Ben's Marvellous Memories Made Through Acting

1. Critically evaluate own strengths and ambitions to support own development and meet identified goals. As an actor, I feel my strength is playing more awkward characters, as I can pull from my experience of being quite awkward myself, allowing me to be completely realistic with my performance.  I believe this strength was shown the best during The Ghost Light Tours, as my performance as The Sceptic, where I spent most of my time guiding the audience trying to keep them calm by making awkward jokes and trying to rationalise everything that happens.  However, a weakness I would like to improve on is my acting for film as I believe I haven’t fully developed my skills on that front.  I tend to struggle a lot more with film, due to the nature of it, how it is split up during scenes so it is difficult to remain in the headspace of the character I am playing when the camera is moving to a new position.  Furthermore, I find it difficult to focus and stay in character with ...

Monday 20th of January Today we focussed on trusting our classmates by doing a series of warmups linked to having faith in each other.  The first task was to lock hands with a classmate and both lean backwords, providing each other with counterweight. This led us into getting into bigger and bigger groups and all leaning back, putting our full trust in each other, even raising a leg, going up to groups of 5.  We then split up into 4 groups and played a game of imaginary tug of war.  This helped improve our awareness of our classmates as we had to know when to move in correlation to our opposing team.  After this, we got into groups of 5, where we made a devised piece based on the characters from "Normalised" to help build context for characters and the story in general.  My groups scene was an evening in Colm, Jamesy and Bo's house, set at a dining table, where it showed Colm get abused by his father, also explaining what led to their mother abandoning them, lea...

Subtext Mapping Task: Scene 9. (MY SUBTEXT ADDITIONS ARE IN BRACKETS IN BOLD) Jay is nursing a bloodied nose. He has his head back. Matt is feeding sheets of toilet roll to him as he dabs at his nose. Sam is there, mic out and at the ready. Maddie enters, takes in the scene. Maddie: What happened. Matt: He got jumped by Jamesy and his gang.  (Jay could interrupt with his next line) Jay: And Bo. Told you.   (Jay feels like he was always right about Bo so is giving Maddie a hard time for not believing him.  To portray this he could roll his eyes at Maddie.) Maddie: Mate I’m so sorry. Maddie hugs Jay. Sam: I need to interview you about this Jay. Jay: I told you Sam, no.  (Jay is frustrated at Sam for constantly overstepping his boundaries to show to the world, so could say this through gritted teeth to avoid getting himself too angry at Sam.) Matt: From now on anywhere you go we go too. Jay: Seriously Matt? I don’t want you to be my bodyguard. I can’t live like tha...

For part of Unit 11, we had to focus on doing a duologue, which was chosen from the musical "Dear Evan Hansen".  Me and Layla chose to be partners as the scene depicted Evan and his mother during an "argument". Part 1: In this scene, Evan is confronted by his mother for always sneaking out under the excuse of him staying at his friends, however he fires back during the argument, believing she doesn't spend enough time with him.  This takes place in their living room after Evans lies were revealed to Heidi, his mother, showing moments of anger between the mother and son.  Heidi intends to get Evan to explain why he snuck out to see another family, and is hurt by his actions and tries to convey that to him, however, Evan doesn't want to hear what his mothers saying, so eventually lashes out and purposely says things he knows will hurt her.  This is a very emotional scene as Heidi is very clear on her opinions about the situation, where as it seems Evan struggl...

Throughout my first year on the acting course at Stockton Riverside, I have had my acting skills challenged and have been stretched in every project I've taken on.  During this year, I have had the pleasure to portray a range of characters, with differing ages, ideas and mentalities, all of them being incredibly fun to perform and helped me grow an incredible amount from the beginning of the year.  My growth in this year was also assisted in the numerous extra curricular projects I took part in, from writing my very own script for New Views to participating in student films.    From the start of the year, our very first project was already taking place in a proper theatre, The Globe, which already was the most professional place I could only of dreamt at performing in before this.  This project was called "Ghost Light Tours" an interactive piece of theatre where guides led the audience through The Globe, showing them pieces of history involving horror elements, ...

One of my objectives for this performance was to portray a range of different characters while making them distinctive despite most of my roles being children.  This was achieved as my two children roles were roustabout and a perfect child, so I could play them completely different.  As a perfect child, I made sure all my movements were always necessary and were the same as everyone else in ensemble, whereas with my roustabout, I was completely erratic, running around the stage and starting fights with the other children.  Therefore, even if some of the audience recognised me from the earlier scene, it would be clear I was a new character due to my actions on stage.   I found out of all of my characters, I believe me and the audience were able to emotionally connect to the parent I played in the song "Toys".  As the parent, I conveyed how exhausted I was with my children, having to chase after them and take Toys out of their hands that they've ripped off th...