9/17
I think the ultimate goal of “Lopate Yourself as a Character” is to make people aware of how important it is to create a realistic picture of yourself as a character for an audience to read about. When writing my memoir I plan on making sure that my “I” in it is a character with background that can be read about, because even though I know about my own background, my audience may not. I intend on taking the authors advice and looking at myself as if I am a fictional character and writing a story that happened to me as if I was writing a fictional narrative.
9/17
- Born
- Getting involved in choir
- Taking my first trip to NYC
- Starting with local theatre
- Getting into voice lessons
- Starting to get leading roles in plays and musicals
- Marley
- Changing my major
- Working on first real film set
- Second trip to NYC
One is obvious enough on its importance I believe. Two really helped my confidence in my own ability to grow. I was shock to be placed into the second highest choir after my first audition, and then the next year to be in the highest choir. Three was a trip that was taken because of the choir. We got to perform in Carnegie Hall and during the trip I saw my first two musicals. Four reinforced my love of performing and made me want to be on stage as much as possible. Five happened when my director thought that I could start doing vocal competitions and he directed me to someone who really helped me grow my voice into something that it never would have been without her. Six came very shortly after five and it seemed almost instant that I was no longer in supporting roles but I was becoming the leading lady. Seven came as a shock to me Marly was the first feature film I auditioned for and I got the lead role in it, despite not knowing anything about the film process. Marley changed my perspective on film vs theatre and it made me want to go into the film industry. Eight was a direct effect of Marley and as soon as I got back to campus I changed my major to journalism and creative media. Nine also was because of Marley, a film company that the director became friends with watched over he movie and asked for me to be a part of a production that he was working on. Ten changed my perspective once again, after Marley I had been so focused on film I forgot about my love for the theatre. My second trip to NYC reminded me that I actually love both and will try to get jobs in either one that I can.
9/19
Her writing style made the memoir very effective. Her use of language kept readers more engaged than if she had no had such a wide variety of descriptive words. Another thing that made it effective was that John was made into a character so that the audience could feel as if they too knew her struggles of wanting to understand John better.
9/19
Maddi didn’t start out like the rest of us. she came from an egg donor and her parents paid big bucks to have her brought into this world. She doesn’t actually know who her biological mother is because of the fact that she came from a donor. For all she knows he mother could be right next door to her, unlikely but still. The doctors fertilized the egg using her dad, the one who actually raised her, and the mother that raised her actually carried her throughout the pregnancy. Once she was born she started to enjoy all thing science. She showed me one of her journals from a young age and she was going on and on about her science class and how it was so cool. Flash forward to now and Maddi is a senior studying microbiology on the premed track with a 4.0. I think it is funny that she started from something like what she did and is on the track to becoming a doctor herself. She shows that the world works in crazy ways.
9/19
“It Will Look Like a Sunset” was a very disturbing memoir but you couldn’t help but keep reading. The writer used language that drew in her audience and told this tragic story so well that one could almost feel the pain themselves. I do believe that it was an effective memoir because it definitely drew in the audience, but I do not believe that it is something that students should be made to read because I feel like the accurateness of it could trigger someone who had been in a similar situation.
9/26
My current intro could use a lot more descriptive terms in it. I feel as if the lack of description of the situation could turn readers away. So I want to make sure that the intro draws them in and shows them the world that I was living in.
9/26
After Peer review I will definitely add more descriptive terms to make sure that my audience can see the chaos of set. I will also make sure that my paper rounds out better, so that my audience can know the significance of being on the set of Marley for me. The descriptive terms are the ones that I need to work on the most. I need to make sure that I am setting a scene while telling this story to keep my readers more engaged.
