Final Project Proposal

For a four people scene work acting project, I think we should do Wizard of Oz. First of all we know the story and characters which will be helpful when we work together on this piece. I think we can cast: Chrissy as Scarecrow, Livi as Dorothy, Michael as Cowardly Lion and me as Tin Man. This cast will give us a good fit to our range. We will start with our group scene work and then we will work on our individual songs.

What I say is not what I mean!

In our real life, a lot people say things which does not represent what they mean. For example, sometimes when Ms.Guarino say: “Maybe!?” She really means “No that's not a very good idea.” And when John Jiang says: “I don't really know!” He really means “I know but I just cannot tell you what it is exactly about!” Our last scene from English class is one the perfect example of these moments, and it is also the biggest challenge for us to accomplish! As I mentioned before, the hardest part to show from out acting in this scene is our emotion changes! It is hard because the writing of this play gives us the feeling that all of these lines are in the same tone. However, there are many mixed emotions behind the actual dialogue and we want people to sense that even they don't know anything about the actual story.

So how can we do that and how we did? After many changes and practice. We finally gave our final production last Thursday, and I think it's bad because we have shown the doubt in Tom, the sad and anger in Amanda and the confusing in Laura. From the beginning of yelling at each other to slowly building up the temper. It has been a different feeling for me. I used to just think about my character and how will I present; however, this time I spend more time on study how Laura thinks on her head and why she would say each line which helps me a lot when I react to it. I didn't have as many lines as Chrissy had, so I figured to do other things to make my character as effective and interesting as Amanda.

Overall I enjoyed working with Livi and Chrissy, and I am very happy to see all of us becoming better at acting and working with each other! At the end, I am looking forward to work on our final piece next week with four of us in it, and I hope we can make it a perfect ending mark for our last class together!

Character work

I personally can feel Tom this character pretty well, since I was raised in a culture where most moms are like Amanda who designs their children’s entire life for them instead of letting them do it on their own. Tom has been raising by his mother, and suffers everyone from his mother’s complaining and bossing. This is the reason why he wants to leave the house like what his father did 16 years ago. However, it is never that easy because he has a sister who unfortunately has been controlled by the mother even more. In this case Tom as an older brother cannot just let his sister to be torched more, so he decides to stay in the house and keep them from starving. However, The more mother pushes Tom the more he wants to leave.

In this specific scene, as Tom he is trying to avoid his mother’s endless talking as a normal day, he realizes that his mother is pushing harder and harder. Two scene before this scene, Tom already plans out to escape the house, but he still need a lighter to explode this off; a reason for him to eventually decide leaving the house! He cannot make his mind until the moment when Amanda uses her final and biggest push on Tom which gives him the power to finally leave at the end.

Over this scene, even though the lines seem have a similar tone, but there are actually tons of layers of emotion can go into. The last time we try to go over our lines, and it did not really work, since we didn't analysis line by line on the different emotions, we did not see a build up and how these two character changed their thoughts in their head. I will definitely make sure we as a group go through the lines and talking about not just our surface level acting, but deep thinking in our mind.

Float

Float this word was the most mentioned one during our performance in class, and seems everyone likes when there is a float. However, I think this is not success of our work but an accident! Please let me explain, first of all I truly enjoyed everyone’s work and I think the float did make the scene better. Second of all, I don't think creating a float is our main purpose in a scene because of two main reasons.

The first one is that lines and emotion of the passage is the most important element since our main goal is telling a story to a person who doesn't know it. Because of this, More than often we need fresh eyes to give us comments in order to make our work better, and this is why when we all know the story we start looking for something else to focus on, such as float! The reason why our group’s scene had a “float” is because 1. Michael and I know each other pretty well. 2. We didn't know our lines perfectly, so we had to pick something else up to cover our problem. This situation often happens when there is improv show because that is the place you want to keep everything in a nice float which will make actors to improv easier. In our case, it is easier for us to remember our lines or come up with a similar meaning lines.

