Character development 'Gollum exercise'

Within this exercise you are in a pair in which you have to carefully fight over something very precious to that character. As an actor this exercise involved both your physical and emotion presence to explore the given character. You have to imagine that the object you are fighting for is the most precious thing in your life. While you have that certain object you have to explore with that character how that feels while still trying to protect it from the other person. Then if you’re the person without the object you have to explore with that character what that experience is like while still trying to take that object from the other person. For us we were given the character ‘Gollum’ out of ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ and we had to try and replicate his physicality and also his desperation of trying to get that object back into his possession. Also we had to explore ‘Gollums’ joyfulness of achieving his task of gaining the object back into his possession. I thought that the exercise we did today was very useful and helpful when referring back to character development. Within this exercise you are exploring how your character would react in gaining his objective which is to possess the object.

When undergoing this exercise at the start I found it quite challenging in maintaining ‘Gollums’ physicality, however I was able to portray his desperation and emotions while I didn’t have the object. While the exercise progressed I started to adapt to my characters physicality a lot easy and it felt a lot more natural than before at the start. I believe that emotionally I was very connected with my character as I felt the same intensity while I didn’t have the object in my possession. I believe the film helped me portray ‘Gollum’ as a character as I knew a lot about his personality and physicality from the film. I think this exercise is very helpful and useful when referring back to the performance as, ‘Gollum’ as a character is very similar to some of our own individual characters in our performance pieces. Our characters are very much like ‘Gollum’, orc’s and goblins however, I believe our characters are more exaggerated with their physicality. I found this exercise very useful and experimental as ‘Gollum’ has many similarities but also differences between our own individual characters. This exercise allowed me to explore and experiment with new and different physicality’s.