All entries for March 2005

Medea 7 –Spiderman has nothing on me and Owen

Okay so it's been a week since the performance, but it's still fresh in my head, honest! It was a great success, even mathematicians thought it was 'stunning and not at all pretentious' and that is not only shocking but something to be proud of. I think we re-established in some of the invited audience minds what theatre is about, and that I think is more than any of us were anticipating.

Thursday was the day of actually putting together the piece from the mini-groups and actually building the 'set'. Me and Owen played spiderman most of the day, me on the catwalk and him on a ladder, casting webs of string around the place to hold up the collage, booths and shadow boxes. Credit too to Holly who played with my nerves as she lay precariously half over the edge and fumbled with the collage string. Meanwhile the brickies were underneath building a wall. Later there was more work to be done in my lofty domain, I meddled in the lighting work James and Rhys were doing and then toyed with the projector and discovered how uncomfortable it is to stay in the same awkward position for ten minutes.
The Chorus (of whom I had the littlest inclination to what they were actually going to do….*pause, why am I writing like an English student?) Came out of what seemed to me like nowhere to deliver a great rendition of choral speaking, movement and tableaux not to mention creepy whispering. I'd been looking forward to seeing the chorus perform since I'd seen glimpses of the masks and facepaint, and I thought they were the perfect introduction to the acting parts of the production, linking the original myth and greek style to Jack and Zoe's far more colloquial argument. Speaking of which I had to supress my own giggles at their argument fortunately everyone in the audience was giggling too, so I got away with it. The silhouettes were a kind of bridging point between these two parts of the performance, whilst their subject was the traditional myth of child slaying, their form of course was far more modern and worked very well. (See the gallery for the dark side of Sophie).
Of course there were a couple of cock ups in the performance on Friday, and unsuprisingly they were in my sphere of influence. My American-friendly-fire style of projector cap bombing of the audience was not really my fault, the slow motion realisation of the cap slipping off was followed by another slow motion moment of me reaching across to grab it and subsequent missing and having to cover the lens. But as some people pointed out, my persecution of the girl below me was all linked with the themes of the installation. Hey at least it wasn't a knife hey Rothelite? It also took a while to move the film down onto the chorus and Jack and Zoe in the sheet since Owen had convinced me that we should chain the projector down for safety, we were perhaps over-zealous though and found the projector too secure to actually move, but it only took a few seconds to unclip the chains and the whole thing ended in success. Oh it was my friends who destroyed the wall too, women! Chuh!

So yes, I think it was Ian who said 'This is what I came to Warwick to do' and I couldn't agree more, definitely the most impressive thing we've done yet, and we've got two more years to go from strength to strength, which we will.

: 19 Mar 2005 13:56 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

You know when you're a theatre student when….

this is the conversation you have on the sidelines of a football match (meant to add this to the end of the AGM).

Sam: shouts Rothelite!! Stay on the gentleman in the fetching turquoise!

Ric: It's more of a sea blue to be honest.

Geth: I'd say sky blue

Ric: It's a nice colour.

Sam: We're not debating that it's a nice colour, but which colour is it?shouts Go to him Rothelite!!

: 09 Mar 2005 16:50 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Actington Stanley AGM 2005

Actington AGM 2005 Minutes

Present – Sam, Geth, Owen, Ricardo, Roth, Jack
NO APOLOGIES
MIA : Will, Rhys, Jimmy, Hugh

To be discussed
Assessments
Dinner Dance
Tom
Elections
Formation
Training
Any Other Business

Assessments

Collectively
Progressing, demoralisation an issue. Inside games or outside games Vote - 3 to each side, to be decided. From now on, the nicer Pitch to be booked whenever possible!

Owen
Bad performance today but very apologetic and humble. Salutes to him as the rock of our team over the last two terms. He's concerned about defense issues, would prefer more constant subs, a good 5 minutes is better than a poor 10.

Geth
Wet t-shirt competition. Improved fitness, dramatic personal improvement! Makes the point that we can't tackle, calls for more maleable passing. Today was best game of his season.

Roth
Square formation is way of the future. Pass the ball more often, not always rushing up. Going in to space. Capable of defense. Needs to be more decisive. Finds shouting from the sidelines helpful.

Will
Good goal scorer, good runner, but underachieving? Some fine goals, excellent up front but needs to be more defensively minded. Needs to come in deep so defenders can pass to hiim.

Jack
Solid, THE defense, good on the volley, good on the vision. MALEABLE, apologises for todays negativity.

Rhys
Fitness issues - quit the ol' smokes? hesitates on the ball. Positioning and tactical awareness excellent, never let's his height get him down, a great addition.

Sam
Soluble, available, playmaker, communicator, heart of the team, god. More shooting though, more freedom to be the king, whatever wherever.

Ricardo
NEEDS SHOES WITH GRIPS, falls on his arse to many times and slides around. Need a return to the aggression of the early season, needs more confidence and meeting the ball. Positive, maleable,good passing when actually has the ball, fouls well.

Roth
Powers of analysis excellent, needs to be more switched on. Indecision however a magnificent comeback from his retirement in Summer 2001, first game in years.Good passing and willingness to learn.

