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?