Monday, March 5, 2007

Experiments and Glitches

Radiostar: Off the Page is up and running and the feed is on iTunes! An auspicious beginning marred only be my own fallibility. I used the RSS feed for Radiostar: Improv and managed to copy the new feed into both locations. I wiped out all 63 entries in the old feed! I had to spend most of today rebuilding everything. So, if anyone out there suddenly found themselves downloading 63 episodes today... sorry.

Last night was an improv recording session, and one of our more unusual ones. We have a lot of content currently, so we're more free to experiment with different forms and see what comes out of the hopper. Most of last night was focused on individual scenes that were more loosely connected and less long-narrative than what we've been doing so far. Some of it may very well end up on the stream as a series of "short takes".

It made me think about the shows that we've done, though, and what makes them so much fun for me as an editor and hopefully fun for you as a listener. The first scene of a show is never the strongest part of it. "Long form" improv isn't about the immediate gag, but about the joy of seeing everything tie up at the end. It's about discovering threads and then discovering how they tie together.

We talk about doing a serial from time to time, and this sense of discovering threads and interconnections would be a thousand times more complex if we ever decided to go that route. We'd almost need to have someone keeping track of all of our plot lines if it went as long as the current improv stream has gone. It would be fun, but with the current Improv thread, Off the Page, and the upcoming Lab, I don't know when we'll have the time to add something so elaborate.