9/26
- Kate Vianeo
- Avon Indiana
- Communicative Disorders
- sewing
- Become a speech pathologist and be a mom
- quiet
- nice/sweet
- mom
- not playing soccer
- getting into college
While there are so many interesting things about Kate what I find interesting is that her mom is her biggest role model and that one of her goals in life is to become a mom herself. This is not to say that her wanting to become a speech pathologist isn’t interesting, I just want to look in on someone would look up so much to their parent that it then becomes a goal of theirs to become one themselves. I think it is common for most people to want to become parents, but when asked about their goals most people would focus in on their academic or professional goals. Kate however talked about how she wanted to be a mother, which is unlike what most would have said. I think her having a mother who was such a big influence in her life made Kate want to become a mother as well. Having those good role models pushes people to want to become like their influences, and I think that it is wonderful that Kate has such a good influence
Memoir Essay
As I waited for the next shot to be set up, I took a moment to look around at everything that was happening. I was surrounded by people running around with lights, a beautifully decorated living room full of more christmas decorations than one could imagine, and a near constant murmuring from all of the people that were in attendance that day. Standing at the base of the house’s grand staircase, I was strangely very calm in the midst of everything that was happening. All the noise and commotion of that many people being on set generally would have made me anxious as I was after all used to a much smaller cast and crew, and I was not very good around people. But something about the experience was just so surreal and invigorating. We had about twenty people on set as extras, not to mention the full cast, and our whole crew came out, which was a first for this project. Looking back, I never would have expected to be calm in a situation like this, let alone enjoy it. However, there I stood, actively engaged in a crowd of people all looking to me, their leading actress.
My mother used to tell me that I would put on little performances for my family when I was just a kid. She said I loved to use the hearth of our fireplace as my own personal stage to reenact plays I had seen or sing songs that I loved at the top of my lungs. After that though I did not just abandon my love of performing, my mom put me in my first choir around the beginning of middle school. From that I found a local theatre group and continued with music and theatre throughout all of middle and high school. To say I just continued with it is a bit of an understatement. It became my obsession. I found myself wanting to be on stage as much as possible.
For whatever reason, I was anxious about being around most people and especially of being in front of a crowd while I wasn’t in character, but once on stage all the anxiety went away. I found stage productions to be much easier because, throughout the whole show, I was the character and no longer felt like myself. I did not have to interact with people out of character other than the director and maybe the few people who would come see me perform, so theatre became a safe haven of sorts for me. It became a place where I could go and be someone else for a few hours, and it gave me a place to take a step back from everything that was happening at the time.
Flash forward to my first year of college. During spring break back home I was offered an audition for a local film. Initially, I was not at all interested because film acting was far less prestigious in my mind than the theatre acting I was used to. Nevertheless, I got the reel for the two main female characters in the movie and immediately fell in love with the lead. I went to the first round of auditions and landed a callback for the leading lady’s part, El. This was my first audition for a film, and being the youngest person auditioning for this role, I was not expecting anything to come from it. However, the next day I got a call from the casting director saying that I got the part (image 1).
We started filming on June 2, 2017, (image 2) and right off the bat I realized how different it was to act in a film rather than on stage like I was used to. There was so much down time involved that I could not just stay in character while waiting around. To my surprise, however, I didn’t feel anxious or nervous around this group of people. For most of the film we kept cast and crew to a minimum. If one of the lead characters wasn’t part of a particular scene, they would take the role of a crew member, and oftentimes even our director and producer were working multiple jobs on set. With such a small crew, around eight people on set total, it felt more like a group of close-knit friends making a movie for a class rather than the set of a feature film. That being said, from the beginning they warned me about the upcoming weekend where the set would become chaotic and busy.
The big weekend was starting, and I was horrified. There were roughly forty to fifty people in this house working on this film, and I, for the first time, had to engage with all of them. To my surprise, jumping in and out of character was easier than I thought it would be in such a stressful situation. Being in character in front of the camera the few weeks before helped me associate camera with character, and allowed me to easily move from Elenore to myself as soon as the camera was off me. The problem remained that there was much more down time on a film set and I was forced to interact with more people than I was normally comfortable with. Surprisingly, I found myself interacting with people a lot more than I expected and I found it much easier than it normally would have been for me. I felt at home and very comfortable with all of these people looking to me. I absolutely loved being on set.
When I came back to college the semester after we wrapped Marley, I immediately went to switch my major to creative media. I knew that even if acting in films didn’t work out for me, I still wanted to be a part of the filmmaking process. Something about creating a lasting work of art made me feel so much pride in what I was doing that I knew that that is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
10/8
I think the Memoir paper went well. I feel as if I added the descriptive terms that I needed to to keep my audience fully engaged and I feel as if the story itself was interesting enough to keep people involved in it. I do wish however that I had the time to go into more detail about certain events in the middle of the story, but I didn’t want to write too much. Maybe next time I will focus on telling more of the story.
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