Blog #3 - Week One Part Two

 Improv time!!

We spent the second half of the week really regenerating our improv skills (as I mentioned, we were over a year out of practice and all severely underestimated how different Zoom improv is from in-person improv). We started off almost every day with some scene rust, which is where you do quick two-person scenes (not necessarily related to the characters or plot of the mockumentary) as a warm up to shake the rust off. Then, we moved on to workshopping some scene ideas in character, in the form of 2, 3, and 4 person scenes. Here are some of the main things we focused on:

- Pace. Pacing was a constant battle for us, especially once we got to filming the larger scenes. With four of us in a scene, and no script to dictate time, we were liable to fall into one of two traps: big, airy scenes with lots of pauses and low energy, or high-speed scenes that the audience couldn't follow because there were so many of us speaking at once. We used our scene-work days to find our rhythm as a group to avoid these issues. 

- Intention. Again, with the too many cooks in a kitchen thing. Two person scenes are the building blocks of improv, and three person scenes are already a challenge. With four of us, we would sometimes go off on a tangent in the middle of the scene and lose sight of the main intentions/objectives, so we had to focus on improving that quite a bit

- Listening to scene partner(s). See above. We all have different styles as performers and it was tough sometimes to let them merge naturally, so we used keen listening to tune into each others strengths and weaknesses mid-scene and play off of the gifts we were giving each other.

- Game of the scene. Finding the "game" of the scene is one of the most important skills to have in an improv setting, especially an unconventional one like this where we kind of had to know the game beforehand so we could film more successfully. We focused quite a bit on this, analyzing each scene after we finished it to see if we could clearly pick out what game we were playing, be it a running joke, a sight gag, or just an underlying theme.

- Yes, and. This is the pinnacle of improv. It's on every mug and t-shirt you could ever hope to buy. Which is why we were so surprised that we, four seasoned improvisors (as far as high-schoolers can be seasoned anything), were forgetting to "yes, and" each other in scenes. 

- Editing the scene back afterwards. This was definitely the biggest challenge of this part of the process for me personally. After each scene, even the ones we weren't filming, we would pause and analyze every beat of it, seeing which jokes we could potentially heighten, what lines are worth keeping, and where there were any hiccups. I had to process a bit of self-consciousness about analyzing my own performances (which only got more scary when we were actually watching back footage later on). 

After a couple days of this, we fell back into our old improv rhythms and started churning out more good scenes and less flops, so it was time to move on to... filming!