Video Report

On Monday we went to Creative House Studios to shoot the video sequence for the Scottish play. We met everyone the night before to go over the fight sequences and rehearse each scene, and even though I felt a little underprepared, I was really excited to get into the studio and start filming.

Of course, in true Cleveland fashion, the first major snowstorm of the season hit Sunday night and didn't really let up until late Monday night. I was worried that people wouldn't be able to make it to the studio, but they're all true Clevelanders and they soldiered through the rotten weather. We all met up at the studio at 4:00 and after loading in, getting into costume and tying up some loose ends we were ready to shoot.

The studio was really awesome, and Peter Sampson, the gentleman who graciously agreed to work with us and who also shot the whole thing for us, was a fantastic collaborator. He kept saying how impressed he was with our concept and our preparation, which made me feel a lot better about our rehearsal the night before. We started with the scenes with Matt and Margi, since they agreed to bring their newborn son Devin for the Lady Macduff scene and I wanted to release them early so they could get him back home. And after that we just kept knocking them out, one by one. It was super fun to be able to see each take right away as we shot them, and I think we came away with some really great footage. I got the hard drive back yesterday with the video on it, but I have not had a chance to review it yet. I'll start editing this weekend.

Blocking

Ok. If you were expecting anything remotely sane or realistic, stop right now. Don't see the show. Don't read any more posts.

Yes, Ali is directing this in a fabulously comedic way. Over the top! Over the line! Over the...something! We finally starting getting on our feet last night and worked out a few scenes with blocking. My personal challenge is to just make Josh laugh in every scene every time we rehearse it. I don't know what his personal challenge is, but it's on for me!

It felt good to start working the text and to know that it is holding water and that we might not have to paddle the entire way upstream! I mean, this isn't the first time I've worked on a new piece. About a decade ago I worked on a collaborative piece at Dobama Night Kitchen on the Gulf War. Josh was in it too. I knew that I wasn't exactly cast on the strength of my writing, and my scripts weren't integral to the show as a whole (there were A LOT of good writers working on that show) but it was great helping a show take shape. I haven't sought the opportunity to do a show like that since then. It is a wonderful experience. And I'm remembering that again. I'm glad for that.

Merry Christmas, me.

Official first draft almost done!!!!

YEEEEEHAAAAAAWWW!

Josh and I almost have an entire first draft done! We just have to finish up Hamlet and we've got a working script! I'm so proud of us!

Time keeps on slipping

Why, clock? Why? All I want for Christmas is more time. Today was a wash. We were supposed to have hours to work on the choreography for the Macbeth video shoot and writing the bits we haven't yet. Not so much.

Maybe tonight we'll have so time, but we're also trying to visit friends that have been cooped up with a newborn. Ok, Ok, tomorrow, definitely. All day. NO EXCUSES.

A journey of 1000 miles

Last night we had our first rehearsal with Ali. We have about 60% of the script done, I'd say, and we read through it twice, swapping roles on the second read. It was kind of fun to read Kelly's lines and have her read mine, and Ali thought it was funny enough to seriously consider keeping. While writing the dialogue, we have been pretty successful in staying true to ourselves as characters, and Ali liked the dynamic of switching our "characters", so I'm playing Kelly and she's playing me.

Tonight we started some fight work. We got one and half fights down in a first draft form. I'm sure we'll continue to tweak them as we go along but what we've got feels pretty good. We also ordered a couple super cheap bokken from Amazon, and we're waiting for confirmation of a brand spanking new 32" light sword from Starfire Swords.

Also, we had a ridiculous stroke of good luck video-wise. Without giving too much away, the concept for one of the fights is to do it as a fighting video game, like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. This would require filming the fights in front of a green screen. As an alumnus of the Multimedia Program at Virginia Marti College of Art and Design, I keep in touch with the head of Digital Media there, Geof Pelaia. I contacted Geof to see if we could possibly use their green screen, and he told me about a place on East 40th called Creative House Studios. The Digital Media students from VMC all go there now for their lighting and green screen classes. They have a huge permanent green screen studio, lighting grid, camera equipment, everything. Geof put me in touch with his contact there and they agreed to help us out for an undisclosed, but quite reasonable price, plus they're going to shoot it for us and put the raw footage on a hard drive for me to edit at my leisure. Awesome! Now we just need to get some folks to be various fighters and die-ers. Who wants to be in a video?

We are here to kill his characters.

Last night we had some friends over for a dinner party, and we read the current script to them for feedback. They liked a lot of it, and we got some good laughs, plus some very helpful notes and suggestions. The intro needs to be revised, and there were some conflicting opinions as to how much we need to explain each play as we do them. It made me realize that it doesn't matter if the audience knows who the characters in a given play are, or what the story is, because we're not there to do scenes from Shakespeare. We're there to kill his characters, and tell some bad jokes, and do some kick-ass fights. So that's what we're going to do.

