Short Comedic Monologue Final Draft and Reflection

The biggest challenge that I faced during my monologue was learning to make my character feel natural. In the beginning I had my character talking to an invisible friend beside her, which was kind of awkward because I was interacting with someone who wasn’t really there. The switch to talking of the phone made it much more realistic - I was still having a conversation with someone, but they didn’t have to be there next to me and we didn’t need to hear their response. This worked much better and taught me new ways to look at monologues that might make it appear more natural or make more sense.
    Another thing I had to work on was the gestures. I normally don’t gesture very much, and when I do I’m not usually paying attention to it, so to do it deliberately felt awkward at first and didn’t always fit with what I was saying. It was easier when I had my monologue memorized so that I didn’t have to think about what I was saying and could work on using my body more to emphasize it.
    Something I tried to work on was adding more emotion to my voice. In watching the video of my monologue I saw that my voice doesn’t always come out the way it sounds in my head. I tried to improve upon this during the finals draft but it still didn’t come out quite as I wanted it to.
    One thing that was difficult was balancing all the different aspects of of the monologue. It was easy to focus on one thing and then forget about the others - when I started working on my voice I wasn’t thinking about blocking or gestures, and it was hard to keep them all in mind. Once I got to know the monologue better it came together and I didn’t need to focus on one thing at a time.
    Memorization seemed difficult as I was doing it, but once I got it the first time I didn’t really have any trouble knowing the whole thing. Other than the first line, which I knew but kept losing at the last second, it came very easily.