Month: April 2012

After hearing a story by Andy Jordan about the castle, we realsied we’d have to film there. We walked up yesterday to ask if it was allowable, and they said they needed to see documents from the university and a risk assessment.n I’ve filled out the risk assessment but it was difficult to try and foresee any and every accident possible. Here’s what I came up with.

 

Identify Hazard	Who might be harmed?	Risk	List any controls
Slips, trips and falls	Students, staff	Broken bones	Be aware of loose fixtures, wet floors and stray objects.
Being unaware of each other, the space, the cameras, the public	Students, staff, public	Breaking of bones and equipment	Exhibit special awareness, particularly around the public.
Breakage of historical artifacts/ structures	Students	Priceless damage to the castle or its belongings	Be particularly careful and acknowledge that without treating anything delicately it may cause damage.
Bumps on low ceilings, low hanging objects in castle	Students, staff	Head injuries	Make sure we bring sufficient light for dark areas and be aware of surroundings.

I will fully admit that upon first hearing about site Specific, I simply viewed it as just another performance, a perfunctory task in order to get a mark and nothing more. My opinion is quickly changing though. I realise this isn’t the same for everyone and maybe it’s only specifically to the group that I’m in but as Casey Wright- another member of my group- put it, we are “breaking out of our student bubble”.

This performance is forcing me to view Lincoln in layers. The first layer being that of what you can see immediately. The university, the town, the cathedral. The second layer being beyond that- beyond steep hill, down all the road that don’t lead anywhere, outside of the confinements of necessity. The third layer is the history, and this is the one I’m really enjoying.

I’m learning history doesn’t have to mean the stories of kings and castles, hundreds of years ago. It doesn’t mean wars and it doesn’t mean masses. The history of Lincoln is evolving in my mind with every story told because it adds another perspective to the places I wasn’t properly looking at before. The stories of normal people, of things you wouldn’t find written in books, of things that still make you think and still teach you that everything is a version of something else. I’m learning that Lincoln grows and changes, like every other place. However unlike every other place, I’m starting to learn to love and know what it was, and what it’s going to be.

As with any project, recently it’s felt a bit like a deflated balloon. After losing hope, losing steam and a fair bit of enthusiasm for this performance, I found it all renewed today whilst talking to one of the drama tutors, Andy Jordan. He not only gave us the kind of story we’d been hoping for all along; one that really sounded enchanting and interesting and spurred us to reevaluate Lincoln (which I feel was one of the points of this performance, not only to get across to the audience but also for us group members to achieve along the way), but he managed to give us the exact imagery that we could translate to film. I do have slight fears that if it takes up a lot of the performance that people will think that;s because we’ve been lazy with collecting more stories but it’s not true, it’s more of a star piece, the right amount of depth that I wanted to convey in our pieces.

Speaking of the film, it took a (very) long time but we finally got to grips with the editing software today. After hearing from a lot of people that iMovie on a Mac computer was the best software to create a semi-professional looking film, we tried it out. Macs are difficult to get used to. But I’m glad we set aside a lot today with the idea of nothing more to achieve than just to get our heads round iMovie, and with a lot of help from my good friend Google it worked. I know this isn’t an effort that’s going to show in the final film which is a shame but I’m glad I’ve got the skills now, especially as doing Drama I’m fairly certain that this won’t be the last film I have to make!

Our performance has evolved even further, as we knew it would. We’re now reaching the stages of filming, which is difficult because we don’t want the films integrity to be compromised by poor equipment or lack of professional skill. However I suppose the performance being titled “You Have Not Been Here Before” gives us artistic license and the ability and allowance to try new things.