Recording Group and Solo Performances

Artistic Interpretation:

The solo pieces I have chosen are as follows David Attenborough's "The Blue Butterfly", Dr Zeus's "Cat In The Hat" and a 7-11 advert. The reason I grouped these pieces together was because vocally they were significantly different from one another, for instance "The Blue Butterfly" I had to perform with a soft tone, with good diction because this extract was meant to calm audiences as well as have an intellectual edge to it, however "The Cat In The Hat" had several characters, and is also a children's book, so my tone and pitch had a lot of variation and the pace to the extract has quick with a bouncy rhythm because I had to excite my target audience. And finally the 7-11 advert was meant to be relate able to the listeners, and so I read through the piece and decided who the piece was aimed at, so I came to the conclusion I had to be laid back in the way I performed it. All of my pieces had to be adapted to suit radio, as none of them were a radio genre when I picked them, with my David Attenborough I had to focus on helping the listeners to visualise what I was talking about, and so I performed it in a descriptive manner. On the other hand "The Cat In The Hat" I had to bring to life, and I adapted it to suit a mixture of both an audio book and a radio drama type of genre.

Throughout the rehearsal period I struggled with having a clear variation between all the pieces vocally, "The Cat In The Hat" was one that I had the most difficulty with, because the piece was so fast paced I often found myself sinking in and out of different voices, I did however finally come up with an idea having listen to the constructive comments given by my peers, that if I made the characters very wacky and that their voices were clearly different than I wouldn't have any trouble, so I played around a lot with vocal techniques such as, pitch, tone, vocal inflections, pace of each character and even the diction.

The group piece we decided to do was "Seeing Beyond", which was originally a staged performance, which we adapted to a radio drama by using sound effects, microphone techniques, such as positioning ourselves closer or further away from the mic, as well as vocal techniques, like vocal inflections when whispering. We chose this piece because the script it's self interested us and we though it would be a challenge to adapt into a radio drama, also it had a variation of characters within the piece so we enjoyed looking at how we could make a distinctive difference between them so audience members could understand the piece with ease.

After we as a group had chosen the piece we spent a lot of time working out the sound effects that would fit well within the piece, our draft script was full of ideas for this, but we eventually cut a lot of sounds, however we did keep most of the ideas for vocal techniques and mic techniques within the script. We had to make the audience understand that Felicity and Maya were in separate parts of the theatre from Tom and Becky, to make this obvious we had Felicity and Maya stand together next to a mic, and the same for Tom and Becky, we also played used whispering within the piece so it sounded like Tom and Becky were actually in the audience and not on stage, this meant that we had to lean closer to the mic so we could be picked up, Felicity had to yell out to Tom and so she took a few steps away from the mic before yelling, this was so the sound didn't distorted.

Vocational Effectiveness:

After listening back to my solo pieces I found I lacked intention to some of the lines in the David Attenborough piece, even though at points I did feel I had the objective of calm and exciting the audience at the same time, I did find my tone sometimes bordering on being bored, to change this for the future I would add more pace giving it a clearer rhythm to the piece, which hopefully would take the bored tone away from the piece. With "The Cat In The Hat" I found myself mixing up the voices of The Cat and The Narrator, this was probably because I had gotten carried away and the lines from The Cat were close to The Narrators, what I should have done was taken a breath before continuing the piece. The overall performance my diction was clear, and I was happy with the variation in my tone through out each piece, this made it easier to tell it was a completely different extract. The performance itself was good, but there was still room to improve it.

Our group piece went well, each character was clear to listeners, and our characters intentions and emotions came across within the pieces. When listening to it the class agreed it was easy to tell the relationships between the characters. I felt though that we could have taken it further for instance Maya could have elongated her words to make it sound more mysterious, and Tom could have put more meaning on the lines for instance "Oh my god" sounded very flat I should have put more emphasis on the fact that he was freaked out. The piece itself had an intense atmosphere and I felt that was because of the sound effects that we had chosen, as well as how well our mic techniques worked, as it did sound as if Becky and Tom were in a separate of theatre because of how we grouped ourselves by the mic and how effectively we use being close or distant from the microphone. I think we also thought carefully about the pace of the piece, it started quite slow so listeners could understand who was who, and then as it intensified we picked up the pace.

Professional Effectiveness:

As a team I felt we all shared an equal part in the creation of the piece, we all contributed our own ideas. However it did take us a while to get working on this script, we did spend too much time looking for a script that suited us, but as soon as we got into it we were fine. We worked roughly on editing the script together and shared our thoughts of what we should put in and where it should go, and then in our own separate time,after Alicia had given us the draft SFX script, we personalised our own scripts to suit us which I thought worked well it gave us a chance to primarily focus on us and our characters within the work. We were very enthusiastic during rehearsals and read through the script whenever we could all together, and after spoke about what worked and what didn't, for instance the group pointed out we could emphasise the whispering for Tom and Becky more.

I felt I progressed my role within the piece well after being given constructive comments, and this was because I would always take the ideas on bored trying them out, for instance our lecture felt I could be more of a push over as the lines suggested Tom was in the script and I was also asked by one of my peers if I could feel more warmth to the fact my sister who had past way and come back to see me, both of these comments made sense to me and so the next week I went back and performed it taking those ideas on board and it worked very well. Through out the process I decided I needed to challenge my vocals more, which at first was difficult considering how bland the script was for vocal techniques, but I felt I acted on that by actioning my lines within my script, therefore giving the lines I was saying more meaning.

This piece itself did interest my class, they were intrigued about what had happened to Felicity and after noticing that I felt this would be good as mini series, that could be played on BBC Radio Seven, also known as 4 extra, because it caters to ideas like this, they put recordings of comedy and drama in the form of radio, and I think that it would suit audiences of 18+ its a simple series idea which could entertain audiences of this age, I wouldn't go any lower in age because I don't feel like a radio series would interested audiences that were younger. I think the best time to play it would be rush hour, as many people are sat in their cars waiting in traffic, and this could be a way of interesting them whilst they wait.