Reflection of "Life as We Knew It"

This project was different from anything we've done all year. It entailed us getting a little creative with what we thought of in the fact that it was up to us to choose a book to work with. Normally when we act out a scene, it is out of a book that was assigned to us but this time this project was out of something we read on our own time, whether it be a poem, novel, short story, anything. I feel like it was really fun because instead of being limited by certain aspects, being the novel we read, it was fun to finally go and find a book or short story on our own and act it out. We acted out a book called "Life As We New It" by Susan Beth Pfeiffer, the story entails a little girl named Miranda, her older brother Matt, her younger brother Jon, her mother and her boyfriend Peter. An asteroid hits the moon so hard that it moves closer to Earth, therefore changing the weather, making it cold, very cold. Their family is out of the way from town and since the snow is piling up, cannot get there as it is a four mile trek. The family just basically start slowly dying as they cannot eat because they have to save food in order to survive. In our scene, we take certain scenes from before and after the incident and we basically start going after, before, after etc. In order to show this in our scene we used lighting changes, dimmer for after and brighter for before, we also tried to make our characters seem weaker in the scenes where we are reenacting the parts after the incident. The cast for scene was me as Matt, John as Jon, Grace as the Mother, and Maddie as Miranda. In order for all of the cast to have an equal amount of lines, we made sure the scenes focused intensely on one character, some characters got more than one scene that did this but for the most part all of the characters were accounted for and everyone had an equal amount of lines. I feel like as a group we worked well together, we clearly had good chemistry with each other and in acting it is understood that in order for a scene to be good there has to be good chemistry and with us, we all got along and were able to work well together. In total our project consisted of 8 scenes and was around 10 minutes long. Individually I feel like this scene improved my acting skills because I had to learn how to change emotions and the emotions I had to change back and forth between were quite different, in the before sequence I was a caring, loving older brother figure and in the after sequence I turned into an emotionless, hopeless figure who has lost all hope and was basically just waiting to die because his family was dying around him. Overall I feel like we did well on this project and it was really fun. Individually, I'm glad we did this project because it allowed me to explore different fields of acting and expand my views on what is possible for me as an actor, I was also able to improve and learn new things on emotion which is really good because I can use them in future productions. This was a very fun, creative project and I'd definitely do this again.