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We discussed ideas provoked by each stimuli

We decided on Walt Disney Stimulus

We each created an individual initial ideas/response to stimulus mind map

We compared our mind maps and identify which ideas we wanted to explore

We were especially taken with the idea of exploring dreams/reallity

This led us to the dramatic aim/intension 'to inspire in the audience an understanding of the bittersweet nature of reallity'

We decided that the best way to do this was to make our protagonist/protagonists as realistic as possible because this would encourage the audience to empathise with them and their circumstances

This led us to decide on our style: naturalism

Whilst doing some personal research on this style, I discovered that it had been pioneered by the practitioner Stanislavski

We chose Stanislavski as our chosen practitioner and decided that, because of the intense value which he had placed on an actor's familiarity with their character, we would develop our characters before we developed the plot.

We decided that to allow each member of the group to explore this method, we would need to have five principle characters, one each.

We realised that this would also allow our audience to identify a 'favourite character' - the one which they felt they related to more - increasing their empathy with them

We each wrote down a selection of dreams on small scraps of paper, and divided them up at random, these, we decided, would be our character's hopes for the future.

We then rolled a dice to establish which of these ambitions were met or not.

This led us to decide on the additional dramatic intention of 'conveying how different our lives can be from how we expect'

So as to maximise our understanding of our characters, we decided to devise the first scene when they are a similar age to us and interacting, as we were, as friends.

We repeated this process with fears to ensure that our characters would be realistically complex

We realise that to achieve our dramatic intention of 'conveying how different our lives can be from how we expect', we are going to need to show the audience how these kids ended up, but doing so would elliminate the possibility of a naturalistic structure.

This led us to decide to discard a naturalistic structure and instead devise our piece with an episodic timeline (with a scene when the characters are youths and one when they are adults), but with naturalistic characters within that frame work.

We decide that the middle segment of our play would be a stylised sequence featuring short flashes of each of the character's lives because this relates to the themes and ideas (dreams) which we first identified being provoked by our stimulus and seemed to be a recurring trope in the research we were each carrying out about Walt Disney.

We decide to use elements of a cyclical structure in our piece - by starting and ending it in the same location and with the same character's present - this recognisable similarity for the audience would make the changes in the characters' behaviour and interactions more obvious, thus, supporting our dramatic intention.

To establish what moments would be most beneficial to include in the middle segment and to strengthen our understanding of our characters, we then spent numerous lessons partaking in hot-seating exercises.

Having planned the outline of our plot and developed a strong familiarity with our characters, we improvised each of the scenes a few times. This helped us to solidify the relationships between the characters.

To write the script, my group and I sat together and each dictated the lines which we felt our own character would say, this had the impact on our final performance of making the characters very distict and constant in way which they might not have been, had one person written the script alone.

We memorised our scripts.

Having rehearsed, scene by scene, we performed our piece to an audience and received the following feedback: our piece was approximately 10 minutes too long.

We overcame this problem by going through our script and removing any line which we felt was not necessary to the plot or character development.

We wrote our lighting script, deciding to use no blackouts during the piece because this will create a fluidity representative of real time. We also decided to use a simple, continuous lighting throughout because this will enhance how regular our character's lives are.

We decided on costumes which were representative of our characters. We also decided that to visually demonstrate our characters growth, they would don an additional item of clothing (such as a blazer) between the scenes when their personality changes were most prolific.

Final Performance