Oral reflection

Overall, I think my oral presentation was somewhat solid. I felt that I spoke clearly and at a good pace. However, I think I definitely struggled to find things to say or stumbled over a few words, leading to a lot of pauses and ums in the recording. While my presentation was well ordered and stuck to the list we talked about in class the day prior, I think I was a little disorganized while speaking, and felt I hadn’t prepared enough notes for the actual oral. Near the end of the presentation, I began to run out of things to say and tried to come up with some points to make to fill up the time, which led to the cohesiveness of the overall project to fall apart a little at the end.

Another fallacy of mine was that I definitely did not expand on the synopsis of my adaptive scene enough. While my notes did include a small summary of the scene, I instead spoke much too briefly on the performance, and only realized I had when I started talking about specific actions or purposes of some scenes after the fact. I am unsure why I skipped over this, but I hope the actual recording of the scene will be enough to make up for it.

A big failure on my part was my inadequacy to properly prepare beforehand. I had a draft on Tuesday morning that seriously lacked in all departments, length, direction, detail, and so on. Having a real draft by that time would’ve allowed me to be more confident today and better organized or practiced once it was time for the real presentation. However, listening to the practice orals yesterday in class definitely helped me think of things to say today, and I’d probably be much worse off without it.

oral draft outline

Oral presentation:

• The story depicts Guy’s frustration and anger, inferiority complex, jealousy, sexual frustration, and deteriorating relationship with his wife alongside a main plot involving his failing status as a man and how his son continues to succeed education-wise
• Dramatically, the story had scenes where Guy would internally reflect on his relationship with his wife in an objectively sexual manner, which i thought should be expanded on more, as it briefly mentions how he could “easier imagine his son’s mouth on her nipple instead of his own”. I wanted to explore this more, which had a side effect of a more original script
• Between page-stage, the hardest part about it was trying to get into character, as well as making it seem less monotonous or “same old story” every scene.

final draft reflection

I think I made some really good progress between the first project to creating this script and drafting it to the final piece which we shot yesterday (3/8/17). I think a lot of issues remained, but they’ve mostly been fixed or at least, less obvious and severe. One big point of improvement was definitely in my memorization of the lines, so I could focus more on the acting and how to properly portray my character, which was a persistent issue between Romeo and Juliet to this project. I think a lot of this was helped because we had to develop almost all of the script from scratch, as it was based off an idea which was briefly mentioned in the text and not extensively explored or touched on in the source. Because of this, the originality of the lines and flow of the scene itself was easier to understand and memorize, as the first project mostly had us taking lines from the text and simply rearranging it a little.

The scene itself was based on the brief passages in A Wall of Fire Rising, where Guy looks as his wife as they prepare for bed at night, and reflects on his relationship with her, how it has adapted and heavily transformed over the years. The problem was, while this was a topic or idea I wanted to explore and think about more, there just wasn’t a lot of source material to go off of. This might come with the drawback where our characters might be a little too one-dimensional, with Lili being too overbearing or caring too much for their son, or Guy too aggressive and switching between apologetic or angry and only those emotions.

Some other stuff that could use improvement would be inflection, facial expressions, and projecting my voice. I definitely had a lot of issues with projecting at certain points, and I felt like my facial expressions, and emotional tone in general, was inconsistent/didn’t flow naturally/was too neutral for most of the scene. I think I definitely was doing a lot better and made a lot of progress since the first scene. Somehow, I gained a little confidence between then and now, and having that small boost helped me get through this project, and I’m pretty proud that I didn’t flub to the point where I had to read off my script during the filmed scene like last time.