Evaluation for Drama Workshops

Overall I found the drama workshops to be most rewarding. We looked at a range of areas regarding acting and animation. We learnt all about Diaphragms, how we breathe, the right way to breathe and miming characters. We learnt about using signs to get your message and ideas across to an audience. Miming took a lead role in the acting classes. Once we had got the hang of breathing deeply and using our full capacity we then went onto miming and acting out scene with no sound or mouth movements. For me, it was to demonstrate how simple movements, facial expressions, and posture etc can get across a lot of information to the audience. We should take this idea into our animations. Actions, expressions and movement are like the heart in your body when talking about acting. The heart pumps blood around to keep you alive, similarly you need expressions, mannerisms, body language to make a scene convincing. Expressions and mannerisms make it visually interesting and challenges the audience to make their own twists to our mimes. On the whole, the mimes were pretty self-explanatory.

We looked at various theorists like Rudolf Von Laban, a Hungarian central European dance artist and theorist. Laban’s work laid the foundations for Laban Movement Analysis and other developments in the art of dance. We looked at the stereotypes within movement that Laban created for example, a low heavy character would do punch, slice, and wringing movements, all disjointed, and uncomfortable movements and a light happy person would use gliding, flicking, dabbing movements. Laban did this so when he wrote a script the actor would act his words and then know the action he had to do, but due to their being no confinements, interpret it in the way the actor felt their character to take it.

We also looked at Cicely Berry an incredibly influential lady. Cicely Frances Berry CBE (born May 17, 1926) is the voice director of the Royal Shakespeare Company & is world-renowned in her work as a voice & text coach. We started off the lesson by doing some of Berry's warming up exercises for the vocal chords.

Once we had completely Berry’s warm up we had to show and tell our individual performances that we started the previous week. We had to sit in the 'hot seat', say our name, age, what we do for a living, and then answer questions from the class. This task was to challenge our ability, and how we could adapt under pressure. It was also to see how involved in our characters we could get, as we need to get inside our characters when creating character animations. Overall I found the acting classes to be an inside into a different world, a world that will holey benefit my animation work. I am more relaxed to lose my inhibitions to get immersed into my characters I create for future work. I also feel more confident about timing and breathing which I can incorporate into my animation work as well.