Summer Project Diary - Day One

Today we had a meeting with our Summer Project groups. We discussed the brief and thought about what the words 'End of Empire' could mean on quite a broad scale. Rather than something epic we decided it was probably better to use the word as a metaphor, like the empire being the end of authority or command on quite a small or personal scale such as a girl breaking free from her family or a man going against a set of cultural values. We also thought at first about making the the subject matter positive as this would be an interesting take on what intitially sounds like a fairly negative idea.
When we had finished the meeting with our advisor our group got together and tried to form a solid idea for the project. We all had different takes on what the story could be about. The first solid idea to be brought up was about a man quitting his job, the company for him feeling like a dominating empire, and him quitting feeling like a great escape and freedom from his own personal hell. To give the story more depth I added the idea of making references to epic stories so that the audience would recognise that the man's freedom is to him quite an epic experience akin to the abolishment of slavery in more classical terms and not just a bored and frustrated man who is fed up with his job.
This was one idea. We went on to discuss further ideas and through discussion the basic concept and dramatic form of the story has begun to take its shape. The main theme will be death. Although this is a negative idea, it can also have postive implications and we have decided to show death in two different lights, its good and bad points in terms of end of life and rebirth.
Six different stories will be shown to show why the man's death has had a contrasting impact and provoked seperate thoughts and feelings amongst different people.
This is still only a very brief idea and we hope to develop it further very soon.
In terms of group dynamic, we are all contributing to ideas very well so far as well as being sensitive to the voices of other group members. We were a little static at first but we soon warmed to each other's company and our enthusiasm for the project soon inspired us all to speak up about our ideas.