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March 30, 2002

Rehearsals for CIF

I think my least favorite part of (co-)producing an improv show is the part where I'm emailed the schedules of 11 busy people and I have to figure out when we can all meet for a rehearsal. "Well, if we meet on Thursday from midnight to 2 AM, we'll have most of the group." Between these two rehearsals, I think we got 9 of the 11 to rehearsal, which included no more than 7 at each (if all that math makes sense).

The first rehearsal was the kind of great rehearsal I have dreams about. We all jumped in and really connected and felt a lot better about the form and each other. Yay!

The second rehearsal was low energy and full of bickering. Boo.

Posted by Fuzzy at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2002

Character Development Workshop

So, I had my first (and only) Character Development Workshop, and I learned more about how this film is being put together and about my character.

The film is what I call "scenario improv" - the film makers have the outline of a plot, and it's up to the actors to get their characters from point A to point B in each scene. For example, my character is the organizer of a dance festival that the main characters' dance troupe are appearing at and in one of my scenes I blow up at the dance troupe leader. What exactly I blow up about and how the argument progresses will be improvised between me and the other actors.

The character development workshop today was for six of us secondary characters: Mike Wellington, a cop, a bartender, a stand-up host, a roommate, etc. Very few of us are going to be in scenes together, so we couldn't really work on our relationships, but we all got started hammering out the main characteristics of our characters.

Oh, and the movie is being done in mock-umentary style. Huh. So our characters know the camera is there (even though we're still not supposed to look at it). Layers and layers.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:00 PM