Progress Blog #3

During this week, I really tried to focus and dedicate as much time as I could to learning the final monologue in the scene and finalizing the blocking in our scene.

In the beginning, I was struggling with learning my lines. Shakespearean language is challenging, but I love having to push myself  to memorize them. That being said, I found three strategies that helped me learn them.

The first, was writing and re-writing the lines. This is muscle memory, I feel that it helped me make the necessary, beginning steps to learn them. The second strategy that I used was recording my lines, and relistening to them. While this did not help as much, I still think it is good to hear yourself on tape delivering you lines so that you change any habits you don’t like. For example, I found that I was talking too fast on most of my line. I knew this was something that I had to work on, but I did not fully understand until I heard myself speeding through the lines. The third, and most helpful tactic I used, was simply saying one line at a time, and gradually adding another as I went. I would keep going back and repeating the lines, and I think this was the most helpful.

Now, I feel that our scene flows more smoothly because we all know our lines very well. After we were able to memorize them all, we were able to add in emotion and body movements to help add emotion to the scene.

However, it is very apparent that our blocking was the biggest challenge of this week. Whenever we ran through the scene, we would have to stop, and discuss how to fix our blocking. Ideally, our blocking should have been finalized last week. I feel that our scene is behind the others in our class because of it. Even though we are challenged with figuring out our blocking, I know that my group wants to make the scene as perfect as it can be, and I hope that we will be able to figure it out before our final draft. I think we could achieve this if we were to run through it, over and over, until we decided on what works, and what we want to keep in the scene.     

I look forward to filming our final draft later this week. I hope that we will be able to make our scene as tight as possible with better blocking, and line memorization. In the past, I have been in scenes where my group has struggled with both of these aspects, and the final draft always turned out better than I could have hoped. That being said, I have a feeling a feeling that our Romeo and Juliet Scene will turn out great. I have loved working in this group and finding out ways to overcome our challenges. Hopefully, our scene will not be hindered by awkward blocking, but instead will feel natural and flow smoothly.