After James had written what was to be our updated version of Leonce and Lena, he had placed a song right at the very beginning of play before any of the characters even speak. The song is called ‘Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas’ and it does a fantastic job of setting up the play and getting the audience ready for what they are about to watch. Obviously it would be a little too much to expect the audience to set through a 4 – 5 minute song before any acting takes place so only the first verse and the first few lines of the chorus are played.
The idea for adding a song to the video started after a James and Jenn were trying out some ideas after one dramaturgy session and made what was the first basic video which can be seen here. After hearing about the idea and seeing the video, I had some ideas of my own buzzing around for developing the video further.
I really liked how James and Jenn had made the video kick in with the chorus when the song bursts to life with images of Las Vegas itself. However I felt that it could use something throughout the verse as well so set about creating this. I wanted to keep with the idea of showing visuals of Las Vegas but in a slightly different way to how they would appear at the end of the video so the audience could clearly see the contrast between them. The first thing I set about doing was gathering various pictures of Las Vegas (not necessarily all famous landmarks) but ones that could give the audience a taste of what being there was like such as all the towering hotels, the strip and the people there. The best way I thought to make a contrast would be to have the first few images in black and white with the added affect that the audience was watching old movie footage. I thought this worked for a few reasons:
1) It worked well with the slower opening verse
2) It could also represent the transition between the original play by Georg Buchner (the ‘old’ black and white photos) and our new and updated take on the play (the ‘new’ colourful photos).
3) I liked the possible idea of making the audience, at first, feel like they had slipped back in time and were watching ‘old movie footage’ in an old cinema theatre.
I made sure as well that the few images I showed of Vegas at the end were especially colourful and had a ‘wow’ factor, such as the skyline overview of Las Vegas itself and even tweeked the colours slightly in photoshop to make them stand out just that little bit more. I knew as well that I wanted the last image at the end to be a photo slowly zooming into the Las Vegas sign since I thought it would a great way to end the video with revealing the location of where our performance was based. Plus it timed brilliantly with the line in the chorus: “Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas!”
Think there can be a few improvements made for when we perform the play again later on in the year and have the video playing at the beginning again, such as maybe adding video footage instead of photos at the end to show the contrast change better. But for now, here is the opening video for what was used in our ‘work-in-progress’ performance. Enjoy!
– Charlotte