his health problems sooner” and “maybe if we hadn’t gone out drinking so much, he would still be alive”. This also got me thinking about Lily’s religious standpoint and her upbringing, I felt that as quite a free-spirited person Lily most likely was not a strictly religious person however, she might've had quite a controlling religious upbringing that caused her to rebel and question her spiritual beliefs and the loss she was facing may have gotten her to a point where she was desperate to try anything, even praying to God, in order to regain some control of her life and emotions again.
Now I had a solid character to go off of I ran through the script again with a different perspective, I think that because I had a clear image of what it was I wanted to portray, my characterisation was much better and came more naturally after I had written my character profile on Lily. I felt like in the script she came across as more introverted than I had pictured her, however, I felt that this made more sense for her character at this time as she did not really know anyone else in the car. We spoke about how Lily probably felt very lonely in her grief because everyone other than her had someone they could open up about their grief to. We came up with the idea of having a moment between her and Gary where they could talk about her wishing things were different which could lead to them questioning if Dylan had faked his death for an elaborate prank and ending with Gary tasting the ashes to make sure it's Dylan. I feel like this was a really good choice as at this point in the play most have them have started to deal with their grief but Lily is still struggling with not wanting to let him go and is also feeling like she has to work through her grief alone so this moment of her opening up was nice to aid her development. I also love that it's Gary of all people whom she opens up to because I felt like the way they have grieved Dylan, despite being seemingly different from each other, are two sides of the same coin. Neither of them feels as though they are able to process their grief or talk about their feelings with other people. Whilst Gary has been distracting himself, never letting himself take a break and surrounding himself with loads of people, Lily has been isolating herself and not letting others see her grief because she doesn't feel as though she is close enough to open up to the people around her.
Next, we got to see more of the script that David had written for us, I was excited to see Lily’s fun side come out more in the carpark scene where they play odds on but it was also lovely to see the beginning of her vulnerable side in the snippet of the moment between her and Gary in the car towards the end.
We were also able to start working through parts practically to see what lines and moments worked well with the piece. We did change a few lines here and there to sound more natural/work with our characters more, such as in the carpark scene. Originally Lily was supposed to run in circles around the car but it felt awkward and distracted from the conversation happening in the car between Abbie and Amanda so we changed it so that Lily “runs around the carpark” so she can just “stretch” and run off the stage. This also ended up being added to even later in rehearsals, we decided to incorporate a funny moment where Lily ran across the stage in front of the audience and off again as Abbie and Amanda shared a sweet moment which really worked with the tone of the piece we had set. We wanted to make sure that although the audience would see the characters open up and process their grief with the help of one another, we still wanted to keep the humorous moments throughout so adding this moment and making the audience laugh a little was great at keeping a consistent tone throughout.
Once we had the full script we did a complete table read together, which we livestreamed, to see if there were any more changes we needed to make, and other than a couple of lines we largely kept the script the same.
I loved the end letter as I felt like it was great at being sentimental whilst also keeping the tone of the piece, all the audience hears from Dylan are things from his friends so having this note at the end to all of them felt like a wonderful way to showcase his personality directly and how he valued each character on the trip despite their flaws. Also, when we originally spoke about the ending we all agreed that we wanted to finish it at a place where the audience was satisfied with the story they were told without dragging it out and showing the journey back to London. We also spoke about not wanting it to end on a cheesy note and when we were throwing out ideas for the ending I thought we could make a moment out of all of the characters spreading the ashes and looking out before someone just asks “Shall we go home now?” and Charlie just replies “Yeah” and the lights go down. The line did change slightly to fit with the theme of the piece a bit more and we ended it with “Shall we fuck off home?” “Yeah, let's fuck off home” which felt like such a perfect way to end The Bamboo Tree.
Now the script was finished we got to blocking and learning the rest of our lines. When we began we had to start without Gwen because there was a train strike on this day, however, we managed to block out everything other than her bits towards the end. Being in such a small company means that when even one person is absent it can throw us off quite easily but we persevered and had a productive day despite being one person short.
When Gwen came back the next day we were able to take her through the bits we blocked and finish off the scenes with her in so the entire piece was blocked within a couple of days, other than the transitions. The transitions were quite difficult for us to work on at this point as we still had our scripts in our hands, (at one point we even ended up spilling some hot chocolate powder that was still in the pot) but we thought that once we learnt our lines it would be easier. We did underestimate how many props we were going to have though which made transitions pretty hard to do quickly and cleanly, even in our final few rehearsals our transitions were still not the smoothest so I think if we were to do it again I would've wanted to spend more time focusing on how to get those transitions smooth.
We also started to get together our prop list and think about our costumes. I decided that for Lily I wanted to wear something artsy but not over the top and as I was inspired by Gogh’s Starry Night, I chose a pair of brown swirly flare trousers and a matching brown cardigan. To show her creative and almost unorganised personality I wanted to have my hair up in a messy bun and wear fun jewellery such as a necklace with a crystal on it and a pair of earrings that have elephants on them as I felt they matched her vibe.
