Cinematic Challenge
Drama lovers from every House took over campus on Tuesday 5 March, filming their entries in the annual Wenona House Drama Competition.
The House system is at the heart of the Wenona experience, fostering friendships between year groups and providing all students with a sense of connection and a feeling of belonging.
Each year, the House Drama Competition challenges the students to embrace their creativity as a team while facing challenging behind-the-scenes logistics. They collaborate to write, audition, direct, film, and finally edit a video, following a given theme and cinematic style.
This year, the theme is fairy tales, and each House has been assigned either Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and a format such as documentary, action, romance, or western.
School House has taken inspiration from the popular Netflix show Cunk On Earth, to produce a comedic documentary-style video based on Little Red Riding Hood. With a cast of 32 students, they have worked to infuse humour, inspired by their shared love for the show.
A leader of the project is Sophie (Year 11), "We wanted our script to be relatable, making sure that everyone who auditioned got a role, to showcase our School House spirit and recognise how much courage it takes to put your hand up,” she said.
Organising such a large cast proved to be a challenge, especially with various year groups recently away on camp. To meet the tight deadline, the four scriptwriters will divide the editing process between them.
“One of my favourite scenes is our recreation of Philomena Cunk's iconic introduction to Cunk On Earth,” said Sophie. “Hopefully we can pull it off well enough for everyone to understand the reference.”
Hooke House is tackling Goldilocks and the Three Bears in documentary style, interpreting it as an investigative episode of the program 60 Minutes. “With our cast, crew, costume designers and script writers totalling around 40 people, it’s a bit larger than normal but so many people in the House were keen to participate and I wanted to include as many people as possible,” said Bethan (Year 11) who has been instrumental in the process.
“Documentary is a fun style to have been allocated. I am excited about getting to use different filming mediums such as fake security camera footage and applying lots of montages and short choppy scenes. We won’t be able to play in character and emotion and use the conventions of short films like the other Houses, but we have the advantage of being able to play around with footage styles. Also, interview scenes will be fun,” Bethan said.
The final results will be revealed at the screening on Thursday 11 April, the last teaching day of Term 1.