#narrativeinvestigation

[manny-illustration-year1]

NARRATIVE INVESTIGATION: STORYTELLING-

These little titbits are from the workshop with Jane, who’s a right firecracker and a half and imparted a lot of wisdom in a very short space of time. I liked writing the stories as it reminded me of creative writing in English, which I used to love, and hadn’t really had the opportunity to do in a while.

I really liked our snail story which I didn’t get to see performed as I had to go to an induction - but it was great writing something a bit crazy and just seeing where it ended up.

[manny-illustration-year1]

NARRATIVE INVESTIGATION: RESEARCH-

I really like this painting I did of my dad trying to order the pieces before the game had even started.

[manny-illustration-year1]

NARRATIVE INVESTIGATION-

These were our costumes for the Anne Haley play! We got the two Anne Haley’s to co-ordinate and wear red skirts with grey jumpers, we thought that this would make it even clearer to the audience that they were meant to be impersonating each other, and Anna-Beatrix wore a shirt and bought in glasses so she could really look the part as the snooty boss.

I needed to look like a male delivery man so I wore oversized clothing (as normal) and drew a face beard on my face with some eyeshadow and darkened my eyebrows. I also made a hand-held delivery signing thing which I kept trying to give to Anne Haley despite the fact she wouldn’t take it.

I think the costumes definitely made it more believable and therefore funnier, especially as I made such a dashing young man.

[manny-illustration-year1]

NARRATIVE INVESTIGATION-

For the performance aspect we chose the sentence ‘This has got to stop’. I was also late to this brief due to another workshop but luckily my group (Cheyanne, Anna-Beatrix and Sun) all had a good idea in place. 

Rather than write out the script first we decided to do things the straight forward way and record first, write second. They already had a really fun basic idea of stolen identity which we expanded by adding clues to her insanity before the reveal. We assigned roles and had each person flesh-out their character, and stated a brief idea of what should happen before we began recording: a package, cat, no stairs, giving water instead of tea, no coat hangers, no cat, refusal to cooperate, call boss, real Anne Haley comes in, ‘This has got to stop’ - and just ran with it.

I think this method worked really well as we’d basically written the script in under 10 minutes and as it was so natural it made it easy to remember later on.

It went really well and we all remembered our lines and I think it managed to capture ‘madness’ really well as you had the audiences reaction and also the delivery man’s reaction at being stuck in such a strange situation. I think Cheyanne played Anne Haley superbly and we very good at being overly smiley and frantic, changing to demanding. 

The other performances were also superb and it was lovely to watch everyone else! Really enjoyed this one.

[manny-illustration-year1]

NARRATIVE INVESTIGATION-

This is a fold out video of the ‘A fridge could be...’ book. I think if we could've had less images we would've had the inside as one big image so you could use it more effectively as a poster. I think more effort from my part could've been placed on the font in the middle (I do like the hand-written look I just think it could've been done with more care).

I did try and push myself with my images by downloading some photoshop brushes to create a hand-done look and I think I managed this to some degree of success but it still needs more work and trialling,

[manny-illustration-year1]

NARRATIVE INVESTIGATION-

A fridge could be...

During this week I had several inductions which was unfortunate as I think I would’ve understood this brief a little better if I’d been there to listen to Jane. As it was, I arrived at the end so my very nice group of Belle and and co. adopted me and explained that we going to make a book using an item as the starting point. They had already been thinking about using a fridge and I thought it was a very good idea.

We begun by listing several items that a fridge could be before dividing the list between us - each taking one at a time so we could get at least a couple that we had good ideas for. We then discussed how it was going to look and we decided that we wanted it to be two-tone so it would look together and cohesive (also in case we had time to mono-print it). We also had the idea to create a fold out book as we thought it’s be nice if It could be a poster afterwards, also as we liked the element of it becoming a bigger object. 

I think we executed this well, however if I had realised that it was meant to be a children’s book I think I would've done this a little differently - giving it more of a front cover and writing the sentence ‘a fridge could be’ on each page rather than just having the image. I don’t think we’ll remake this later, but it was a good exercise and it definitely got the creative juices flowing, and I am more inclined to make another book.