The week of the performance
Now we were in the week leading up to the performance, we were focused on cleaning up everything we were unsure of.
We all had some time over the weekend to learn our lines but to make sure we were all confident in them, we did a table read-through without our scripts which went very successfully. We also looked over the props list and delegated people to get the ones we did not have yet, I already wrote out a letter and put it in an envelope so that Ella could read it out at the end of our performance and I said that I would draw a “child’s drawing” for Charlie’s memorable prop. One prop that was difficult for us was the ashes as we had to make them edible so that Gwen could safely eat them, but we also had to make sure that they at least resembled real ashes. David came up with the solution to sift together white hot chocolate mix and black food powder to make the ashes which ended up working very well. Additionally, we looked in the props room to see if we could find any of the props on our list, specifically a fake steering wheel as we wanted to use an actual prop. However, unfortunately, we were unable to get one so in our performance Gwen had to mime steering the car. Although we were quite late in the process, when rehearsing we noticed that it was really difficult to see Sam and me as we were in the back of the car behind Ella and Gwen, so we discussed changing the staging. While the close proximity to each other was realistic in displaying the dynamics of a car, it did not allow for the characters to interact very much as we couldn't all see each other so we suggested separating those in the back from those in the front so that instead of them being in front of each other, they were next to each other but this felt very unnatural for the piece. To remedy this problem we ended up just moving the two front chairs further apart so that all of the characters could be seen whilst staying true to the car dynamic.
The day before our performance we had many, many, many, run-throughs to familiarise ourselves with the full performance. It was great to be able to see the space we were going to perform in and try it out with all of the sound effects and music that we had wanted to include as we had practised with a lot less space than we had in the performance so being able to put our show in the space we were going to perform in was helpful, especially in terms of us putting our voices in the space and making sure we were all able to be heard. We also tried out our costumes which worked very well together but were quite warm as we all had to wear coats on top of them to maintain the idea that Gary doesn't know how to turn the heating on in December.
We also got the opportunity to show our dress rehearsal to the Level 3s, which was a great way to see how an audience would respond to The Bamboo Tree. It was really rewarding to see their reactions to the big moments in the story and hear their laughter at the jokes, especially when Gary eats Dylan’s ashes, even though we did not use the fake ashes when showing them the performance, they were still shocked and amused to the point where me and Gwen actually had trouble staying in character in this moment. Showing the Level 3s also highlighted some of the things we needed to work on in the show such as the transitions. Despite working on them, during the rehearsal it was messy at moments and I think that if we had organised them better beforehand they would've gone a lot smoother. But overall the dress run for the Level 3s went well, despite a few technical difficulties and unorganised transitions, we stayed in character, remembered our lines, and performed well.
Unfortunately, Harriet was ill on the day we were going to perform so we were unable to have a final showing of The Bamboo Tree.
Overall
This devising project has definitely challenged me a lot in terms of coming up with ideas and feeling confident in sharing them, much like in our last process I found myself criticising a lot of the ideas I had to the point where I did not share a lot of them. During this process I became really aware of how much my self-criticism gets in my own way as an artist and so as we progressed I got better at quieting the voice that picks apart all of my ideas which in turn has made me more confident in my contributions to this process.
Something that really helped me through this process was documenting it from the beginning, being more organised with this process has really helped my development as keeping track of what I did each day has allowed me to see what and how I have learnt over this period and looking back on it has also helped me to identify a lot of my strengths and weaknesses as an actor. I have been able to see my thought process over time and that I’ve gotten a lot better at being creative and thinking of ideas since being in a more creative environment. I think that due to Alevels and even GCSEs I stunted a lot of my creativity to focus on just hitting mark schemes so now I have more freedom to express my ideas I also have gained more freedom to create new ones too. I do still need to get better at coming up with ideas from scratch, I've found that once I have a concept I do not find it difficult to get inspired but I still struggle with being decisive and choosing what initial ideas to explore. I think that one way I could push myself to improve on this is through improv or even using random word generators to get my ideas flowing quicker.
Another thing that I’ve observed from my notes is that I am very detail orientated. This helps me a lot when creating dynamic characters as I am able to build interesting facts and backstories into their personality, it also helps me to perform these characters in a realistic way as I can find ways to connect with their stories and understand how to portray them accurately and in an interesting way. Although my attention to detail can also make it difficult for me to keep focused on the bigger picture as I often get carried away with all he little details to the point where I just keep zooming in and loose track of my original task.
I used a lot of mindmaps when working on this project which I found was a really helpful tool during this process for a lot of reasons such as they allow me to delve into details whilst remaining aware of the bigger picture which reduces my chances of getting too carried away. I also think they helped me to get my initial ideas out of my head and flowing onto paper so that I could understand, organise and prioritise them.