« October 2002 | Main | December 2002 »

November 28, 2002

Week Off

There wasn't any Neutrino Project rehearsal last night because of Thanksgiving. So Shaun and I (with our Sickest F***in' Stories and Around Midnite Series producer hats on respectively) had a meeting with Don Hall (with his WNEP Exective Producer hat on). Inevitably the conversation wandered to The Neutrino Project, because Don (with his Pit Bull PR hat on) is helping us do some of the PR for the show. We're usually pretty good at PR, but for once everything is on schedule. Postcards are in, cast tchotchkes are in, press releases are out, phone calls have been made, posters are ready to be posted. It's almost frightening.

Don's been reading this journal and pointed out that last week I didn't say what we actually did in rehearsal. (The fact that he could have asked Jen when she got home is, I suppose, beside the point.)

I've settled on two warm ups that we do every rehearsal -- follow the follower and race car. My thought is that since we're so disconnected when we're actually doing the show (that is, each team is in completely separate physical locations), anything that gets us started on the same page is good. So, we did those two warm-ups.

Then I sent everyone out in teams to do first scenes -- so shoot them fast and with minimal camera set ups. They'd come back to the rehearsal space, I'd watch the scene with the team, we'd talk about it, and then I'd send them out again to do another first scene. A lot of the scenes were great, but I found that by the end of an hour plus of scene after scene, it was wearing me out to be watching all of them with a critical eye. It's hard to be the director, huh?

So it was a nice change to grab a camera and get out in the field with just 3 actors and shoot some scenes. I had everyone switch up teams and go out to shoot 3 scenes (2 minutes, 4 minutes, 2 minutes) like they would in a real show (though we weren't doing the strict timing and running like we would in the show). To contrast with the last week's wackiness, I gave us all the directive to do our scenes as though we were trying to avoid audience laughter. It's a nice way to stay grounded.

Overall, another good rehearsal. Maybe because Shaun wasn't there. Heh. You can hear more about how hard it is to direct someone who you perform with when I'm grumpier. Tonight, it's Thanksgiving and I'm feeling good.

Posted by Fuzzy at 10:56 AM

Abject failure

Well, I've got a couple hundred words in my Hiptop that I haven't transfered to the main Word document, but really I haven't done anything since the 12th. So I'm going to come to the end of the month with about 3500 words done of a 50,000 word novel. Last year I at least made it 1/3 of the way there.

So today I'm thankful for... not stressing out about failing at a self-imposed artistic challenge.

Posted by Fuzzy at 10:43 AM

November 21, 2002

Cable Access, baby!

Kevin Reome, of the Playground's Inside Vladimir, has a new cable access show called, if my lousy memory can be trusted, Focus on Comedy Reome Comedy Probe (thanks Kevin). He came out to Neutrino Project rehearsal last night and filmed some of our rehearsal process and then did a short interview with me. The episode should air in January, just in time to plug the show as it is running.

Posted by Fuzzy at 02:52 PM | Comments (1)

November 15, 2002

Gallery of Grabs

As part of our PR push for the upcoming run of The Neutrino Project, I've posted a gallery of video grabs from the two preview shows.

Rehearsal this week was the practice/get-out-of-our-system extreme video and acting techniques. We learned that fake slo-mo is hard, muscial montages are tricky, and drug-freak-out camera-spins are cool.

Posted by Fuzzy at 03:42 PM

November 12, 2002

Gearing up

We've officially started work for a real run of The Neutrino Project. We'll be going up Saturdays at 10:30 in January and the first week of February at the WNEP Theater.

What do I mean by "work"? A whole bunch of things.

Have I mentioned we have a great cast and crew? We lost Russ LaChanse to New York (but I got his car!) and Zach, Andy, and Tim to other obligations. But we've picked up Lillie Frances, Phillip Mottaz, and Jen Shepard (and Adam Devlin-Brown is moving from running to camera-ing). Check out the full list on the main TNP page.

Last week was a remember what it's like to work together/meet the new people/remember how that video stuff works-kinda rehearsal. Tomorrow I've got a wacky rehearsal planned -- I'll post more after it's over.

Posted by Fuzzy at 04:06 PM

Word Count - 3100

There's no getting around it -- I've been ignoring my novel. I really don't know what I was thinnking when I signed up for Nanowrimo again this year. I mean, the actual writing went fine, when I had time for writing. But I'm in a show, and just started rehearsals for a show I'm directing, and I'm putting together a video montage and so on and so forth. I don't want to say I've given up, but we'll see...

Posted by Fuzzy at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2002

Word Count - 205

It's not the end of the day yet, so I've got plenty of time tonight to write another 1461 words before I go to work at the club. I wrote those two hundred words on the bus this morning on my Hiptop. One Hiptop Note holds 1000 characters, which is about 180 words, it turns out. So it'll take about 280 Notes to hold my novel (I'll be working in Word when I'm not on the bus).

It seems my novel is a crime story. I think I've been playing too much Grand Theft Auto 3 lately.

Posted by Fuzzy at 05:15 PM