Story and messages communicated

Okay, to be totally honest, I don’t have a clue what is meant when asked ‘what story and message did you communicate and how?’ However, I will give it an educated – or as close to smart as I can – guess and let you know as much as I can, as to the ‘message’ we tried to give to the audience of our short clip…

…well…

…erm (see what I mean by as close to educated)…

…Well, the moral of the story was meant to be – try hard at school. When the teachers want to see you in their office, or whatever it is they do that you think as nagging, they are trying to help you. Teachers are not here to make our lives harder, they are trying to help and when we act as the character Bima played did (which is most people) we are making their lives harder. And just because a student gets work in on time, it does not mean that they are a ‘fucking suck up’.

I thought that we used mise en scene rather well in order to make this scenario as realistic as possible. We moved things around in the business room to have a separate desk at the front and borrowed things from our head of Sixth form’s office – Flower, tissues – and then threw a pile of books on the edge and some paper work – the script to be precise – to make it look a little more like an office. We did initially plan to just use Miss Menzie’s office but it was too small to fit everything in and get good angles with the camera. It was also too dark, this was not supposed to be a nasty scene, we wanted the audience to stay in the feeling of calm.

I think that we got the moral of the story across due to the script and the teacher’s – me – reaction. The teacher was as nice as possible to the student, clearly just concerned about her and the student snaps at everything the teacher says and very rudely walks out before the conversation was over.

As the teacher I tried – not exactly a drama student – to keep sympathetic expressions on my face and for most of the times that I was responding there was a medium close-up on my face to show this to the audience. There were also over-the-shoulder shots on Bima’s character to show how little she cared through her body language.

We were very careful when using our body language. We made sure to have the rebellious student always leaning away from the teacher, showing to the audience that she did not care about the teacher, she barely made any eye contact. The eye contact could be construed as the student lying - maybe she was having problems at home at the teacher was right in trying to help. The lack of eye contact could also be construed as the student just not paying attention or caring about what the teacher is saying to her. As the teacher I tried to be more formal at the beginning – keep it business like – but as the scene progresses it is like my mask crumbles. I lean toward ‘Mercedes’ to show to the audience that, as a teacher, I really do care about this student and her well being. There is also a medium close-up that shows the annoyance some teacher’s feel when their tolerance for some students falls to pieces and they are just getting annoyed with the way they are treated. This is also shown as the volume of my voice slowly builds.