trailer alert

Here it is, folks.

THE TRAILER EXISTS. AND RULES.
In my humble opinion. As one of its creators.
The kids at Improv A Go Go were kind enough to let us screen the first NTC trailer last night. Dave Jennings heroically showed up at the last minute and fixed the sound, so the ten hours Eric and I put in earlier in the day paid off, and people actually watched, laughed at, and hopefully enjoyed it. We set out to make something that was both cliche and totally weird, unique and representative of Neutrino TC. What did it? I think the combination of "O Fortuna" as a score AND some footage of Corey waggling a sock dangling from his crotch.
Eric's going to add some extra magic to it, and then we'll post it online so people can enjoy it again and again, download it and make screen caps of Corey's nipple.
-Hannah

box girl in the dumpster room...

...another glory-token from one of our rehearsals. it's amazing the props you can build in under 3 minutes.

hey, so oct. 4th is three weeks from today. our first show! hooker whaaaat?! if i used terms like OMG i would use it right now with some degree of earnestness. then i would punch myself in my face. we are rapidly approaching what i have grotesquely termed, our "soft opening" (i learned that from top chef... so so so not ok) in which we open the show up to audiences and work out all the kinks and mayhem. that will now be my band name if ever i have one. that, or soft opening...

anyway, point at hand: our first 3 "preview" shows---the FIRST THURSDAY of every month, oct. thru dec. 10:30pm @ the bryant lake bowl. $10. come see it. help us sell out. make some dreams come true. in fact, if you come to see the show and say you heard about it from this blog, troy zimmerman will kiss you on the mouth. no strings attached. come to the show. do it.

soon the city will be splattered with our publicity and hope. not to mention some awesome neutrino trailers made by some of our finest. be prepared. be excited. we are...

ellipses.
-rita

ps---does anyone want to know what god died of?...

a general report

This is kind of a rambling post to make up for the lack of posts over the last few weeks. We've been busy rehearsing, and mostly just thinking really deeply and furiously, trying to digest what the honorable Matt Donnelly taught us when he visited on August 18th and 19th.

We're rehearsing in Calhoun Square these days, basing our operations out of an empty room in the office corridor behind the cooking classroom and Comedy Sportz. Tuesday nights from 7 to 10 are spent dashing around the mall and surrounding streets, trying to time things correctly and figure out how to tell stories the Neutrino Twin Cities way.... whatever that means. We're still figuring that out. Matt gave us some excellent tools for scene work, story building, camera movement... a big, full toolbox is what we have. Our job now seems to be to take those tools and build a show that is as strong as possible -- AND make Neutrino feel like something uniquely ours as well.


One of the best things I've gotten out of this project so far is the opportunity to work with improvisers from different "schools." I come from a predominantly short form background, having been raised since early adolescence on a diet of Comedy Sportz and dreams. I've had more long form instruction and experience in the last few years, but nothing beats doing scene work with the kids from the long form side of the tracks. I think the collision between varying styles of acting and storytelling is going to yield some really cool results on film. NTC is made up of people from a number of different smaller improv groups, all of whom know each other with varying degrees of familiarity from taking classes at the Brave New Workshop, or working there or at Comedy Sportz. I get the impression that this makes us unique among the Neutrino cities, since other NVPs have been started by groups that were already formed and had worked together before.

I hope to have some photos soon for this sad, black blog. Tomorrow's rehearsal may yield some images.

-Hannah

don't play dead on the greenway...

so, last night we had our first encounter with the minneapolis police dept.

Q: what's the worst time for this to happen?
A: just as mike hadley is slowly removing his shirt from his body and i am yelling "take that, demon!"

