Casino Royale Variety Performance

Today at college we had the privilege of viewing a fantastic variety performance from the cast of the up and coming performance of Casino Royale (not the James Bond film).  The stage was set as a casino, where in the middle of the stage the was a roulette wheel where the man with the light would spin it around and it would land on a number where there would be a performance completely different from the last. There was singing and dancing and a few random sketches. The performances were really camp: It was like Fame and Pineapple dance studios put together. Plus Wagbo!!!!!!
Performances:
The camp lion taming sketch was hilarious. There were 2 lion tamers called Hansel and Grettle who were insanely camp and absolutely hilarious. They were like Bruno and Louis Spence. There was so many innuendos it was totally hilarious; I was in stitches.
The performance of 'Big spender' was extremely saucy ;) There was lots of girls dancing wearing very little. They did a tribute to Abba by singing Money,money,money which was dressed down (or dressed up compared to other performances) with the most fantastic harmonies.
There was a man who pretended to be Mr. Bean. He didn't look much like him but he copied Rowan Atkinson's expressions really well and started to do his Mr. Boombastic dance which was fantastic.
There was tap and indian dancing. They were very good dancers but the noises of the tapping and jingly things totally did my head in!
I recommend that go and see the show because you will be amazed and in stitches. It's brilliant!!

Evaluation of Culture show.

We recently made a small installment of the BBC's Culture Show. In our programme we had to talk about the college before we would interview another student participating in our Creative and Media course. When editing our short film we used Final Cut Pro, Motion and Soundtrack Pro and Filmed it with Sony A1E cameras.

The SonyA1E cameras were brilliant. We were really lucky to use the cameras because they are fantastic quality and really expensive so i decided to present our piece instead of being the clumsy camera man and drop it. We found out about that the white balance would change if you filmed out of a window it would change to blue, we found this out when editing our video.

This is what we found out about filming: Composition is the placement of objects in the frame. The rule of thirds or 'center of intrest' is when you place your film into a 3x3 grid. The looking space is the place where the presenter is looking: this makes the picture less constricted and give the audience an awarness of the space and whats going on around them. Horizontal lines create stabillity and Verticals create strengh while Diagonal lines create a sense of drama. Lastly, Motion space is the empty space on the side where the subjects is walking, which heightens the feeling of emotion. 

When editing the vidoe we used final cut pro. I found this hardest part of the project and needed help from John. I reallly liked using Motion and Soundtrack. In motion we made a cool title for our show and took it a step up but making the soundtrack was my faourite part. I'm really intrested in  making music so I was really kean to contribute to the soundtrack. At first found it a sruggle to find a relevant tune to match the programme but I'm really pleased with the soundtrack.

We have uploaded our video on to youtube and I am very excited to see our project on their but I'm not too keen on people seeing my terrible side parting at one point in the video. Here is our completed project.

Tour of Stratford

Recently we went on a tour of Stratford on a bus and we visited Shakespeare's birthplace.
On the bus journey we learnt and found out a lot of things. We saw a flat top tree that had been around for a five hundred years. The tree was quite impressive but if i was making one of those audio guides for the bus I wouldn’t include this as it is just a tree. We learned that Shakespeare’s birthplace was sold a few hundred years ago for £3K. I found this fact quite interesting as it may not sound like a lot now but was insane amounts for back then. A man from Stratford came up with the idea to put frog saliva down throats if it was saw or they had a cold, this is where the phrase 'a frog in your throat' comes from and that some people slept on beds made from rope which is where the phrase 'good night, sleep tight' comes from were 2 more things that we found out. Kids had tilly willy ale and grown men had 8 pints of ale back in the day, salary is Latin for salt and people use to get paid in salt and that’s why we use salary now as a common substitution for wages were EVEN MORE interesting facts we found out.
On the tour we found out a lot of facts that were totally irrelevant to Stratford itself and found out little about Shakespeare, which is what most people would like to find out about when on a trip to Stratford.
When we arrived at the birthplace we watched some screens about Shakespeare himself for a while, this gave us a good introduction into his life and his plays. After this we moved on to the house itself. In the house we discovered that William's father was a glove maker and we found out about gloves and how gloves were made back then, I found this quite interesting purely because of the weird man who was giving the talk on them. Next we saw a timeline of Shakespeare and the entered the bedroom. In the bedroom we found out where the phrase ‘good night, sleep tight’ again… this made me quite disappointed as i was hoping to find out some more stuff about what it was like living back then, she also said something about it being important what colour your bed sheets were as they would keep spirits away but I didn't hear it properly as I was taking in the scenery of the room. We then moved on to the court yard where we saw a random performance of a drunken man taking a rollicking from his wife. The performance was well set out and funny, cheering me up from what hadn't been an exactly spectacular tour.
Overall I found the Birthplace better because I found the Bus journey a bit tedious. The bus journey gave you a good idea of what it was like in medieval times but I wasn’t in the mood for a boring history lesson with the woman with the most boring voice in the world so found it hard not to change languages to cheer myself up and I was also pondering the question of why do you have an open top bus if you could get whacked in the face by a tree where as the Birthplace you could be told it to your face and made it easier and a more enjoyable experience of learning about medieval times.