Task 1- Collaboration and independence

 The expectations of producing a collaborative piece of work

When working on a collaborative task the main thing you need to focus on is communicating. We need to make sure that we’re constantly informing each other of what’s going on so there’s no mixed signals or understanding. When people aren’t communicating with each other things go wrong and that’s what we need to avoid. Another reason communication is SO important is because we need to be making sure that everybody is comfortable with everything, we don’t want anybody to feel pushed out. Communicating is also extremely important when in a scene, you need to be listening and responding/ reacting at all times for the scene to be realistic, it’s not just about memorising lines and staging. You have to make it flow and you have to put heart in it. For Blood Brothers, which is our current show, there’s three casts which means there’s another two people playing the same role as me. The three of us spend time together in rehearsals discussing costume, line learning and helping each other with scenes. This is good because we’re all helping people but then our performances are still individual and unique to one another whilst still correctly playing the part. We even made a group chat for all of the Mrs Lyons and Mrs Johnstone where we were all putting in our show size to see if we could share shoes because there’s no point in us all buying them and wasting money when we could share. It makes the project feel a lot less of a challenge knowing that you’ve got people listening to you and supporting you. It’s also very important to be listening to the directors and communicating with them any issues you’re having. In our class we’re always giving feedback and it’s very common for Kelly, Kane and other students to just shout out a bit of advice that you quickly take in and act on whilst still doing the scene, this makes it a lot easier to quickly change you’re mistakes and make sure it’s a show everybody is proud of.  The best projects I’ve worked on are the ones in which everyone has a say, a project can only become better with more creative minds in it, we need to make it a safe and comfortable environment for our peers to express their creative ideas. Of course, we don’t have to use every idea that’s thrown around however, you have to keep an open mind to all ideas and work together to create the best outcome. 

I’m on the marketing team and communicating with everyone is very important. If we don’t communicate we’ll end up doing the same job twice which is unnecessary or accidentally missing out jobs completely which we can’t afford to do. We communicate in our group chat and also in person when we get together and discuss what we’re doing and how we can help each other. We discuss new ideas that we wouldn’t have came up with on our own and it just makes it a better and easier experience. That’s why I think communication is the most important part of collaborating, it makes it a safe, comfortable, fun environment with the most creative outcome.

Independent 

Collaboration is great however, there are lots of things that I can do in my own when I get home without the help from others. For example, I’ve been researching actors who have played mrs Lyons in the past. I’ve been reading all about my character and studying what drives her to do what she does. For an example, the evil v desperate and doing it out of love or hate debate I’ve been really looking into and actually having a great time finding out more about my character. For my costume I’ve researched what was worn on western  shows so it can look the most accurate. I’ve been doing accent research and taking inspiration from Kiera Knightley who has a very posh accent as well as Kate Winslet. I also watched Notting hill to see which accent they had in it. I also watched videos of the show so I could make sure it is correct because people spoke differently in those days. I’ve been spending nights listening to music and learning lines and running lines. Singing the songs from the show for arrows Willy Russel piece. I’ve been doing research of the themes shown throughout the play like superstition and violence. I also had to research what it was like to live as higher class in Liverpool in those days. For some reason the play ‘An Inspector Calls’ comes to mind.  Even though it was set way before I feel it shows a similar contrast. I needed to do research on the context and on the full background of the play and why it was written. All these things I could easily do alone and it’s things I can be getting out with outside of college hours. I think it’s good to be independent and get things sorted on you’re own for certain things. I struggle to concentrate on writing and research when I’m not on my own so personally it’s best for me to just knuckle down and do it independently.