Blog #2 - Week One Part One

 We spent a large portion of this week building the skeleton of our project. While not much of this week's work was used in our final video, it helped us greatly in setting a tone and direction for our film, as well as getting back into the flow of doing improv in person again after over a year of collecting rust. We had already done some of the leg work prior to the start of the project by figuring out a club, a premise, and some basic character ideas, but now it was time to really begin fleshing it out. Four our character work this week, we researched some archetypal four-person character dynamics, so we could get a better feel for how they would interact as a group. As a very basic jumping off point, we landed on some classic archetypes for media set in a high school: the smart one, the jock, the weird one, and the "Straight Man," a film and theatre term that essentially just means the normal one; the one the audience is supposed to relate to. 

Once we had their roles in the group figured out, we each did some individual character work to find where they challenged those stereotypical archetypes. We wrote and workshopped some talking-head style monologues, pulled tons of costume pieces and props for ourselves from the HPS costume closet upstairs, and spent hours playing in-character through scene work to deepen the relationships between our characters. This was really helpful because it gave us ways to humanize the characters and make their arcs more complex than they were originally. 

Going into this project, I was worried that working in a group of close friends would be largely unproductive and stressful. While there were definitely times (especially early on in the process) that we had trouble reigning in our collective focus, I think our closeness really helped us be vulnerable in our creative processes without fear of failure or judgement.