Audience

We started this lesson by telling each saying a couple of sentences of a story, not worrying so much about the content, but concentrating on how we were saying it, changing our target audience each time. We had to think about the tone of our voices, the language we were using, aswell as our body language and gestures. After this we tried telling the stories without using any faical expression or moevemnt, just using our voice to make it age appropriate. This was really difficult as we found isolating your voice from your face especially, when your trying to be over the top with your voice. Next we tried telling an inappropriate story in a way that was appropriate for young children by changing ther tone and language we were using. This was good as it showed you how much we need to think about the words we're using when talking to young children, making sure we use words that they can understand. 

We looked at creating the stmosphere for a scene, not just making the setting. By adding sounds, movement and music we brought many different places to like, creating an atmosphere for the audience, making it like they were there and bringing the story to life. The last thing we did was having one person narrate a story while the rest of the class created it and filled in the dialogue where it was needed in the story. 

Movement

This lesson we were focusing on how to interpret and potray a character through movement. We did a lot of thinking about how to play a character without literally acting like it, for example when playing a rabbit you would not hop around but act and think like one, adapting some of its characteristics and how it would be acting. Some very helpful examples that helped me to understand this concept is trying to act like a bit of lava in a volcano. Trying to bring out the energy and movement that a bit of lava would have was difficult at first, but once we got into it and started thinking less literally and just imagining how a piece of lava would move and react to different things. 

Voice

We started today by going through the pronunciation of vowels, saying them after one another working on our projection and the clarity of our speech. To warm up our tongues we then did some tongue twisters, futhermore we said them with different exaggerated emotions. I think this will help with our expression and gesture when story telling, to help portray the stories to our audience. Next we started actually creating the start of Little Red Riding Hood, taking everything we had done so far into consideration. We tried to make it captivating from the very start, interacting with the audience and breaking down the fourth wall to get the audience involved. Once we had finished them we then watched a video of a children's presenter and picked out aspects of what she was doing, like eye contact and the tone of her voice. We then went back to what we had created and improved it, taking the new things we had noticed into consideration. As a finishing task we had to each simply say 'Once Upon a Time' in a captivating way that would catch the audiences attention right from the start, which I think is very important to story telling especially when it is to young children, if you don't have their attention from the start the children won't listen to the rest of the story. 

Body

Today we were working on how to portray emotion not just through what your saying but through your body, especially your eyes. I think this really adds to a performance and helps to put across the emotion of the characters without it becoming to over the top and cheesy, which may not be appropriate for the audience. We did lots of different exercises using mime so we had to get across the emotion without speech, this will help us with our physicality and gestures when doing our story telling. To help us with this, we related the story or emotion we had to feel to what we have felt or experienced in the pass and so it is believable and we can relate to the story. Also we mimed a couple of scenes, for example being in McDonald's which I found quite difficult as I do not find it easy to act in an over the top manner just with my body and gestures. To get the feeling of emotion portrayed through our eyes we posed as statues and then had to show a random emotion just through our eyes without moving. I think this is a really useful skill as we can use it in many forms of acting and it will really add to the story telling.