characterisation blog

 Characterisation:

What is characterisation? 

Characterisation is being able to thoroughly portray a character you are playing by including all of their mannerisms, beliefs, thoughts / feelings. This means you’re reacting as your character would in every scenario you’re placed in.

In our lesson today, we watched four videos. Two from West Side Story and two from Sweeny Todd. The two videos from each song were contrasting.

West Side Story:

Tony’s characterisation - Tony is singing about something exciting/ positive that he can feel is coming into his life. As the song/ the day is going on he’s becoming more excited and maybe a little agitated as he’s so eager to know what this feeling of hope he can sense is and what it means for him. You can see this through all of his movements and subtle dance moves that are gradually getting bigger and stronger to show his desperation. He’s also smiling throughout the whole song and is characterising through body language and his facial expressions.

I didn’t like the second version of this song as much as the first video we watched (2021 version) despite the actor characterising his enthusiasm strongly. I think this is due to how in the first version, the actor comes across as more powerful and it’s almost as if he’s unable to control his excitement however in this version his singing isn’t as strong and his movements I found were slightly more subtle.

Sweeny Todd:

Sweeny Todd and Mrs Lovett are just friendly at the moment however you can see the tension between them and how Mrs Lovett admires Sweeny Todd from the way they look at one another and how it seems she’s willing to do anything for him.

You can sense the evilness and slyness rebounding on one another as they are almost attacking each other with ideas of how they can eat their next victims and how this allows their psychotic relationship to develop.