I'm aware that over the past few days I haven't really blogged properly. Just lately I feel tired and possibly stressed, all I really want to do is sleep, but of course I have stuff to do for university. I often sacrifice sleep to do university work, hence I feel very tired now. But the good news is that I had a good long sleep last night and have woke up feeling refreshed, I'm in a very good mood.
Yesterday afternoon was fun and I did kind of promise that I would blog about it, so I'll take time to explain now. I've mentioned being involved in a production in a few of my blog entries but haven't actually mentioned what it's all about. The whole story goes to about a month back. I was bored and using Facebook when a friend posted a status update about needing people to play small roles in a piece of drama for her dissertation. As I felt like doing something different I inquired about the roles that were available and asked what the dissertation was about. My friend replied explaining that it was a piece of drama to raise awareness about domestic abuse and people were required to play the small parts of the victims friends. I agreed to audition for the role, even though I'd never done any acting before. I attended the audition and had to act out the small part I was playing there and then, my friend and the guy she was working with on the production liked my acting and gave me the role and sent me away with a copy of the script. On Friday I attended a meeting and was told that I'd be filming this week. As I didn't have many lines to remember and was required to act natural in my performance it didn't take much practice.
Yesterday morning I woke up feeling a bit nervous and thought that I wouldn't pull the role off quite as well as previously anticipated. I spent half an hour practicing my lines before I got ready to leave the house. At 12:30 I headed out to get the bus as I had to meet my friends in the train station at 2pm and I didn't really want to be late. I arrived in town at about 1:40pm and walked to the train station. Once my friends arrived we headed to the student halls, where the production was going to be filmed (as the drama was set in a student's bedroom). As the bedroom belonged to Ollie (the guy who was working with my friend on the project) and the bedroom was supposed to be the bedroom of the main character, who was female, the room had to be decorated with girly things that were mostly pink. The camera was set up in front of a chair to make it look like it was a webcam as the performance was in the form of a video blog. In the scene I played a part in, the main character was recording a video blog about what was going on in her life and mentioned how her boyfriend was supportive (when in fact he was just possessive and creepy), she also mentioned she was going out with friends for the night. My character then knocked the bedroom door (which was actually a wardrobe door that was opened), then I walked onto the set, where I sat next to the main character, she introduced me to her blog viewers, I made a claim that I was amazing and then asked her if she'd seen her boyfriend lately. She explained to me how caring he was even though he was grumpy at times. Our characters then left the set to get drunk before going out. We had a few practice takes as I'd never worked on the set before and then we took a perfect take, another take with background music and a take without background music as a backup. We also did a take where it came to the part where I had to say hello to the blog viewers and I just burst out into laughter and had the giggles for about 10 minutes after. I felt like such a fool but it was funny. If I get the outtake send to me I'll let you see it some way or another.
Now to talk about my own dissertation. If you know me, or anything about psychology you'll know that my dissertation is in the form of a research report, that has to be around 10,000 words long. In the summer I designed a piece of research about message-based digital deception and moral justification and my research ideas actually took off when I proposed it as my final year dissertation. Before Christmas I designed the materials and carried out the research after the project had been submitted to and approved by the ethics board. I then started to analyse my data. I have recently started doing the write-up of my research and still have to analyse my qualitative focus group discussions. So far it's all going well. I'll keep you updated on how I'm getting along.
It also seems that I'm taking a part in my best friend James' dissertation. My friend James studies computer science and for his dissertation he has designed a database for a company. My job is to evaluate the database for him by completing a series of tasks and giving feedback via a questionnaire. I received the database and questionnaire by email yesterday, but was too tired to complete the tasks, so that's on my list of things to do today.
Today I was woken up at about 8:30am by my nine month old puppy, Charlie. I looked at my clock and was kind of relieved that I'd stayed in a bed a bit longer than usual. I still felt tired and my legs still ached so I decided to stay in bed for a bit longer, but couldn't get back to sleep. As usual I started messing around with my phone looking for applications that could be fun or at least useful. I noticed that I hadn't reinstalled that Amazon Kindle application, so I searched for it and reinstalled. When I searched for Kindle I found an application that had free ebooks on it and claimed to be the "Youtube of Ebooks". As the application was free I saw no harm in downloading it, if it didn't work, it didn't work. It turned out that the application was more like a network that allowed writers to upload their short stories for others to read. I did a few searches and came across a short story called "You've Been Tagged".
The blurb for "You've Been Tagged" looked interesting as it said that the story started when the main character got tagged in a post on Facebook by someone called Anonymous saying he had 24 hours to live. I sat up in bed for a few hours reading the story and found it interesting. Anonymous tagged the guy in the post and then claimed that he was going to kill the main character in the next 24 hours, Anonymous then broke the guys bedroom window by firing a bullet at it and also smashed the guys laptop. After this Anonymous stayed in touch via mobile phone using an unrecognised number. The police couldn't do anything as there was a lack of evidence and things began to get scary. In the evening the guy went to bed early and Anonymous kidnapped him (after poisoning him with a granola bar) and placed him on a park bench in a town several miles away. When the guy woke up he was lost but had been given a new mobile phone. He managed to get in contact with the police and was collected from the town by an unknown police officer, as the main police officer on the case had been killed by Anonymous. Whilst the story was interesting, I don't think it was structured that well and a lot of important detail was missed out. Also the ending left too many questions unanswered such as was the guy safe after being picked up? was the policeman really a policeman? How did Anonymous get onto the guy's friends list in the first place? Who was Anonymous? It's fair enough to leave cliff hangers at the end of a story as it leaves the reader thinking and gives opportunity to write a follow up story, but if this is the full story I'm a little bit disappointed. I'm going to see if there is a second part to the story later on, I'm hoping there is.
Today I've just decided that I'm going with the flow even though I have a lot to do. This afternoon I am going to the hairdressers with my mom and then I will return to my room to get some work done, answer James' questionnaire and look more into the short story I read earlier on.
Catch you later,
Jodie
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