Chasing Pavements- 9th December

Today we worked on the scene where we first meet the gang. We wanted to make this as effective as possible so that the audience knew that the gang were serious so we decided to do it in a black out and create a sound scape with voices and the sound of beating and screams. We made the sounds of the beating by using a belt for a whip and chairs to sound like bars being hit. We also found the sound effect of the gun that goes of at the end to signify that the person being beat has been shot. However we are deciding to change it as the sound effect didn't sound right.

Chasing Pavements- start devising- 8th December

We started by Creating of our piece which is going to be a silhouette of the writer of the book (the puppeteer) is going to hang himself. we decided to do this to make the audience attention we drawn from the very beginning. We are doing this in a silhouette so the audience doesn't know who the person is until the very end of the performance. When we created the silhouette we realised that we need a bigger sheet. Which we are going to get and create a washing line with it so it can be moved into place whenever we need it. We also need a light that is stronger as it didn't create a solid outline through the sheet. After this we began to discuss each bit of the story line and what are going to be the different endings that the author changes them to. 

Chasing Pavements- developing ideas

Over the next couple of lessons we began to develop ideas. We started of by looking at the lyrics of the songs and annotating them to see if any strong ideas would develop. We noticed that in the song she talks about wanting something better and having enough of the pain so we thought we could use this theme in the piece to show how we link to the stimuli. We then moved on to looking at other Adele songs. We began by looking at set fire to the rain and developed the idea that someone is trying to get rid of the pain by setting fire to it but setting fire to the rain is impossible so this could never happen. This lead on to the ideas of the pain of abuse and not being able to escape also the idea of permanent injury and wanting to be better again. We then moved on to the song turning tables and looked at the line 'under your thumb I can' breath' this related to the idea we came up with before about being trapped by abuse and pain. We decided as a group we could develop this to become a main theme for our devised piece to draw the attention of the audience. We then came up with different scenarios that we could fit these different themes. One idea was that we could put it into a gang theme where someone in the gang wants something better from life rather then being in a gang. Another idea was Soldiers being stranded longing for there way home and stop the pain of never getting where they want to go. After we looked at all the ideas we had come up with and put them into a mind map and started to decide of which 2 we liked best. We picked out the solider idea and gang idea and developed each of them using themes that we had developed from looking at the different stimuli. Creating mind maps for each. Then we decided which on to go for which was the gang idea. We then created a brain storm of techniques which we could use and how we could use them in the piece to help develop our piece further.

Chasing pavements- My ideas

Outside of the lesson I decided to come up with some ideas myself I firstly did this by looking at lyrics. I looked at the line 'i waited as my heart dropped and back begins to tingle'. I related this to how if someone is in a accident and get injured and how they reference to there back tingling when they have broke it and how your heart drops when you imagine the fear of not being able to walk again and do everything you have wanted to in life. My second line I looked at was ' if I tell the world, it will never be enough'. From this I developed the idea that this person could be a dictator and they can tell the world everything and put on a brave face but what they are really going through isn't very nice and they are struggling. This shows how cruel life is even to the most powerful of people. I then moved on to one of the photos we viewed in the last lesson which was of the homeless person and there fighting for something they believe in but they never get it. My final idea was developed from the back story of song which was how Adele has an argument with her boyfriend in a club and then ran of and is about how she wasn't being chased or chasing anything so she was just Chasing pavements. From the idea of her running away from nothing I developed the idea that someone was being stalked and every time they look to see if someone is there but there is not.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/story-of-the-song-chasing-pavements-adele-2007-1607926.html

Adele Adkins had an argument with her boyfriend in a London club.

Punches were thrown, drink spilt, and the singer legged it down Oxford Street. "It was six in the morning," she said. "There was no one chasing me, I wasn't chasing anyone. I was just running away." The 20-year-old realised she was in hot pursuit of nothing. "I remember saying to myself, 'What you're chasing is you're chasing an empty pavement.'" Back home, she wrote the song.

chasing pavements- 1st December

In this lesson we began by being put into our devising groups which was Dan Mckay, Tom Falconar, Dan Smith, Kyle Starkey and Theo Benjamin. In this lesson we made a huge brain storm of all the different ideas that we could come up with and how we could work on them and if the can be expanded. We included the idea of chasing dreams, following a path to somewhere and one of the ideas that was favored was a gang in the 1930's where someone wanted to escape. We discussed all the ideas in detail and decided on what we could to to research in the next lesson to create more ideas.  We had problems while brain storming as we had to make sure the piece was mature and made sense to the audience as this was a key part of making the performance successful. while coming up with ideas we were also coming up with techniques we could use for example live music as we had a drummer in our group, dancing as we have dancers and I had the idea that we could include flickering images to create an effect all this things could help to enhance the performance and make it more interesting for the audience. When we were coming up with ideas we were also looking at picture of the internet when we searched in the words chasing pavements and found lots of long roads with nothing in:

We also found picture of homeless people all this helped to come up with more ideas.

our brain storm

Chasing Pavements- finding out the stimulus

27th November

At the beginning of the lesson today we began by watching the stimilus for our devised piece which was the song chasing pavements by Adele. At first it was very difficult to think of ideas at first as there was so much going on in the music video as  the lyrics of the song was very different to what was going on in the video. We then got split into 2 groups which we began to discuss ideas one person came up with a chasing pavements game show and have a comedy value where I had the idea that it could be about a person chasing a better life in the world or chasing a dream that they will never catch. We then picked one of the ideas and we choose the game show one. we then created a small devised piece on this idea to help us get used to developing ideas and seeing if they work or not. I find comedy quite hard so it was difficult to think on the ball about thinks I could say in some situations. over all this idea didn't work very well as it was very hard to develop and create the right atmosphere with enough techniques as possible.