Explain your character's who, what, why, where, and how. How did the photograph help you decide the direction of your monologue? What were some of advantages/disadvantages of writing/creating this monologue from scratch? Discuss any challenges you faced with this project?
14 comments:
I loved it. Especially since I had an AWESOME picture (Thanks, Jake!) I was really able to have fun with it. After I performed, most of the tips i received had to do with my inability to really get deep into the character. I hope that I will be able to improve on that because...that's the whole basis of acting, right? Anyway, even though it was hard to be an old homeless man, I really had fun with the assignment.
Sarah, stole the first comment form me... :(
In my monolouge. My character didn't really have a name. In my monolouge i am talking to a therapist explining how I was different from the begining. My character was a young boy with girly characteristics and who found himself to be gay. Later on in life he realized he as happier as a drag queen. He was missing something his whole life and being another person... a drag... Because he was different (gay) during his teenage years he was abused verbally and phiscally. When he found himself happier as a drag queen, he was badly beaten by a man coming home from work. All because he was different.
The photograph of my character didn't really help other then the fact that she looked different. And today in society being different often creates problems.
The only disadvantage i found with creating a monolouge from scratch was that i couldn't think of what to write about and how to write creativley; enough to get the attention of the audience. The advantage of creating my monolouge from scratch was that i could write about anything i wanted to. It gave me a chance to use my creative side. I liked that we could write our own monolouge.
A challenge i faced with this project was again was what to write about, but it eventually came to me. Another challenge was really connecting to the charcter because she'd been through things that i haven't and that i couldn't really create or set a certain mind set with. I must a problem with the whole privacy in public thing because when I practiced in privacy i could cry without trying and connect more to the character but when performing on stage I felt like i didn't get the same emotions out of myself as i did in pravicy...
I really enjoyed this project :)
This assignment was pretty challenging for me. I think thebiggest challenge I had was the fact that my character was a girl. When we were told to pick a picture, I didn't think we were going to have to portray the person we chose. Once I knew that I did not want to turn around and pick another picture, but instead I decided to work through the challenge and see what would come of it. Another challenge I had was the fact that the picture was of a little girl who probably was not old enough to speak or express emotions that were necessary to complete the monologue assignment. So, I decided to make this character an older girl simply so that she was able to speak and express emotions. Next, I decided to incoorporate this picture, which was a major part of the assignment, by having it be a picture of my character when she was a little girl. My character's motivation for looking at this picture was becuase she was pregnant. She was fifteen years old and pregnant. The monlogue I wrote takes place in her room. She is speaking to her mother and asking for her forgiveness and for her love at such a hard time in her life. She needs her mother's love and support to get through this terrible time she is about to embark on. This photograph was really the basis for my monologue and ended up being used in the monologue. At the end of the monologue my character rips up the picture which repersents the end of her innocence and the fact that she will never be able to be like that girl in the picture ever again. Overall I enjoyed workign on this project becuase this was my own work. The advantages to writing my own monologue was that I was creating the character so I really was able to get inside her head without a problem and really create what she was thinking and feeling. A disadvantage to this is the fact that sometimes I am not very creative. It was a little difficult to come up with a story line that was really intense and worthy of a monologue but in the end I feel like I was successful in finding this story to tell through my monologue.
My character has a long story behind her. One that was woven into the monologue without actually coming out and saying it. It was only implied. And i think knowing that much backstory really helped me know this girl. It was mike hirsch who made me do it that way. He literally made me write out her ENTIRE life story (no joke) and i think that made it much better for me to perform her because i felt as if i actually knew her (or for that moment WAS her). The photograph could be interpretted many ways pretaining to who that girl might be but when i looked at it i saw only one type of person and i just ran with that and hoped it worked. I consider myself a good writer, it's one of my strong points. HOWEVER for some reason i'm not a good writer when it comes to things like this. isn't that ironic? how i am bad at writing things i would actually want to read and perform? strange. My biggest challenge as the class saw was actually doing it. it took me about 3 days (if i'm remembering correctly) passed the date of when i was supposed to go to actually go and do it. and of course after i did i was releived. Okay so i'm going to end this because it's already too long. <3
My character was a young girl whose best friend recently died after being in the hospital for an amount of time. She would bring him a lollipop every day and only after he died did she realize that he had not been eating them. She found all of the uneaten lollipops under his hospital bed. She took them with her to his funeral and sneaked into the bathroom with them so she could be alone and "talk" with her friend who had died. She felt that by speaking to him through the lollipops she could feel whole again and let go of her grief. The picture that I chose guided me to this story because the young girl had a look in her eyes that could just make one cry by looking at her. I didnt exactly like writing my own monologue because it made me feel like I was being judged not only on my acting but on my writing as well. It really put me out of the situation and made it extremely difficult to get into character. I ended up changing my monologue last minute to something that was easier for me to perform because i didn't have to try very hard to get into character. The girl in my new monologue was already nervous so it wasn't hard for me to portray because i felt the same way. I almost wish I had done my lollipops monologue because it was truly touching and I could have done it well had I been able to get into character knowing that the monologue was my own creation.
