Wednesday, October 24, 2007

One Seventy Six?

In writing up the latest adverts for the show, I took a loose tally of how many sketches we have.  Prior to now I’ve been keeping it vague to avoid liability, citing “seven hours” of scripted material.  The seven hours is still accurate, if a bit modest, and I was downright shocked to count 176 sketches in various stages of completion.  This total encompasses stage sketches, film sketches, songs, monologues, dance numbers, audio bits, and several hybrid experiments.  The number of bits will grow by the end of the run.  We started writing in June and producing in September—not bad, I say!

Time to get your tickets!  If you think you’ll want to attend multiple shows, we’re offering a $50 pass to all seven of ‘em.  Just inquire at the box office or wait a few days for the special link on the ImprovBoston site to go live.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Inreflection

I’m having trouble remembering why I thought it would be a good idea to have T.S. Eliot host “The Wasteland Comedy Hour.”  Originally I tagged “...with T.S. Eliot!” onto the title as a joke, and to skew the perception of the show towards a weird late-night program.  As a title, and an advertising mechanism, it totally works.  As an idea I now have to follow through on, it’s presenting some challenges.

There was a time when the producers discussed the idea of abandoning the Eliot-as-host idea altogether.  I resisted dropping him from the show, because I felt our material—mostly 2-3 minute sketches, films, and songs—is too diverse in tone to bind into a cohesive hour.  This is still true, and for that I’m glad we have Eliot facilitating the evening.  His role is pretty well-defined now: he’s Kermit the Frog.  Kermit hosted The Muppet Show, but the character was never imposed on bits that didn’t have anything to do with him—and once the program got rolling you never really missed poor Kermit.  He popped in here and there to tell a joke, move things along, and buffer other pieces.

So, Eliot is our Kermit, and of course I wanted to tackle the challenge of playing Eliot, because it sounded fun, and hosting in character definitely falls outside of my performance comfort-zone.  Here are a few of the hurdles I’m stumbling over.

Several sketches which take place in the meta-world of Eliot’s variety show have lines written for Eliot himself—naturally.  Unfortunately, they were written long before I stepped into Eliot’s shoes, and so his dialog in these bits feels functional at best, forced at worst.  I need to rewrite his lines to fit his voice, or improvise around the scripted beats.  This is not the fault or responsibility of the original writers, just a hiccup in how we’ve developed the show and material.

T.S. Eliot is notorious amongst anybody who’s studied lit (and many who haven’t).  This is part of why I chose “him” to be our host—his dry cadence, his stuffy reputation, his canonical criticism and dense poetry—he’s already a character, and that he would never host a comedy show is all the more reason to force the role.  Plus, I strongly dislike his scholarly writing, even though “The New Criticism” paved the path to some of my favorite practices in Critical Theory.  I am also divided on his poetry—I empathize with and pity Prufrock down to the muscle of my heart, but “The Waste Land” leaves me cold.  I’ve read all his other work but confess that none of it really sticks unless I’m deeply committed to taking the time to read and re-read.  So, what does this mean for me, playing the character?  Just that my WICKED HILARIOUS New Criticism jokes have to be cut.

Eliot’s voice and cadence are distinctive, but not conducive to high-energy late-night antics.  Here are some recordings of the man himself:

T.S. Eliot reads The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot reads The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I mean, I would love to talk like that for the whole night, but I’d end up doubling our show’s running time.

In walking the line between faux-pretension and lit-nerd-masturbation, the only real metric is how many laughs a joke/bit gets.  But because I’m only doing each joke/monologue/bit once, I’ll never have the opportunity to revise, tweak, perfect—I’m flying in the dark.  I suspect the monologues for the first three shows will be a bit strained as I figure out (along with the audience, in real time), just what’s so damn funny about T.S. Eliot.  I’m writing the monologues out fully, but I won’t have the mental bandwidth to memorize their exact phrasing, so there’ll be some improv and some dropped jokes and some gibberish as I stumble to get comfortable in a new character, in a new show, in front of a new audience, for a window of ~7 minutes.  If I fuck it up or the stuff I wrote just isn’t funny, the opportunity to make that beat work will be gone forever. Much like improv, but with the added sting of having conceived and prepared for that moment of failure for several weeks.

