Final Mixing

So it's 4:37 on Friday morning as I write this entry, and I'm sitting at the DRF office working on the final sound mixing and recording session for "E.D.E.N." We have to finish this for the contest deadline, and it needs to be posted to the Internet tonight so that the judges can see it. For such a short little movie, at only 8 minutes, it's taken a serious amount of work. Between all the sound work, the visual effects work, the music composition, and then the general editing and sound mixing time, I think it has taken far longer to finish this project than anyone thought it would. We can't leave tonight until it's done, but the sun is about to come up and that is challenging all of our creativity to solve the problems and not just let our brains fizzle away. It's now 4:45am.

And the Thunder Rolls....

Well, perhaps my last blog post turned out to be prophetic, as our show tonight in East Falls was rained out with extreme prejudice. We set up the show in a rapid-quick rush, since our truck with the costumes and set was about an hour late to get to call. Then as we were changing, we started seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder rattle in the distance. As the show approached, the sky got continually darker and darker. The rain started to drizzle down upon us when our director walked out to announce that we were postponing the show until the rain date. No sooner had he made than announcement than the heavens rumbled. Within seconds it was raining, and within minutes it was pouring. We ran around as best we could, grabbing our clothes and bundling the set into the van as quickly as we could.

We lifted a whole lot of heavy things into the van, and by this time all of us are soaking wet from head to toe. I was coiling up some extension cords and XLR cable when the pouring got even more intense. I have never seen rain that was falling so thick that I could barely see through it. We grabbed everything and pulled it all over to the truck just as the rain stopped falling. We paused for a moment to do a photo shoot while we were soaking, fulfilling all of our 'wet dream' jokes, and then took a little breather and re-packed the truck more correctly than we had before. Heading out to bar to start all of our drinking early, I hung around for a quick pass at the free chips & salsa, and then ran back to the office to finish up the final edit on "E.D.E.N."

Bringing the Thunder

Last night, we were out in Lansdowne for another performance of MND, and it was strong right out of the gate. We had two days off, the cast had dispersed into their own various projects and lives, and then we had to come back together to rock the ground with another performance. The show rocked, and it didn't have any rough patches that I was expecting it to. The four-way fight between the lovers really cooked, and there was only one moment in the entire show that I blanked out on my next line. Lucky for me, it only took about a second to find it again, and the show continued without even a hiccup. But now I know the part of the lines that I should review before every show, whether or not we've had two days off. And what really shocks me is that it wasn't that part I thought I was going to forget - it was something completely different! We have three more shows this week, and then three more next week, and then it's on to the next show.

A First Weekend

So I'm a little late at this, but we opened MND this weekend, and it all went really well. We had great audiences all four nights of performances, and the show has really been cooking along. We've done shows both on grassy plots and on concrete slabs, and now we have another two weeks coming up. But now that the show has opened, it also means that a lot of my time frees up to work on other projects. It's always funny to me that the performances time involved with a show is never as long as the rehearsal time. Going from six nights a week, four hours a night, now we have three or four shows a week, and the show is only two hours long. Of course, this timetable is completely different is it's a touring show we're talking about, since that means that the performance time will also include a whole lot of travel/hotel time. So now I'm going over the script for D&S, the Philly Fringe show I will be a part of in September. I start rehearsals for that almost immediately after MND closes, which I always think is the best way to keep working. Have a day off or two, and then go to the next project.

Coming out of Tech

Over the last two days, we've massaged all the technical issues out of MND. We worked with the set for the first time on Monday night, solving all of those problems of where we are entering and how we should play the different scenes. My scenes aren't all that complicated, so there was just a matter of figuring out how to make different moments work now that I'm actually running through curtains and not just pretending to run through curtains. It's also much more challenging to work my puppet through a split in the same curtain, but it's something that I was working to figure out by the end of the night. Then we started working on the very first truck-pack, and then I was off to listen to the highlites of the Phillies game on the radio. (22-1? WTF?)

Last night, we went out to a lovely park in West Chester, and we did a full run of the show outside for the first time: costumes, sound, lights, set, the works. Everything went very smoothly for the most part, even if we had some "rust on the works" as the director put it. We've got another run-through tonight, and then we open the show on Thursday night before running for three weeks. I'm excited to get on our feet and get this show going. I've had fun working with this cast through the process, but I really think that we need to have an audience soon to get all the best next step forward.

Going into Tech

I've been a little bit absent lately, but that is always a sign of being very busy on different projects. In this case, MND. We've been rehearsing and working every day for a few weeks now, and we are getting ready to go into the tech process with the show. Tomorrow is going to be our first day on the set, where we get to figure out all of the details about scene changes and entrances/exits. We've been pretending to move around the set so far, and tomorrow we will learn how to actually move around the different columns and curtains that we have been imagining up until now. And then once we get all of our clothes and all of our props, we'll be good to go for our opening on Thursday night. I'm excited to really start running this show to see what we've got once it gets in front of an audience. Now if I can just drop this Philly accent of mine....

Stumbling thru

Last night at MND, we tried stumbling through the first half of the show. We have almost the entire play blocked, and now that we have a framework on which to play, Josh (the director) encouraged us now to start experimenting with our characters. That first week as we work on staging the show can often be fun but a little limiting, and now with the overall structure in place, we can really start tightening up comedy bits and make everything as funny as it is supposed to be. It's also an interesting part of the rehearsal process; we've spent a week putting everything together, and now we have to spend another week taking it all apart in order to put it back together again by this weekend. When all this process happens organically, it's the sort of work that is hardly noticeable in the final project. It takes a lot of work to make something look effortless, and that's the stage we are entering for MND.