My character was a dad who lost his son recently and before that his wife from cancer. He wants to kill himself because he can't take life anymore. At the top of the empire state building. He used the elevator to go to the top. It gave me for a dramatic suicide because he's on top of the empire state building. Advantages more freedom and disadvantages i can't write anything by myself. It was hard to memorize even though i did it myself and should be easier since i did but Katie helped too so maybe its just a regular monologue that is hard for me to do usually.
The character I created for my monologue was named Detective Funn. In the piece I created he was just making a journal entry of a recent case he was on. The photograph definitely helped give me the setup for my monologue. The man in the picture looked just like a detective who was talking into something, I just came up with what he had to say. For some reason I imagined him doing a private audio journal, the challenge was making it something interesting. With my character being a detective, it seemed like having him blog about a case he was on would be the most interesting and fun. I had a really in depth layout for what I wanted to do. But time went by too fast, and before I knew it, it was the week of presenting. I still had no idea of how it was going to officially end, so I gave it a simple cop out ending of just making it all an April Fool's joke. I kept reading it over during that week, and for some reason I didn't like it, but obviously there was no time to rethink and rewrite a whole new monologue so I stuck with it. But sometimes I have found that even my jokes of the simplest humor, many have found really funny, so I just decided to wing what I had, and hope that everyone would enjoy the bit more than I did. Once I started performing I don't think I was anymore than two lines in before everyone already started laughing. From that point on I had a good feeling about the rest of it. So I belted the rest of the piece out, and to my surprise everyone loved it. Along the way I did add a few small things to add to the humor, which some bits worked and others didn't. In the end though it seemed like everyone enjoyed the bit, and I think my favorite part about it was just the fact that this was a character that I made-up entirely on my own, so the monologue itself was very easy to remember, and this has definitely been one of the more enjoyable assignments throughout the year.
~Christie Hackett~
WHO: So my character was a young woman in her twenties who is kindof a control freak, and she gets really upset when people try to tell her what to do.
WHAT: My character had anorexia, and her doctor is trying to make her eat.
WHY:If she dosn't eat, she'll die.
WHERE: A mental hospital.
HOW: My character explodes during the monolauge, which is pretty much about how fed up she is with all these people telling her what to do.
So the picture part was cool, but I thought of a character a bit before I got a picture, so I think I cheated. ^^! I liked writing the monolauge, that part was really fun, but I think the fact that I wrote it made it harder to perform because it was pretty embarassing for everyone to see something I wrote.
My character for the monolouge was a runaway bride. The picture was a woman in a big white dress running along a beach, so I assumed runaway bride. Some advantages to writing your own monologue were that if you screwed up no one would know unless they were looking at your script. Some challenges I faced were I rewrote the monologue about 8 times before finally settling on one that I liked. This was probably my favorite assignment this year and I loved the emotions this character let me use.
Vicky B.
This monologue was really difficult for me to do. At first I was really unsure what sort of picture I wanted to do or even what kind of monologue I wanted to write. I have so many internal conflicts going on in my head that I didn't know where to start with it. So I the monologue itself explained pretty well who my person was, where she was and why she was there. Anyone whose experience rape could certainly go through those mental relapses and experience some kind of need or even some kind of help. The photograph I picked really helped me to pick up the conflicts I wanted to go with, along with some of the starting details of the way I did things. The advantages of doing something like this is the total leeway you have with the character and the entire story as a whole. You get to just play with it. However, this can also be really difficult if you don't know where you want to go. All in all I think I did pretty well and am looking forward to doing something similar for the actual final exam of the class.
The picture was of a woman and a young girl, and they both looked really happy together, and it reminded me of an old picture of a daughter and a mom. i guess i was talking to a shrink or something about me and my moms relationship before she died. my character didnt really have a name, but she was about 16 years old. this project was sort of easy for me because i studied the picture for like 5 minutes, and the idea for the monologue just poppped into my head. i really liked this assignment, and i had fun writing it.
At first i didnt like this because my picture was stupid and it jsut looked like a bratty girls myspace pictures but then i worked it into an awsome daddy rape murder monologue which freaked out my parents and besically i loved it. It was easy to memorize because i wrote it. I enjoyed this because i got to create my our character who was really all mine.
This is SHAUNA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This was my favorite thing we have done so far. I absolutely loved it. I was at first going to make my monologue sad and depressing but i saw everyone doing that and decided to go the other way and write a comedy. I was nervous because I'm not really a "funny" person but everyone was laughing when I did it so I guess I didn't do as bad as I thought I was going to do.
My problem is my confidence. I have no confidence when it comes to acting. I doubt myself before I even get on stage. I've always been that way. I wish my confidence would kick in sometime soon before the year is over.
Also, to make it better, I think I could of made it a bit longer. That probably would of been a good idea.
Overall, I thought this monologue was a lot of fun. It gave us a change to do something that we wanted to do not just what was written on a piece of paper. Two thumbs up for making us do this SUNNYYYYYY! LOVE YAAAAAAAAAA
I'm out.
Well the monologue was very interesting and i loved it, it was so funny and i enjoyed it. thank you
- Ian Murphy your favorite student!
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