...and that is pretty much how it happened. my character had inadvertently thrown another character over a bridge. as tim h. lay draped in a maroon shrug on the cemented greenway, bikers and rollerbladers passed with confusion and concern. apparently, some of them phoned the po-lice. well, according to said po-lice, a "bunch" of them called.
so here's my question: why didn't any of them freakin' stop then, huh? not concerned enough to interrupt their exercise?! seriously. unless of course it was the one lady who did stop to ask tim if he was ok, to which tim answered "yes, we're just shooting a movie. i'm fine." if that lady called then she's a damn idiot because dead people don't talk.

we have begun our larger rehearsals now with the "starting team" of actors including: dan hetzel, fred beukema, aric mckeown, tim hellendrung and corey anderson as well as us, the core. (if i have spelled any of their names wrong, it was on purpose and to teach them a lesson.) we have all been getting used to improvising with each other, as some of us have never worked together before, as well as the ever-arduous task of getting used to improvising in front of a camera. it's all been going pretty well so far and everyone seems to be gelling quite nicely together. nothing but rainbows and hearts and apocalyptic zombie pox...pretty sweet.

so, to all you greenway goers out there: if you see a dead person in your way, look around for an effing camera before you call the cops!

-rita

there's a monster at the end of this book...

...and it's an effing life-sized video camera constructed from cardboard, duct tape, and a dream.

this is how a portion of the core spent their sunday afternoon. the costume is designed to be worn over the torso of a gangly runner for our publicity photo. this camera-man (or lady, although i don't think hannah or i are going to bare our legs for the sake of this photo) will run throughout the streets as our photographer chases after, hoping to catch the perfect shot.

it promises to be delightful, enticing, and logistically difficult.

stay tuned...

-rita

"Are you guys shooting a Puffy video?"

Here's a bare bones account of our last rehearsal - things are getting busy. We've planned a rehearsal with all our actors for next Tuesday. We decided that before that rehearsal, we should add in the element of TIME CRUNCH to our approach to this structure.

So earlier this week we met at the Bryant Lake Bowl to rehearse. This time Matt Houchin joined us. Houchin is a film maker and all-around indie media mogul (I just made that up. Matt, if you'd like to be characterized with a different phrase, please let me know...) who performs at Comedy Sportz Twin Cities with all us Core folks.

We figured out a loose timetable for the show -- basically a schedule for each team's runner, mapping out how many minutes are available for each team to shoot and deliver each of their three tapes. Then we hit the street. The challenge: do practice runs pretending to be team A, B, or C, giving ourselves a time limit to see if we could do this Neutrino thing as fast as we'll need to for the show.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that it's actually not impossible to shoot a decent 5 minutes of improved film in under 15 minutes. It's not *easy*, but it's not impossible either.

Mike, Rita and myself were in front of the camera. Matt directed. Eric and Troy did both. We all switched off being the "runner," aka keeping time.

At this rehearsal we discovered: To do this show, you have to be able to do math while running down a dark street, looking for pools of light to shoot in. Multi-tasking...

As an improvisor who doesn't know when to fucking shut up and let the scene move, I was helped a lot by Matt's style of improvisational film directing. When he picks up on something that he thinks needs to be shown instead of talked about, he just CUTS. This led us to add more action to our scenes. Hadley ate some crab grass from somebody's yard, I soaked my bosom in a sprinkler, Boersma got stabbed by a "sword," aka dirty wooden stake from a construction site, and Eric rode on Mike's back and berated him for half a block.

We also incorporated some serious special effects into this rehearsal's films. Matt went all Sam Raimi and did a shot from the POV of a sword flying through the air towards a moving target (Neutrino=athleticism). Troy's segment had teleporting aliens and a UFO (aka cell phone moving through the upper corner of the frame). Shit got cine-MATIC, yo.

For this week's person-on-the-street quote, see the subject line. The guy who asked us this said it in a friendly, gently mocking tone. It was delightful. After this rehearsal, I personally got three reports from friends around town that had either seen us running around the Lyn-Lake area with Eric's camera, or who had heard from others who had seen us. Is this just because I have bright pink hair right now? Will this Neutrino show thing lend all of us an air of local notoriety as "those camera nerds who run around uptown?" WERE we shooting a Puffy video without even realizing it?

So many questions. ..

-Hannah

p.s. The 35W bridge collapsed the day after this rehearsal. I mention it here because, in addition to serving as a reference for other people trying to mount Neutrino Video Projects in the future, this blog is also meant to be a personal historical document for all of us working on the show.