In Preparation for the presentation we had a group meeting the week before during the holidays to cement our project idea and to divide up the talking up. We decided that seeing as everyone had their individual character that they had been working on it would make sense for everyone to introduce their own characters. Early on in the discussion someone made the suggestion to make a little introduction video of that character, as a kind of, online dating profile. So it was up to me to introduce the characters as I didn’t have designated character. My job was pretty simple, seeing as we had a multitude of writing from our group meeting it was almost a case of copying and pasting the idea from that. My main problem was that I had to keep it all short and concise because we had 5 minutes worth of video that we had to get through in a ten minute presentation.

Because some of the characters didn’t match the gender of their writer I was asked to step in and do some acting as the Stoner/Class clown in the Teen comedy genre. Niamh, who was writing the short script for me, sent through a draft of what she’d like me to say in the video. From there I was able to figure what kind of character she wanted. Niamh gave me some creative freedom with this, she said I was free to throw in a bit of improv in if I liked so I put in a reference to finding Nemo and tried to make it seem as natural as possible.

Here is the video that I did to introduce the Stoner character in our group project.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3atcmZODt1UWHdjMmcxd3hIcEk

I think it was definitely a big help being a part of the creative team to really understand exactly what Kind of Character Niamh wanted. Being in the meetings and knowing exactly how he fit into the big picture, what he needed to be like, everything thing that wasn’t necessarily in the script that I was reading off helped me out tremendously on delivering the final cut. The problem with this revelation is how to convey that type of understanding of the character to an actor that hasn’t been there during the development stage of the project. For instance when the stoner is explaining his nickname he gestures with his hand which reveal a lighter and a jay. This wasn’t in the script but is the type of comedy that we’d like to implement in the character, so we’ll need to figure out how we can convey those types of actions that make the character. I’m thinking perhaps a separate character briefing that we can give to the actor so that they know some background to the character that isn’t found in the script.