blood sweat and tears feedback.

FINALLLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!! got my highest mark on bst. so happy with it because i worked my arse off for that, i think it was about time i was on the verge of giving up. I was completley convinced i couldn't do it and i was rubbish and i was wasting my time. I was obviously wrong i can do it. So happy with myself. Although i couldn't tell you if it's a 2:1 or whatever because they have changed the marking system but i got 70 out of 100 which is an A.

Postmoderism.

Been pretty busy lately even though i think i've only been into uni once or twice in the past week for lessons. But we have our hand in for our post modern essay next Friday so i'm trying to get my head around postmodernism, hyper reality and Jean Baudrillards simulacra. Starting to understand now but i've had to draw diagrams and mind maps to help me link every section together. 
   I decided that i would go with something i understood to make it easier for myself. The whole postmodern part of the essay is hard enough without it being something i barley understand to begin with. Anyway one of the movies we watched to go with the lectures was ' The Truman show' which i think almost every human being on this planet must have watched at one point. I'm trying to relate the idea thatTtrumans world has been created and isn't 'the real world' that we ourselves live in. It's all there in my brain but trying to get it out into words is the hard part. I understand what i mean by 'the real' and 'the real' but trying to explain that on paper is the hard part. Getting there slowly though.
     wish me luck.

BST.

Last week we handed in our Blood, sweat and tears work. This was a project in which we were given a poem Aunt fanny: the legend of a shirt by Thomas Ingoldsby (8pages bloody long). This is the story of a shirt and is set from 1802 to 1832. I tells the story of a young boys aunt who sets out to make him a shirt, throughout the story different things happen and it takes over 20years to get the shirt finished, in the end the shirt is hung over a chair in front of the fire to dry but ends up setting on fire as does the rest of the kitchen. We were to choose a stage of the shirt and create the shirt how we imagined it to be. This included plenty of historical research as the shirt had to be properly made. Along with lots of pattern cutting, machine and hand stitching and dyeing.
I chose to create my shirt right at the very end of the story , which mean the shirt was pretty much burnt to a crisp. This might sound easy right ? all i had to do was create this shirt and set it on fire. NO! the fabric i used pretty much melted as it was not 100% cotton. PROBLEM. I ended up testing out endless different brown and black dyes to get the right one. Testing out tea and coffee to stain the shirt. Burn tests etc etc etc. In the end i soaked it in tea. Added black and brown dye (which may i add took a while because i had to get it in the right places without it seeping into other parts of the shirt) to the pieces i wanted it to be on. I then ended up using in scent sticks to burn the shirt which took a while because they were so small and burnt slowly. So in the end i just burnt the shirt, panicked a little bit when it set on fire but hey. So here is a picture of my final shirt. Not very good quality because i took it on my phone but i will get a better one on when i get my shirt back!

Costume.

During our narrative an genre project we have to take everything into consideration. When designing the model box, set and props we also have to come up with costume designs. The hand in requires bible sheets for everything that is to be in the set along with costume and accessories. One of the first things i started to imagine when reading the story was how the costumes would look like (i just can't help myself). For the project we are working on this is probably a bar trait but i just can't help it. I automatically thought bigger the better, out there and over exaggerated. which lead me to using Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland  as a big inspiration for my work. Not only costume wise but set wise. The costumes are just truly amazing, i just love the way they are so out there, very very crazy and fun. The use of pattern and layers upon layers. Of course , it's something no one in their right mind would ever wear but isn't that what Alice in wonderland is all about anyway. A magical crazy world. This was my starting point for my designs. 

 I found this image of the Alice In Wonderland dresses at: http://www.examiner.com/women-s-fashion-in-los-angeles/alice-wonderland-costume-exhibit-at-fidm-downtown-la

Little Red Cap.

I decided to go with the story of 'Little Red Cap' which is pretty much the story of little red riding hood. I think the main reason i chose this is because it was one of the only ones that i read and could automatically picture what it could look like. It's also a very simple story, easy to understand and easy to adapt. the idea was to then go over the whole story and analyse how you may have each scene put onto stage, from that we then had to choose which scene we would make the model box for. I chose the scene in which red cap first enters the woods and the wolf appears and tells her to look around at the forest.

Grimm Tales

So i thought I would start with what i am currently working on. We have just had a hand in for a project named 'Blood, sweat and tears' ( i will post about this later on with work etc.) We are now more focused on our project 'Narrative and genre' this is concentrating on taking a piece of text and putting it onto stage. So far we have learnt how to analyse text, a lot of other technical stuff that i honestly can not remember the name of. But pretty much learning how to take the text and covert it to stage. Anyway we were given this book .........

Collected Grimm Tales by Carol and Duffy and Tim Supple.

This is pretty much self explanitory. A book full of 'Grimm tales' Fairy tales adapted to make them slightly more sinister and twisted. The book has both a 'story' version of the tale and a 'scrpit' version of the tale. Therefore we could read both and get the jist of the story as well as how it would be as a play. We then had to choose which one we wanted to transform into a production.

The whole idea of this project is to take the script, come up with ideas on how we picture it on stage. Then go on to create a model box of how we would have the production on stage. Now I'm sure a few people aren't familiar with what a model box is. It's pretty much a small version of what the stage will look like for the production. This includes everything from backdrops, set pieces, props and lighting. Something along the lines of this ....

First time.

Soooo I'm all new to this blogger stuff, tired it once before for group work and i got all confused. Hopefully i will be better this time round. Going to try and get some work up as soon as possible and backdate myself and get work from last year as well as this year on here.