Monday 2 December 2013

Exploring our narrative, issues covered

For our narrative, we as a group wanted to explore issues in which is a current concern in our contemporary society. With this in mind, we wanted to ensure that this was highlighted in our narrative, in a sense as a way of raising awareness of such issues. In order to do this, we as a group began to think of how we could include these with supporting evidence, (need to justify why we have focused on such issues). These were the issues we chose to highlight:

  • Mental health (Schizophrenia). Here due to the age of one of our character (Flora), who has developed such illness, we wanted to ensure we had done in depth research as to when such illness begin. Before any research was done, we had we stated that Flora was 8, however after research we decided to change her age to 13. This comes down to the fact that research by NHS suggests 'illness begin by age 14'. Although NHS suggests such illness begin at the age of 14, due to the character of Flora we wanted to make her slightly younger to fit in with the child-like aspect, whilst evoking audience reaction with her sinister behaviour. This was also due to the classification of our production, which we are targeting the age range of 15, and thus needing to make the audience relate to the character of Flora.  http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2005/mental-illness-exacts-heavy-toll-beginning-in-youth.shtml


           
Here I looked into children with such illness and how they may act, to ensure I get accurate representation. This gave me an in depth understanding as to what courses schizophrenia, without giving false statement.Lastly this this gave supporting evidence that children do in fact have Schizophrenia, and thus enabling us to show why we chose to have Flora have such illness.  




          
Again I looked further into the illness of Schizophrenia, to have more understanding.

·         We also looked at the case of split personality, where we were influenced by ‘Psycho’ of 1960. However by making Flora to have this disorder would cause for too much confusion, along with having Schizophrenia. Furthermore there were variations of ‘Personality disorder’ ranging from A- C, because we didn’t want to portray the wrong image we didn’t want to offend anyone by making inaccurate portrays in our narrative. Such ‘disorder tends to have difficulty relating to others and usually shows patterns of behaviour most people would regard as odd’, which fitted in with this particular character. Contrasting this, other areas such as ‘feeling they cannot really trust their friends and associates’ didn’t portray Flora as we has imagined.
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Personality-disorder/Pages/Symptoms.aspx



            
Although not directly linked with the case of 'schizophrenia'. This gave me an idea on how we could direct our our actress, who would be playing the role of Flora (we may be taking some ideas from footage). I will be showing this to them during their auditing, which we would be conducting on Wednesday (4th December) on how they could possibly play this role. The reason as to why we’re doing an audition is due to the fact that, there has been much interest where I have pitched our narrative to drama students who have also expressed their interest in playing such role. 


·         Lastly with the rapid increase of domestic violence, where is suggested by BBC news ‘70,000 people suffer domestic abuse...every year’, which sadly affects children. We wanted to show this in our trailer, demonstrating the full effects it has on children, hence why we included this in our narrative through the character of Flora.  
Ironically research suggests those affected by domestic abuse go unreported due to the normality of it. However a woman who was in a former abusive relationship stated ‘It's imperative that the word of abuse, mental and physical, should be known all over the country just to make everyone aware of what's happening.’ Supporting our reasons as to why we wanted to include such act in our production, however in a horrific manner to make a point. Such take on events could support ‘Postmodernists’ interpretation, which is a theory that undermines the conventional narrative, which our group aims to achieve.

These are the links for reference (feel free to have a look)
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/192104.php

http://www.rethink.org/diagnosis-treatment/conditions/schizophrenia?gclid=CIzegsnH87sCFTMdtAodET8AOA


No comments:

Post a Comment