Monday, September 24, 2007

A weekend of love and hate

Saturday: Great! Sunday: Terrible! A heartfelt thanks to Jacey, Rachel, and Lisa, who woke up (presumably) early to volunteer their comedic talents to the Wasteland sketches we filmed on Saturday.  We were very productive, although at the time our direction probably seemed “loose ‘n diffuse.”  Since Lynne left the show, the two remaining girls in our cast have been doing double the work, and even our dudes are being double- and triple-booked for roles.  Happily they’re up to the task.  We filmed from 9:30 to 3:30, and it wasn’t until 2:00 that our minds and bodies started to crumble. Whatever.  Four hard weekends of filming, and we’ve got—at a quick glance—around 24 video sketches in various stages of post-production or outright completion.  We’re on schedule.  We still have too much to do, but each week we chip away a noble amount. Saturday night I became paranoid about how much precious Wasteland footage I didn’t have duplicate copies of.  The raw footage will be on tape for all time, but countless hours have already gone into cutting, splicing, and massaging rough cuts in Premiere.  Well, fuck me for trying to do the right thing—I left Norton Systemworks to make a backup copy of my video directory overnight, and when I woke up, my computer was irreparably frozen.  After several hours of teeth grinding, praying, cursing, and hot angry tears, I unplugged the drive with the Video, reformatted C:, and installed WinXP fresh. At some point in the afternoon, Haas came to our apartment to film another sketch.  We bagged it, and I think (hope) I acted well—I honestly don’t remember much of the shoot, my mind furiously churning through data recovery options instead of learning my lines.  No matter how good the sketch turns out I will inevitably be disappointed with my performance for this very reason, a double-shame since it’s one of the few Wasteland video sketches in which I act. The filming done, I returned to my sputtering machine.  With some BIOS-level tweakage I was able to isolate the corrupted drive in such a way that WinXP doesn’t crash while attempting to detect it in boot.  A glimmer of hope?  I called TechFusion, a local data recovery service who frequently underwrites on WBUR.  I should’ve known that if they can afford to underwrite on WBUR, I can’t afford their services.  $90 for diagnosis?  An estimated $500-2,500 for recovery?  And they market themselves towards students?  More like TechFuckYousion.  (Burrrn) I Googled some freeware data recovery applications.  All failed, either by locking or causing the BSOD-reboot.  Then I tried a demo of this little program which not only revealed to me my directories—pinned beneath layers of corruption—but promised me that the files could be recovered by the full version.  $70 < $500; done. I've been able to retrieve everything from the corrupted drive that is truly irreplaceable: photos and Premiere project files. I also rescued my music collection. However, Premiere project files aren't terribly useful without the raw AVI footage on which they are layered. So far Nucleus's Kernel software has locked each time I tried to recover a larger file, such as the AVIs. I have more digging to do tonight, but it may be that my final two options are:

• Have data recovery specialists retrieve the AVI files and directories, then bend over for payment.
• Re-import all the footage and massage each Premiere file to fit.  Since we haven’t been using timecodes, this will be time consuming (but free!).

I haven’t made up my mind yet.  I’m secretly hoping that I can get those raw files out of the corrupted directory.  (If you nerds and WPIers know of any other cheap/free data recovery methods, do tell.)  At least I have options—there was half a day when I thought all was lost forever. After this debacle is over I’ll be investing in an external backup HDD, and using Gmail for more small-file storage. There’s no reason I can’t email myself Premiere Project files, and since that’s where the bulk of the creative editing is stored, it’s a good permanent failsafe.  If FTP wasn’t so slow I’d consider using my considerable web spaces to store some data, but until I can transfer a 5Gb AVI in one minute, I’m sticking with HDDs and writable media.  Also, I’ll be telling everybody that Norton Systemworks is a buggy piece of shit that attempted to destroy, not protect, several years’ worth of data. So, despite a lot of good things happening this weekend, I’ve been dwelling and obsessing over a fucking computer.  It’s been a few years since I kicked my computer addictions (multiplayer gaming, email, IM), but I’m as reliant on the machines as ever, especially when it comes to creative projects.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Help from our friends

I’ve been writing almost exclusively about the experience of a producer on The Wasteland, which gives me a particular myopia when it comes to what’s “new” and “interesting” in the project.  Today our director forwarded me a document so befuddling that I need to share it:

Dance_Dance_Dance_notes.pdf

What ramblings are these? To whom do these arcane instructions belong?

