Unit 3 - Lesson 4

Lesson 4 - Character's Objectives
In this lesson we focused on finalizing our performances as we ran through every scene that our acting class had. One of the improvements that we were told about was linking ourselves with the character's objectives in the scene. Our group was told about the effect "Objectives" before this situation happened and learned that if you know what your character wants in the scene then you can connect with them even more and emphasise the character to the audience. Through body language and voices our groups were showing a drastic change in their performances and some of which created professional and high quality scenes. This is because they were showing the objective of the character by movement and vocals, my group also did the same and I will explain some of the techniques we used to illustrate this effect.    

One of the ways we connected with our characters was through physical movement. Instead of standing or sitting with a blank expression while my partner was speaking her part of the scene, I reacted to more or less every sentence she said. I could feel within me that my character's overall objective in the performance was to stay together with Sephy for as long as possible. For example, I showed pain in my body and facial expressions after the sentence that my partner stated, "...your a Nought and I'm a Cross and we can never be together...", as I felt it would reveal or make clearer to the audience that Sephy and Callum wanted to stay together no matter what, which is also Callum's objective. A second way we achieved this is the approach we took to setting up and staging our scene. We decided to split them up like the Noughts and Crosses with Callum sitting, facing away from Sephy of which was standing and looking towards Callum approximately 3 meters apart. However, the separation of the characters during this scene created an aura of lust and want for each other and emphasised that their love would be on another level and never taken down. On the other hand, we showed we are also desperate for each other in the scene and scared that society, the way it is at the moment, would never accept this true love. 

In conclusion, all three of these aspects revealed our character's main objectives and overall created a distinction worthy performance. All I can hope now is that our scene during the live event is the best it can be, with rehearsal and practice, I'm hopeful it will be.