Learning Outcome 1

Sources: themes eg social, cultural, historical, ethical, spiritual and/or moral issues; textual eg autobiographical material, literary and non-literary text, poems, stories, dance notation, music scores, sheet music; visual eg painting, postcards, photographs, artefacts; aural eg music, audio recordings, live sound; media eg films, videos, newspaper and magazine extracts Exploration: eg exercises, improvisation, research, discussions, idea and thought mapping, try-outs

Planning

After being put into a group by our teacher and told the brief of Conflict and Peace performances, we began discussing our roles in the band and brainstorming ideas. We first decided who would be playing which instruments, and then went on to discuss ideas for the conflict performance. We decided that Teddy would play electric guitar, Emma would sing, Spencer play bass, I would play drums, Sophia trumpet/cornet and Charlie rhythm guitar.

We then decided to make written notes on this, which I took down and later wrote up. We decided that it would be a good idea to make a Facebook page in order to stay in contact and collect our ideas together out of college. Here is a screenshot of our dedicated page with my written up notes uploaded!

We started brainstorming themes for the video and song we would compose, and relating these ideas to how they would work both visually and as music. Most of the ideas here were by me and Emma. You can see the themes in the image. We then began coming up with ideas for the music we would write to accompany the video. We each came up with ideas such as those you can see written on the plan, such as playing in a minor key to suit the mood of the piece.

To address the implementation of dance and choreography to our performance, we started thinking about audience participation and how we could do this. We discussed clothing and came up with various ideas for conflict as oppose to peace.

Some of our ideas:

• Wear black for conflict, white for peace
• Wear multi-coloured for peace
• To add to the black, we could each wear one item of camouflage clothing (My suggestion)
• Wear uniform of some kind

This could tie into the choreography, i.e. changing our clothes between the two songs to emphasise the contrast between to two pieces.

Finally, we allocated roles for each of us before the next meeting. These roles were starting points and enabled us to effectively progress the task in hand by all tackling a different aspect of the organisation and covering everything from collecting conflict videos from YouTube to writing the lyrics of the song. Once Teddy had made the Facebook page, we then began discussing ideas and organising ourselves through this Facebook page.


Further Planning

A lot of the planning from this point up until the actual performance happened on Facebook. Here I have some screenshots of some of the posts.

I then made two pages on Facebook - one for conflict videos and one for peace videos. This way we could all post suggested videos into a place where it is easy to see them and keep them in order. We could then discuss and comment on good ones or bad ones accordingly.

 

Here are some more planning and organisation posts:

As you can see, I made sure, along with some of the others such as Teddy and Spencer, that we stayed very organised on Facebook. In the end, although I was relying on everyone else to collect conflict and peace videos, I ended up collecting quite a lot of them as well. Spencer and Teddy were very helpful however, as well as some videos posted by Emma and Sophia.

I did all the editing on my laptop using Sony Vegas as you can see in this image:





















I did the same for the Peace Video.

I was partly influenced by this video for my conflict one. I thought it was very effective having the lyrics going across the screen, however as a group, we decided it was best to not have the lyrics on the screen as they would distract the audience too much.