The second reason I feel this is a failure rather than a success is because we didn't try to make our own character more authentic and realistic, instead we tried to make our scene look less awkward. Luckily we made it, but this also gives me a warning on what should I focus more on in the future. If I am working with some other people who I don’t know well, I don’t know how will I be able to create a float on stage by improving, so learning our lines and character are important! I will be more careful in my next project!

Escapism

Since I have been reading Hemingway in English class, I have a lot of different understandings and approaches on people who are suffering in the reality and they choose to escape from it. In the story, I have noticed that all these four characters are trying to get out of their life which they are having now.

For Tom, the problem he is facing is that he is stucked with his mother and sister which means that he is having a life he hates, but he cannot change easily. The situation is that he cannot find the perfect way to leave the broken home. He cannot leave his sister behind, but he also cannot bring his sister with him because his sister is such a weak person who is always depends on other people. This situation is the direct trigger which caused his leaving from home. I see this character as the person who is telling the story with a negative emotion which set him as an unreliable narrator. I would play this character as if he was going through the darkest memory in his past experience.

For Amanda, since I mentioned the Tom I would expect her to be the worst behaving character in the entire play. She is always living in her own self built world where she is still young and beautiful, so she can still pretend her pride and self respect. She is one of these kind people who always want the attention and control everything in her life since she made a wrong decision once.

For Laura, she is the glasses in the pay. She is this beautiful little thing, and she wants to escape from the plate the control, so she can start her own life. However, no matter how realistic these animals are, they can never be real. She will always be controlled by her mother.

The last is Jim. Who is similar to the mother, but what he missed is the feeling under spot light. He is always trying to tell Tom how “different” they are from other workers. It is just like how he once felt “different” from others in the school.

This is what I have so far on all these characters, and I will dig deeper as we practice more and perform more on stage. I think this is a great piece for us to work on as class unit, and we all have familiar character we used to play, but within new excitement and challenges.

Silent but colorful

I have been acting in a silent movie for a long time, so I was so happy and excited to be part of this silent movie project. Since the last time I did a silent movie, I have improved myself as an actor in many different ways, and our group had a great start on our story line. However, we can still make it better.

First thing I think we can do is getting our props ready because in a silent movie we cannot use any lines to tell the audience what we are doing. This is why we need to get all the props, such as bread, table set, glasses, background paper, posters and plates, then we can create a scene of Paris. The goal is to make audience know we are tourist in Paris and we go to a local restaurant.

The second thing I think we can improve is that we can use more body and hand movements to make our plot more clear. During our last performance, we improvised a lot of the stage blocking which went along with our plot, but it was not properly organized and rehearsed, so some part of the performance was not clear, and sometimes we were blocking each other.

The last but not the least, think that it would be better that we can practice more on the timing because it felt loose. Part of the reason was because we were trying to figure out some of our movements, and some other reason was because we didn’t practice enough, so we didn’t know the timing well enough to keep the plot tight and smooth.

Overall, I am looking forward to work on this project more with my classmates, and I hope that we can put on a successful silent movie this time since it will be my last silent movie project at CA. I am also excited about where our story is going because so far we have established a great plot and starting. We just need to finish it up. At the end, I hope everyone had a great break, and ready to work hard for last marking period.

Ideas

1. Since Liv hasn't done a silent movie project, and I cannot remember the last time I was in a silent movie. Also, Chrissy and Liv had some struggles with their body movements I feel a silent movie would be good for us to do.

2. Improv will also be a good choice since they did not have much experience before, so we can have classes and come up different themes to do.

3. I kind like the idea to do a riff off short musical which we can do on a certain topic about CA, and we can be creative and I personally didn't have much experience with musical in this class.

4. I also think we can have our own unique adaptation on a famous story such as Hamlet.

5. The last idea I have is that we may can take a three person play to put on stage.