Planning

Idea

My group decided to perform the train scene and the leviosa scene from the first harry potter movie. We chose this because we are all familiar with the show and the characters so we could understand them and play them better than a character we didn’t know we also didn’t need to research the characters to understand them because we already knew them. We had a couple of other ideas before we settled on harry potter but most of them were more 2-person scenes and we needed something with 3 people. We discussed our ideas with Maddi and Felisha for feedback. They recommended that we chose 2 scenes rather than one so that way it is a bit longer and we could have all 3 of us talking for more of an even amount otherwise I would only be in it for less than a minute.

We chose to do our first scene in front of a green scene because that way we could just add it in because otherwise there was no other way we could add in a moving background through a window.  

context

The context of our piece is that Voldemort killed Harry Potter’s parents and tried to kill Harry but failed so Harry became famous and known as ‘the boy who lived’. Harry, Ron, and Hermine have been given their letter of acceptance into Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Ron is from a poorer family and has many siblings, everything he owns is a hand-me-down or is hand-made by his mother. Hermine has 2 muggle parents and getting into Hogwarts was very shocking for her so she wants to work very hard so she can do well in school and prove that it doesn’t matter that she is a mood-blood. I used the context of my character so I knew what hermines objective would be in both the scenes and what her overall goal is. by knowing what Hermines objective are it is easier to understand what she wants and how she would act so I can act her better.

Rehearsal

I used Stanislavski’s technique of who am I so I could better understand Hermine so I could play her better and more realistically. I also used where am I so I could understand how I would act in the setting. For the train, I was more casual because I was just talking to my peers but for the leviosa scene, I was more focused on what I was doing. I used objectives so I knew what I had to work towards in our scenes by knowing what I had to work towards it helped me know what my goal was and therefore how I should act.

To prepare for our performance we rehearsed as much as possible, learned our lines and thought about what we would wear for our costumes. The first thing we did was learn our lines because once we had our lines down it was a lot easier to rehearse. Then we rehearsed so we knew exactly what we were doing. After that we had rehearsed and felt prepared we thought about what we would use for costumes. For my costume I was going to wear the formal blazer and tie as the uniform because it was easy and had a resemblance to the robes in harry potter. In the end we just wore sports uniforms as the uniform. We were prepared for the performance because we had prepared well and practiced a lot.

Performance

Next time I would sit up straighter because Hermine is proper and especially in the leviosa scene because it would have shown that she was focused and what was happening. The editing went well we managed to clip it all together in a short period of time and also add in effects such as the background noise of the train.  

The best aspects of the performance were how I used my voice because I used an accent so I could portray Hermine better and make it more like the movie. I also used beats whenever the thought changed and paused to build tension in the scenes.

I learned how difficult it is to do the same scene multiple times the exact same from different shots. Because if we did something different it made it more difficult to edit and put together also for our second scene Jessie was wearing the glasses for one shoot and then wasn’t for another so when we changed angels she would go from wearing glasses to not having glasses on each was a bit strange. For me, I needed to improve what I did with my eyes because part of the time I don’t know where I was looking and it didn’t make much sense.