Also, we had our first production meeting with our director, the stupendous Ali Garrigan, and she, too, had a lot of helpful criticism and ideas for the script. The best thing is, she is super excited to be working with us on this show and she really wants to be an objective director and help us get our ideas out there. We've got a lot of rewrites to do before our first rehearsal on Thursday.

Kelly just asked me, "Yes, but how do you feel about it all?" A couple of days ago I was very stressed about how much work we had left to do, and I freaked out a little. (Kelly: A little?!?!?) OK, a lot. I still feel a bit stressed, but the laughs and comments we got from everyone were great and made me feel a lot better about what we do have written. My biggest concern right now besides the script is getting all the video done. I've got some feelers out there about how we're going to do that. So, overall, I feel much better about where we are.

Critique

Josh and I received a couple of critiques from our friends.

One said he needed to hear it before he could really give an opinion, and the other was very detailed, but I think she thought it was the whole thing and close to being a final draft. Her thoughts still hold, though. And I agree with quite a few of them. Things need to be fleshed out more. We have to remember that more people than just our friends and family will be seeing this show and need to know basic things like
- who we are!
- why are we doing this?

Yeah, good questions.

(Josh just asked from the kitchen if we could do one of the fights as a silent film - maybe Hamlet?

"Hamlet is the wordiest play in the cannon, so we are going to do it completely silent!")

One thing we keep asking ourselves is ,"Will people know enough about the plays?" I mean, almost everyone know R&J, MacB, Hamlet, but what about the others? Other than the two, maybe three people reading this, does anyone know that there's 3 parts to Henry IV? Should we work a one or two sentence description into each scene? Are we clever enough to do that without it sounding like English 101?

We wrote!!!

So, what we've got written:

R&J
MacB
Ham (sort of)
Henry IV, part 1
Henry VI, part 2
Othello (two versions)
King Lear
and Titus Andronicus

Not bad for a week. Now if only our writer friends would let us know if they think they are any good...

Progress

4 scenes written (one twice), 5 to go, more or less.

Blog? What blog?

Oh, that blog. Whoa, hey! Where'd November go?

So Kelly and I agreed to clear our calendars for the fall so we would be able to commit ourselves solely to this project. So of course, what happened? Kelly got sent to two tradeshows in Indianapolis and Nashville. We got a fight gig at Olmsted Falls High School that tied us up for four days. The Mac suffered a serious hardware glitch that required it to go to the shop twice, for several days both times. Life happened. This is hard!

I think we've made some good headway, though. We turned on the tape recorder and riffed on some ideas for the major scenes we want to do, and I blocked out a couple on paper from those riffs. This coming week is all about getting them all written out. We've got nothing on our calendars until Thanksgiving, and then we've got a 6-hour drive down to Maryland (and another one back) with which to do more writing and brainstorming.

On the "actual progress" side of things, we have a light designer nailed down! Doug and Danielle, who are doing the other show we are sharing the weekend with, hired a young designer named Dan Schreckengost, and he has agreed to design our show as well. So, yay! At least something is finalized.

Yes, I'm worried. Yes, we are terrible procrastinators. Or rather, we are really excellent procrastinators, which is the problem. But it is coming together. Really, I swear it is.

Collaboration

Josh and I just had a meeting with our fellow Big Boxians tonight - two of the creative team for Cramped. Danielle Hisey is one of the authors and Doug Snyder is the director. We worked out some logistics... ate some dinner... made some small talk. Doug mentioned he wanted to tie in the two shows somehow. Make them flow. So we started brainstorming. Some good ideas, none of which I will expound on here, because some things need to be a surprise. But it could be fun.

Now, to write more of the script.....

What's comedy got to do with it, got to do with it?

Thank you for letting me paraphrase you, Tina.

Seriously though. What's funny? That has been Josh and my biggest worry. We crack ourselves up all the time. But will anyone else laugh with us? Hell, even at us? There are times where I'm not sure I get my own jokes. And, as people constantly tell me, I live waaaaaaaay over in the town of Over The Lineville. But I know what's funny in other people. Usually. Just don't make me laugh at Family Guy.

Josh and I went to see Jonathan Coulton - www.jonathancoulton.com - (or JoCo, as his fans call him. Now that was something I thought was incredibly funny. Until I saw an autograph on someone's t-shirt. Can you imagine signing Jonathan Coultan over and over?!? Smart man.) He is what I call Nerd Rock. Let's just say, walking into that concert, I felt like a super model. Whoa. But JoCo's (I still giggle) songs are witty, fun and funny.

