Into the New

The past week has been very interesting and more diverse than our typical week at the academy. On Monday we had a lesson with Andy where we discussed genre and the generic conventions found within different types of films. We watches small exerts from a western, a gangster film, a screwball comedy and a musical. We then had to identify some of the elements that indicated to us that a film belonged to a particular genre. For example we could easily identify the film ‘Stagecoach’ as a western because of the typical iconography associated with the genre being present. The film contained cowboys and Indians, guns and other weapons, horses, stereotypical cowboy costumes such as boots and cowboy hats. I enjoyed this class even though I already covered some aspects of this lesson within my Alevel classes at sixth form, however I am looking forward to exploring genre and representation in further detail.

On Tuesday we split into our groups to work on the ‘Home’ projects. Our group met to discuss our ideas of what we wanted to film and organize the sequence of the short film. After our meeting we went down to the kit room to meet the rest of the class, we collected the kit we would require for our Into The New shoot and transported in to the ‘Arches’ where we would be filming for the next few days. When we arrived we were shown around the building and given a health and safety induction. I was really impressed by the venue, I had never been to the Arches before but I thought that it was a really nice location and was looking forward to filming there the following day.

Wednesday was quite a busy day as in the morning we had another meeting regarding the ‘Home’ project. By this point we had a really firm grasp of our idea and our goals were really to sort out the technicalities of our idea. While me and Michael went away and did a storyboard the others worked on organizing a location to shoot in and called up actors. At about 4pm we made our way to The Arches where we were going to be shooting this evening. The team I would be shooting in would be made up of me, Kelsey, Sam and Michael. After we were shown the location we would be shooting in we had to set up all of our equipment in time for the performance. This did not cause any major problems, as setting up the kit has become more of a second nature as we have now had lots of practice. We were not really briefed about what performance we were going to be filming. All we were aware of were the frightening stories that we had heard about the CPP performances the year before, many of these involving collecting blood and sticking biscuits in places they don’t belong. However I kind of anticipated that these were stories that had been exaggerated or at the very least were one off occurrences. However after filming several performances I cab see that many of the rumors are in fact true. It wasn’t that I didn’t like or enjoy the performances that we watched, its just that some of them appeared somewhat pointless. It seemed that in all but one of the acts we were told to film, the artist used nudity to shock the audience. It seemed the performance didn’t really have a point, it didn’t tell anything to the audience, it did not seemed to tell a story or have a particularly strong message. I think that the nudity and other forms of abstract self-expression would not bother me, and may even improve or add to a performance if the art actually had a purpose. In several forms of abstract theatre that I have seen before, the artists used a variety of weird and unusual techniques within a performance, however more often than not there is a reason behind these techniques and they often symbolize something. However in the performances that we witnessed I could not really see a reason behind many of the actions taking place. All of the performances involved the actor taking off all of their clothes. It seems like this is an overused technique and they are only doing it for the sake of it, or to add a shock factor to their piece. Time after time the main focus was the artist and their body and the ‘exploration between nature and the body’ or other generalized statements that could mean almost anything. I was disappointed with some of the shows that I watched, I am sure they are very good when looking at them via the standards of the CPP course and I am sure they fill the assessment objectives required. Its just that I had heard so many negative things being said about the CPP course and I was hoping that these negative ideas would be washed away when seeing the performances first hand. I have seen some abstract performances that have been really interesting although the things we filmed on Wednesday and Thursday didn’t really appeal to me.

However I do think that it was beneficial to film the performances. Even though this is not the type of work I hope to be doing in the future, it is always good to use the kit and it felt nice to work in a professional environment and be filming live. It was also nice to have some variation within the week and spend a couple of days in a different location. However I think the images of a naked man wrestling with a log, a woman on a plate of glass covered in flowers, and a naked woman eating sand will be imprinted in my mind for a very long time.