Atmosphere is....

Who made the production of Treasure Island we are exploring in these lessons?

Which of the following is NOT a word we would use to describe lighting?

Which words could we use to describe atmosphere?

What is the definition of pitch?

Developing analytical comments for live theatre

﻿Hi, everyone, I'm Mrs. Bradley. Welcome back to your second lesson in the becoming a critic scheme of work. Today we'll continue to look at some examples of live theatre, and if you're ready, we'll get started. In this lesson, you will need an exercise book or some paper to write on and a pen to write with. All right, do I hope you've done the intro quiz which will have recapped some of the key terminology. We will just go back through our prior learning just to make sure we've remembered the key skills that we're using in this unit. Then we're going to be looking at describing a scene from a play, building on the terminology and the skills we learned last lesson. We're then going to start to develop today our analytical comments, and turn those from notes into more of a paragraph, responding to a question. That will take us to the end of the lesson, and then there'll be an exit quiz to check your learning from today. Let's get started then with our keywords. So today we're going to be using this term LED. So LED is an initialism which stands for light emitting diode. So an LED or light emitting diode is a commonly used source of light in theatre today. So theatre has moved on from using old fashioned, what we'll call tungsten bulbs, to LEDs, which are lower energy and more cost-effective and efficient. We also are going to today, be looking at underscoring. So underscoring means playing music underneath the dialogue which you hear on stage. And this is commonly used in plays to create some atmosphere or some tension. And then we're going to be focusing today on stage positions. So we use stage positions to describe where something or someone is on the stage. So watch out for those three key terminology words, making an appearance in this lesson. All right, then, so let's recap the key skills for today. So last lesson, we looked at describe, analyse and effect. So can you remember the definitions for these terms? I'd like you to pause here and write down the definitions from memory, just in your own words, and then we will check your answers in a second. So just pause and then resume when you're ready. All right, then, so these are my answers. It's perfectly fine if you've written this down in a different way, just as long as the gist is the same. So don't worry about rewriting it so it matches this exactly. But describe means to give an accurate account of something in detail, analyse is when we examine something in detail and explore why choices were made. And the effect of something is the outcome of a decision, or it's a change caused by a decision such as lighting design in a play, which we looked at last week. All right, then, brilliant. So, I wanted to start with some terminology words, and I've given you an unscramble task here. So can you unscramble these terminology words which I've mixed up? These are all words that I want you to use in this lesson today. As a clue, we used most of these words, last lesson. They all relate to lighting, sound, or talking about an effect. So just pause the video and see if you can unscramble all eight of these words, and then we'll check the answers. Okay, brilliant. So here are the answers. Just take a second to check your answers. If there's any that you didn't get, please write them down because what that is going to build up is a terminology vocabulary bank which we're going to use in this lesson today. So when we get round to describing a piece of theatre, this is some of the language that we're going to use. So just take a second to make sure you get all of these. And we're going to move on and look at a clip of live theatre now. So we're going to watch a short extract from the National Theatre Production of "Treasure Island." This was produced in 2015 by the National Theatre directed by Polly Findlay. In this particular scene for today, Jim and Long John Silver are stargazing. So they're sat on the stage looking up at the stars. So, we're going to look for the use of lighting and sound effects in the extracts. And we're also going to focus on analysing what effects are created, building on our work from last lesson and using the terminology for today. So my three key areas for you to focus on are, I'd like you to look at the use of lighting, listen out for sound effects, and see if you can comment on what atmosphere is being created. Here is the clip, and we're going to watch this three times. So the first time, I don't want you to write anything, just take it in and just see what the clip is about. The second and third times are for you to make some notes. And again, we're focusing on lighting and sound. So try to write down everything that you can see and hear, try to describe the sound, particularly in as much detail as possible, really listening to what you can hear, and try to remember some of the terminology from today. So let's take a look at a clip for the first time.

All these stars and shapes just moving, Jim. Save one immovable star, which Long John Saucepan will lead you to. Now, imagine that you're lifting his handle like a poor in shoe. They see the side that the student pulls out.

Yes, two bright stars.

Now, get the distance between them in your big brain and count how many of that distance up to the very brightest star.

One, two, three, four, five, right, brightstar.

North star, Polaris, the one constant immovable star.

Like grandma.

Named here after grandma. She's the head of all constellations. Hercules the hero, there's Persias, Orega, Sisphus, Lyra, Ursa Minor, little bear. Now for the magic. We use all of this to find out where we are on this dark, empty sea.

Okay, that was the first time. And now we're going to watch it twice more, but now we're really going to focus on what we can see in terms of lighting and what we can hear, okay? Let's take a look.

All these stars and shapes just moving, Jim. Save one immovable star, which Long John Saucepan will lead you to. Now, imagine that you're lifting his handle like a poor in shoe. They see the side that the student pulls out.

Yes, two bright stars.

Now, get the distance between them in your big brain and count how many of that distance up to the very brightest star.

One, two, three, four, five, right, brightstar.

North star, Polaris, the one constant immovable star.

Like grandma.

Named here after grandma. She's the head of all constellations. Hercules the hero, there's Persias, Orega, Sisphus, Lyra, Ursa Minor, little bear. Now for the magic. We use all of this to find out where we are on this dark, empty sea.

And we'll watch it one final time. And this is your last chance now to get some notes, looking at the different types of lights, thinking about the terminology you learned today and in the previous lesson, looking at where the lights are, so where they are placed, and then the sound. So really listening to the sound, seeing if you can pick out individual sounds, and thinking about what they are made by and where the sound is coming from, okay? So final time.

All these stars and shapes just moving, Jim. Save one immovable star, which Long John Saucepan will lead you to. Now, imagine that you're lifting his handle like a poor in shoe. They see the side that the student pulls out.

Yes, two bright stars.

Now, get the distance between them in your big brain and count how many of that distance up to the very brightest star.

One, two, three, four, five, right, brightstar.

North star, Polaris, the one constant immovable star.

Like grandma.

Named here after grandma. She's the head of all constellations. Hercules the hero, there's Persias, Orega, Sisphus, Lyra, Ursa Minor, little bear. Now for the magic. We use all of this to find out where we are on this dark, empty sea.

Okay, so I hope now you've got some really good notes about the lighting and the sound in that clip. And so what we'll do now is we'll compare our notes, and we'll see if there's anything else that you want to add. Okay, brilliant. So I hope you've got some really detailed notes there. I'm going to go through my notes with you now, this is what I noticed. And you can see if your notes are similar and you could add to your notes if you want to. So for the lighting, I noticed, first of all, that Jim and Long John Silver are lit with a cool white spotlight at the front of the stage. The rest of the stage all around them is in blackout. So blackout means no lights are on. Boats, we can see hundreds of small LED light bulbs which are hanging from the ceiling of the theatre. And they create that huge sense of the starry sky. In terms of the sound I heard, this scene was underscored and there was music and I heard string and woodwind instruments. For example, I thought I heard a violin and a clarinet. I thought the music was quiet. It was slow paced, it was quite high pitched. So they would be my descriptive words for the sound. All the words you can see in the bold there, are the terminology words and other description of what I could see and hear. All right, a little bit of new learning then for today, I want us to look at stage positions. So when we're talking about acting or we're talking about theatre staging or design, we use stage positions. And that helps us communicate where things are on stage or where things should be. There are nine stage positions in total. So we call the top of the stage, the furthest away from the audience, we call that upstage. Down at the front of the stage, nearest to the audience is called downstage. And then we've got centre and we've got left and right. What's important to remember here is that the positions are from the perspective of an actor stood on the stage facing outwards. So if you're looking at this diagram it showed opposite, okay? So this is my left, but the stage left is over there. So it's the opposite of what you can see when you're looking at this picture, okay? So just bear that in mind. But as you can see on the diagram, there are nine different stage positions, upstage right, upstage centre, upstage left. Stage right, centre stage, stage left. Downstage right, downstage centre and downstage left. And these terms help us to communicate where things are or where things should be. So if you were a director, you might say to your actor, can you enter from upstage left? Or you might say, can we place the table downstage right? So what these help us do is communicate where things are, we can use this terminology in our writing. So, question for you, can you remember what position Jim and Long John Silver was sitting in? So have a think, look at the terminology on the screen, look at the options, where, were they stopped? Were they upstage, centre, were they stage left or stage right, or were they downstage centre? The answer is downstage centre. You can see the front of the stage in the video. And I hope you notice that they were sitting right at the front of the stage, and they were clearly sat in the middle lit by the spotlight. So the answer for that question is downstage centre. Brilliant, so what we're going to do now is add analysis to our description of the scene that we have looked at so far, the stargazing scene. So analysis is thinking about why things happened, why decisions were made. So when we analyse, we want to be asking ourselves these questions, why was the lighting and sound designed in this way? What does this represent? What does this suggest? What is the effect of this? What atmosphere is created here, and what does this make me think or feel? So they are all questions that we might want to be thinking about when we analyse. Why? Representing suggesting affects atmosphere and thinking and feeling. So as we go forwards, we can think about those questions. I'd like you to complete a task here. I've set this out in a table, but it's absolutely fine for you just to make some bullet point notes. I'd like you to think about why the creative choices were made for this particular scene. So in the purple on the left, I've given you three different aspects of the scene, the spotlight downstage centre for Jim and Long John Silver, the use of hundreds of small LED light bulbs, and the underscoring music and the style of the music. I would like you to think why those things were done, and what the effect of it was. I've given you one example answer here. So the use of hundreds of small LED light bulbs, to me, the LED light bulbs represent the stars. And the size and the number of them make the sky look huge and vast and really, really exciting for the audience. So that's my analysis of that particular use of design. I'd like you to pause here, and write down your analysis for these three aspects. You can add to my example answer there, if you've got something else which you could analyse about the use of the LED lights. Pause until you've completed the task, and then we will resume when you're ready. Brilliant, so we're going to take this one step further today, and we're going to put our notes now into a paragraph because in drama, as we get older and work through the different levels, it's important to be able to write and do some extended writing about what we see in drama. So I've given you a question here to focus your writing. The question that I'd like you to answer is, describe and analyse the use of lighting and sound effects in the scene from "Treasure Island." And on the screen, I've given you an example answer. In the scene from Treasure Island, the characters of Jim and Long John Silver, are sitting on the stage, lit with the spotlight and the rest of the stage is in blackout. This great is the effect that it is dark, and our focus is drawn to them. How do you think that is as an answer? It's okay, isn't it? But it could be more developed. There's a little bit missing and it could be more detailed. So here's an example of a more developed answer. So you can see straight away, this is different. It's much longer because it's more developed. What I've done here is I've highlighted the description in purple and I've added in more description from the previous answer. And I've added in blue or the green, the analysis. So you can see it's much, much more detailed. I've talked about an effective lighting technique. And I've said why. I've described in more detail the spotlight as being cool, white and dim. I've analysed in a lot more detail, the effect of the LEDs. So this now is a much better answer Using this model to help you, I'm using all of your notes from today. I would like you to pause here and complete the paragraph yourself. So I've put the question on the screen again, the question is, describe and analyse the use of lighting and sound effects in the scene from "Treasure Island." So remember to describe and analyse and use the vocabulary bank that you built up at the start of this lesson. Write in as much detail as you can, always write everything that you can think of, and try to write about a different aspect of the scene to the model that you saw. So that's going to challenge you a little bit more. So if I wrote about the LED bulbs and I wrote about the blackout and the spotlight. You could write about the sound effects, for example. So if you try and write about something different, it will challenge you a little bit more. So pause the video for as long as you need to complete the task. And then we'll just resume when you're ready. And if you want the extension task for today, what you could do is apply this paragraph structure and answer the same question for the scene that we looked at in the previous lesson. It's optional, just if you have more time and you want to just take your learning a step further today. Great work. So you've produced a huge amount of work again, today. You've learned some new terminology, you've looked at vocabulary, you've analysed and described another key scene from "Treasure Island." And then we've put that into writing. So great progress, very well done. And I will see you in the next lesson. If you want to, you can share your work from stay with Oak. You just need to ask a parent or carer who can tag @OakNational and #LearnwithOak. Well done, see you next time.

What type of light is used to create the stars?

Where are Jim and Long John Silver sat on the stage?

Which of these is NOT a correct stage position term?

Which of the following would be an analytical comment?

Why was the rest of the stage in blackout in the scene we studied? (Choose two answers)

In this lesson, students will watch a short extract from a theatre production where the focus is on use of design skills. Using basic design terminology to describe the use of design skills, they will comment on how the design skills support the action on stage.

In this lesson, we will start to look in more detail at the choices theatre designers make and the effects this creates for an audience

Lesson overview:Developing analytical comments for live theatre

Core Content

Additional Subject Info

Content guidance

Supervision Level

Live theatre responses: Becoming a critic: