Evaluation of the Final Draft

    After submitting the Final Draft of the video, I felt released. My teammates and I were so nervous on the stage and we made some mistakes that we have never made during our practices. Even so, I’ve seen us improved a lot compare to the first draft of the performance.

    For me, the reviews that I received after the first draft were mostly about my voice being not loud enough and my lines being lack of dynamic, or in other words, emotionless. In the final draft, I raised my voice up generally and put in some changes of volume and speed. For example, in my monologue, I raised my voice when I was saying “Oh boy, being in love has made a new man of me! The power of love is pretty tremendous! Love is something that, changes the whole world!” These lines shows how excited Jim was when he talks about his love and his feelings. They also expressed Jim’s love to his partner. Then, I lowered my voice when saying the following lines “It happened that Betty’s aunt took sick and she had to go to Centralia……” Jim starts to explain why he came over for dinner. He’s not excited any more. He’s even kind of embarrassed. These emotions can be shown by changing the volume of my voice down to form a contrast with the previous lines. On the other hand, I made some mistakes as well. I remember how important it is to stay in character on stage. One of the perspectives of being in character was to not laugh when the character does not. However, when Amanda try to have some interaction with Jim, she reach out to tap my shoulder. Because we were standing a bit too far from each other, her hand didn’t reach my shoulder. Instead, she just tapped the air. I laughed at this point. That’s something I shouldn’t do because that made it obvious that something is going wrongly on the stage.

    As a group, we had improved as well. However, we still need to work on communication and emotions more in order to make our performance more realistic. The group members should be more familiar with the timing and the blockings as well. For example, before Jim exits the building, he should slowly approach the exit of the building when talking to Amanda about leaving. However, I forgot to do so and it ended up that I said goodbye to everyone in the building that then take my stuff and leave. There was a few seconds of silence and it was extremely awkward. We should all pay more attention on putting emotions into our lines. If the emotion presented does not apply to the context that we are saying, the lines will no longer make any sense. For example, when Tom says to Amanda, “The more you shout at me, the quicker I will go.” It seemed odd because Amanda didn’t seem shouting at him when they were arguing. When Tom was saying the line full of anger, it doesn’t make sense to the audience. They could even be confused why Tom would be so angry when Amanda does not seem mad at him at all. Other than that, the group members should be more familiar with the lines as well. There are several pauses between lines either because the person forgot the line or was waiting for the other partner who forgot his/her lines to remember their lines and then go on. These pauses shows the audience that people are forgetting their lines on stage. It made the performance unprofessional as a whole.

    Even though we had improved compared to the first draft. there are more things that we should work on in the future in order to put on better performances. The mistakes in this final draft not only shows the problems we have at this time, but also remind us of our bad performing habits. We should always keep these in mind and pay attention to them every time we perform. We should also always remember, “Practice makes perfect.”