The opening act was a music/comedy act called Paul and Storm - www.paulandstorm.com. Now JoCo (heehee) is all about the wit and his songs are well written. These guys happen to be comedians that can also play guitar and harmonize really well. The act consisted of them making jokes (usually with the help of a very vocal audience - either Paul and Storm have heard it all before, or they are some of the best improvisers I've ever seen in my life), singing a song, taking a step back, bowing in unison, and starting the process over again. I loved the bows. Every time they did them, I heard Steve Martin saying, "thank you" in the voice he always uses when he isn't playing himself. You know... the nasally, drawn out one?

I turned to Josh and told him, "We have to do like that."

Tell a few jokes, do a fight, take a step back, bow in unison and start the process over again. That's comedy.

Not single spies but in battalions

The tally of all named deaths is complete.  We counted approximately 150 characters who either die on stage, or whose death is reported during the course of the play.

In a related note, some British professor has used plagiarism-detecting software to determine that "Edward III" was, in fact, about 40% written by Shakespeare, with the other 60% most likely Thomas Kyd (article).  I still say it stinks.

Keepin' on keepin' on.

Josh and I have been stressing out about this (Josh more than me). We have been talking it up, sent out a save-the-date email blast, and thrown around ideas to our friends. The amount of support and excitement has been overwhelming! Sometimes a little too overwhelming. Instead of hoping we have a fun and funny show, we're now hoping we don't suck.

With all of the wonderful suggestions and comments our friends and colleagues have given us, we got a little ahead of ourselves. We started steering our little boat of stage combat fun towards the Sea of Dramatic Purpose, which would eventually lead us to the Ocean of Ohmygodwhatarewedoing. We decided to get back to basics.

So, Josh and I requested a brainstorming from our friend Dave. Very, very helpful. It put Josh in a better frame of mind and we are renewed with purpose! The session was a lighthouse - to further my metaphor I started in the last paragraph. If you couldn't tell, I'm the visual side of the team. ;)

As I type this (to make myself feel like I'm accomplishing something tonight), Josh is continuing to research all of the deaths in Shakespeare's works. Through one of our friends we discovered a wonderful reference book called Who's Who in Shakespeare by Francis Griffin Stokes. It's a dictionary of every person in and around Shakespeare's writings. The best part? At the end of the detailed scene by scene breakdown of what the character does in the play, it says how they die. OH MY GOSH!!!! Time saver! We thought we were going to have to read/re-read every single freakin' play. And as much as I love Shakespeare, I REALLY don't want to read King John. Someday I will. But hopefully I will be paid to do it.

I asked Josh if he would like to add anything before I post this. He says I should change King John to Timon of Athens. We all have our limits I guess. Does anyone die in Timon? Echth, I hope not.

Is this a prologue or the posey of a ring?

Welcome, gentles all, to Kill Will - the Blog! Here you may read progress updates as we write, choreograph, rehearse and perform our world premiere play. As this is only the first post, there is not much to report yet, but allow me to give you some background, in case you're not already sick of hearing us talk about this project.

As you probably know, Kelly and I have been teaching, choreographing and performing stage combat in the Cleveland/Northeastern Ohio region for several years. Shakespeare is one of our great loves and we have directed the fights for many of the Bard's plays. (Including, at last count, something like 4 R&Js, 3 MacBeths, 3 Midsummers and 2 Hamlets.) A couple of years ago we came up with the idea to do a fight show based around all the death and violence in Shakespeare's plays. We called it "Kill Will" - for those of you who are not fans of Quentin Tarantino, it's an homage to his film "Kill Bill", which has some crazy fight scenes in it.

But who has time to write, choreograph and produce a new show? We talked about it and threw out crazy ideas, but never really worked to get it off the ground. But it lurked there, in the back of our minds like Puck, invisible but pulling strings nevertheless. When the applications for CPT's Big [Box] program were announced last spring, I decided to jump into the breach and apply. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war! (For you non-Clevelanders, Big [Box] is Cleveland Public Theater's annual new works program. Each show accepted into the program gets the theater for a week to rehearse, and then a weekend to perform, plus a small production budget. It's a wonderful thing for local artists.)

Of course, I waited until the last minute to do the application, and to be quite honest, I didn't think it was very good. Kelly and I brainstormed some ideas, I wrote up a basic outline and some blather about why we should be accepted, and threw together five pages of a rough script. I turned it in the next day, right on deadline. That was in June.

Fast forward to August. People from CPT are probaby getting tired of me asking when the Big [Box] decisions will be made. Then one day, I get an email from Raymond, the artistic director. They've accepted Kill Will! Not only that, but we've got the opening weekend! That's aweso... oh.

Oh dear.

Guess I'd better get writing.