Jimmy
Ball control an issue, but enthusiastic, needs more pace and confidence. Needs to stay awake in lectures, we need him next season too!

Election Speeches
Speeches made for the election of next years Captaincy, still accepting speeches. Votes to be made secretly to Ricardo via MSN.

Gethins Election Speech – Notes
More organised

got up the most - commitment
taken extra responsibilities

Return of the Rota
Rothelite exempt from rota debate, claims (justified) ignorance

Gethins Innovations : Socials - too much tension at end of games
Fitness - don't turn into a pie

Sams Election Speech – Notes
Warming, Growing, captaining, changing, supporting, encouraging, delegationing, talking, texting, training, socialising, democracying, Jugging and Jestering, Varsitying, Making a Difference..........Football.
_Question : Does missing lectures have an adverse effect on play?
Answer : Cheltenham is detrimental to Actington. EXPERIENCE._

Tom
Offered Tom a contract, Jules acting as ambassador to Tom. Votes for Tom and his skills to join the team overwhelmingly in favour.

DINNER DANCE
Thursday 8:00 – Drink in Rootes social, bit of pool, bit of table football. Then company picnic outside battered, possible Rotheliting to follow. Dress Code : hats (and clothes). Hugh to be emailed, ALL WELCOME, esp. supporters.

Formation and Training
Tobe decided following captaincy vote.

Special Mentions
To Julia, who is constantly in support, excellent chanting and dancing and moral support, thankyou!!

To Hugh director of football, who is always with us in spirit.

Other business
BUTTER WORTH HALL BOOKED FOR THE NEXT AGM

RAFFLE – signed actington ball, do it for the kids.

ARE SAM AND GETH IN LOVE? – platonically probably, overwhelming vote in favour of the motion. Sam 'wouldn;t call it love as such'.

IS WILL A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT?

edit (for Jack)..................MSN ELECTIONS

: 08 Mar 2005 18:35 |  Comments (10) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Medea 6– A hard days all–night'...Rothelite?'

So it comes to this, sat for my 8th consecutive hour in the editing suite, a can of Grolsh in my hand (dont tell Tim) many a bag of sweets in my stomach, company from Sam Smallman (2nd yr blokie) and Owen who paces the room nervously noting that we've been waiting for this rendering for about an hour now, and if this attempt fails 'like a poor quality piece of shit' like the last two attempts did, Owen will destroy one departmental camera an hour unless we are met immediately by someone who knows what they're doing. Our training was abismal, after spending half an hour working out that the computer we were using and the tape player we were using were not connected to each other by anything more than our good intentions, Nick (2nd yr) proposed the idea of moving on to another computer. This done it was a mere hour before we managed to familiarise ourselves with the controls and capture all the precious filming we've done. An hour on from this point having succesfully mastered the process of putting clips on the timeline, Rothelite entered to comment 'is that all you've done?'. Rothers was lucky to escape without a neutering.

However… apologies… Owen has just broken down in front of the computer as it fools him by starting another process, going from 100% to a brand new 0%. With his new sense of technological insecurity, Owen now claims he will eat a candle if the computer does not meet his demands. It's not the largest candle I've ever seen, but eating candles in general is something not to be taken lightly…..However, we eventually scraped the barrel of our clips, repeated a few and even considered running some in reverse, every clip was considered for slow motion, even the dialgogue, but there came a point when those with foresight to choose another element of the performance entered the room, they were met with gasps of glee (Owen's now chewing the end of the candle btw) because me and Owen had created something that could even be described as 'sexy' and has been, several times, accompanied by 'awws', and 'yeys' and by Roth's 'yes, Yes, YES!'.

That seems a very long time ago though, since then we managed to finish the film!! HURRAH HUZZAH! That is in the sense that we can play it end to end on the computer, how wrong we were to think it all over though. As the past 2 hours have involved missionary work to costcutters, an olympic sprint through arctic conditions to Whitefields for CD-Rs which are useless as the cd writer is playing up, not to mention candle eating, which is worrying me more and more.

On the plus side though, we made it to 4 minutes and Owen has resolved not to eat the wick. So by tomorrow, when we will stagger of the editing suite and straight to the seminar we should have our element of the installation, crisp and ready to go.

IF ANYONE FANCIES A BIT OF ROTHELITING OR ALL-NIGHTERING PLEASE COME AND JOIN US, WE'RE LONELY AND BY THE WAY THINGS ARE GOING, ALL THE ABOVE STATEMENTS ARE NOT A JOKE!

: 03 Mar 2005 19:58 |  Comments (8) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Medea 5– Riddles in the dark

Tuesday was all about the dialogue shots, we set up the studio with lights and shot segments of speech from the text being spoken by various members of our group, through the magic of editing we're going to put this into some coherent order with the effects from the maths department.

The shooting went very well, may even consider putting the blooper reel on dc++? Including such as classics as 'Haction!!' Don't want to give too much away though.

We'll be editing tomorrow and anymore shots we need doing

: 02 Mar 2005 21:35 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem