In the past week or so, we have to of hit our stride with (again) another new idea. This time we have scenes and firmer grip on things so it’s going well.
With new ideas comes new scenes and with new scenes comes duffrent ideas for techniques. As I’ve just finished the essay in the past week or so my mind jumps right to how we interacted with our mediatized elements of the peice.
In our Hitler scene. We are presenting the lighter and prehaps more realistic/human side of him. So we are performing a lip dub of his home videos that can be found online. I find this particularly Intresting because the usual image of hitler is one of a angry dictator screaming at a podium. We are showing a diffrent mediatized form of Hitler, moving past the propaganda and into his real world. What is espacially diffrent from the archived footage to the home movies is the way he interactes with people (espacially his wife- who was barely seen with him otherwise). It bring hitler into the modern day and into the age where with YouTube self captured videos are ubiquitous.
The realistic and casual speech of the lip dub also help aid in this YouTube esque take on Hitler.
Another scene and technique we are including is the columbine shooting. One aspect of this scene will involve fixing a GoPro (small camera) to the barrel of a discharged, and completely innofective gun. We are going to point this to the audience, showing their reaction on a screen. The technical thinking behind this is to, 1: show a diffrent angle we all come to expect of this type. making it feel personal for the audience
2: represent the real life boys obsession of self image
3: represent the behind the scenes of history theme were using.
As well as this, with the ‘gun cam’ we are going to run off stage and into the library where we will perform a staged shooting. What the audience will see is a traveling video taking us off stage to another place. we use the technology to experiment what space can be implemented live, on stage. On stage we will just show the video and nothing else. This will draw more attention to the video.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B48LAjXTFSy9Unh1NGRJbThrcFU/view?usp=sharing

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one. So an arch-duke, two presidents and a member of the Beatles walk into a bar…”

“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will…
My rifle and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit…
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will…
Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!”

“That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit. That reminds of a joke: Lincoln was shot by a two-bit actor exercising his right to bear arms.”

“Some families, especially in politics, are soaked in blood. Two brothers, both ambitious and populist, both murdered by radicalised mutants – one a Soviet defector, the other an Arab extremist. Same as it ever was.”

“People always ask if I’ve ever seen any of my victims. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity at all if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. It’s the only way to save money nowadays.”

“Do any of you people know who Charles Whitman was? None of you knows? Charles Whitman killed twelve people from a twenty-eight-storey observation tower at the University of Texas, from distances up to four hundred yards. Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? Ah, I see some of you know who he was. And do you know how far away he was? Two hundred and fifty feet! He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. Oswald got off three rounds with an Italian Carcano bolt action rifle in only six seconds, and scored two hits, including a head shot! Do any of you people know where these individuals learned how to shoot? The United States Marine Corps. These individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do!”

In a note he left behind after he was shot dead, Charles Whitman asked for an autopsy to be performed on him to determine if there was a physiological influence on his behaviour. They found a tumour the size of a pecan in his brain. Opinions still vary as to whether or not it was directly responsible for his mental health issues.

“Ask not what you can do for your country… ask what your country is doing to you.”

“I heard a new CIA joke recently: how can you be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassinations?”
“I don’t know – how can we be sure?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

The archduke is a tricky one. He was killed by a 19 year old student radical who was armed by a secret society made up of Serbian military. He was tried in a kangaroo court, left to rot in prison and eventually he was re-buried as a hero for aiding the Slavs to throw off the shackles of Habsburg empire. Even assassins can be venerated as martyrs and saints. Even arms dealers have a patron saint in Catholicism.”

“Nobody really thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the meat-puppets. It’s the same thing. They have their five year plans, and so have I. But I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils. What do you believe in?”

“Oh, don’t be so gloomy. After all, it’s not that awful. Remember what the fellow said. In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Hassan I-Sabbah said that. Who says video games never taught anybody anything useful? The Romans knew it too, when they butchered Caesar, and the CIA and KGB, and Gavrilo Princip, and Whitman and Oswald and Booth and Sirhan Sirhan and yes, even that fat sonofabitch Chapman with his copy of Catcher in the Rye in one hand and a 38 special in the other. So did Valerie Sonaris and Sara Jane Moore and Lynette Fromme and John Hinkley – even those who try and fail understand that once you shoot burning hot metal into the present, the future splinters into fragments.”

We had an idea, to stage moments in history using technology all in order to show certain aspects of these moment that couldn’t be seen at the time. The lead example of this would be recreating Marylyn Monroe’s ‘Happy birthday Mr President’ performance (the moment of history) after showing a live feed of her backstage taking pills (the way in which technology could uncover things we haven’t seen before). Everyone jumped on board and went into writing up/ coming up with their own scenes/ ideas. In the end we had a list which contained; The Zodiac killer, Jack the ripper, Richard the third, WW2, 9/11, the moon landing, the JFK assassination and many more. At first we considered staging these as separate vignettes, yet we decided upon creating a plot that could act as a through line through so it might be a little more cohesive to follow. What we noticed was that many of these idea all contained the theme of conspiracy so this lead us to come up with the idea that this plot should be two (or more) people attempting to recreate the conspiracy’s in order to shed some new light on them. Really we wanted the show to be a discussion of conspiracy on a whole, using these examples to illustrate our points. What was a large debate that went on when moulding this idea was will we be playing fictional characters that we have made up or not. Personally I saw us playing versions of ourselves like in Gob Squad’s Revolution Now! Or even such as in Flickbook Theatre’s Three words. Therefore we can enter and tell the audience directly our ideas and thoughts/ making them aware that this is a show whilst also being able to get away with seemingly recreating what we want at our own will by stating something like; “well look at the Richard the third conspiracy…”. On the topic of Revolution Now! By Gob squad, I see this show following a similar style by being a show that explores the theme of conspiracy rather than attempting to uncover it. The way that they did with the theme of revolution. However one thing that I would like to avoid, something that Revolution Now! did, was laugh off actual debates of revolution. In one part of the show a member of the group took to the streets and interviewed members of the public (in order to hear ‘what the people want’). Mostly their participants were shy and making light of the topic matter. However one participant, a man in a black cab, did start speaking about (what he believed) to be the problems with the concept of revolution his ideas were dismissed and not mentioned again. Instead the group found another quite shy participant to act how he was told in order to fit into the ending they wanted, therefore completely undermining the basic idea of revolution all together. I want our show to be an exploration and investigation of the subject matter rather than an outright mission to make fun of the concept.