Why, they’re our choreographer’s, of course—I forgot we had a choreographer.  The lovely Katie Proulx has choreographed a dance for a filmed bit called “The Sundress.”  I’ve been completely uninvolved in the development/rehearsal/planning of this particular bit, so it’s always delightful to see the hard work of others manifesting in such a real, immediate way.

While on the subject of hard workers, I need to give big acks¹ to Joy Adams, our costume designer, who is currently slaving over some of our more fantastical costumes.  We’ve also got a slew of musicians working on our musical numbers, an awesome Stage/Production Manager hammering out logistics and recruiting several ASMs, we’ve got people at ImprovBoston working to publicize our show, and the list goes on and on.  Their names and titles are better organized here!

Our community is great.  I can’t wait to see all this “bounce around.”

1. My hip new slang for acknowledgments.

Monday, September 10, 2007

And so it begins

It’s been a full week for the Wasteland team. We had three major victories over the weekend:

1. Wrapping our first video shoot, which consisted of two sketches
2. Dance rehearsal for next weekend’s shoot
3. Re-jiggering each of the 7 shows to fit a more modest production schedule

The third item is a bittersweet victory. We had, as of last week, multiple sketches in multiple locations being filmed on every day of every weekend in September, with the promise of still more to do in October.  This is in addition to our weekly rehearsals for the stage material.  As I wrote in a previous entry, I think this ambitious schedule was attainable—but it wasn’t ideal, especially as our cast is swept up in the tide of “major life events” that is always heralded by the coming of the fall.  In our eight-person writer/actor team, we’ve got two people getting married, two people recently engaged, and a person just married.  If I were to also list nonmarital conflicts, the list would merit its own post.  Instead, I can summarize the producers’ decision thusly: our cast needs to be focused, energized, and having fun more than we need to create 150 perfectly-shot comedy gems.

We lost a cast member and some good material, but the show rolls onward, gaining momentum.  This weekend’s shoot, which I can summarize thusly:

was a whole bundle of fun.  As we end the stressful task of writing, revising, and structuring our seven hours of material, the horizon is filled with fun shoots, fun rehearsals, and the more fun task of bringing our work to life (via more work).  I think our decision to cut some of our more excessively complicated material will pay off when we open in two months and the cast is alive enough to do the bits justice.

In related news, I recently had to end my full-time commitment to The Uncommonwealth, a sketch group formed in just January of this year.  The group had a lot of talented writers and performers involved, and we even pumped out a fair amount of material in our first six months.  Unfortunately, as the months flew by, many members of the group (myself included) found themselves spread too thin, and the demands of filming all but the simplest of sketches were too much for us.  We shat out, like, fifty scripts in the first two months, then got bogged down in the logistics of prioritizing and filming everybody’s work for the next six.  There’s some good stuff on TUC’s site, but I’m afraid that might be all she (we) wrote, pending a total recast.  No regrets, no hard feelings, always the option of restarting something in the future.  But for now, The Uncommonwealth‘s primary function in my life is a great learning experience, if not an outright cautionary tale.

The difficulty of managing—or committing to—an ambitious film team is not to be underestimated.  Especially if you are in a community of improvisors, who take for granted the immediate satisfaction and fast turnaround time of weekly shows, weekly bombs, weekly laughs. Film is, honestly, only 10% fun—but the payoffs are more substantial than the disposable, transient giggles in an improv show.  The Wasteland, mercifully, has an end date of December 14^th.  With a solid, clear goal of doing the show in Nov/Dec, our cast and directors and crew are more able to commit—and follow through on—some very demanding shooting schedules.  Much of the post-production work falls on the shoulders of the directors, and our one tech/fx wizard, since we don’t have dedicated editors.  With the helmers editing 24/7 and the cast rehearsing or shooting for 3-6 hours per week, it’s a damn good thing we have a definite open date.

It’s been a tumultuous month.  As this one perpetually-shifting project continues to eat my life, all the other little projects are falling by the wayside.  Uncommonwealth is done, I’m on hiatus from Rondo, my writing is begging to be touched, and I’m only doing one Mainstage show in the foreseeable future….

I just had this cute little metaphor about the coming of autumn coinciding with the falling-off of old commitments, like leaves off a tree or some bullshit.  I’ll be honest—I’m not in a very poetic mood, and I have miles to go before I sleep.