Over the last few months, we've been seeing our download numbers climb rapidly. So first off, WELCOME! I don't know how many people are actually watching the blog, since it's on a different server than the shows, but if you're here I hope you'll have a seat and I'll bring out the milk and cookies.
Improv, like all theatre (with the possible exception of the "one person show") is a collaborative artform. We're fortunate here at Cassandra's Call Productions to have an amazing ensemble of performers, and the tools to make this show a reality. But that doesn't mean that we can't always use a little more help.
Are you a musician? Would you be interested in contributing scene change music to one or more of our upcoming shows? Are you a sound editor who would be interested in working on our scripted material while Radiostar founder, Improv Director, and Off the Page editor is away in Africa for a year? Better yet, are you an improvisor with audio editing experience who would like to try your hand at a show or two, or even to work with us on new podcasting projects? Are you an artist, feeling inspired by a particular show who would like to turn it into a "comic"?
Radiostar has lots of ideas for expansion, but at the moment we're limited by manpower concerns. We aren't getting any money off any of this (yet), after all. But if you like what we do and want to be a part, let us know.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Friday, June 8, 2007
Catch Julie Kurtz in Anna Bella Eema
I've been encouraged to use this space to publicize my own upcoming show Anna Bella Eema, opening Saturday June 9th (tomorrow), so here we go:
Come, enjoy this world of fantastical and menacing adventure, underlined by a beautiful mother-daughter and coming-of-age story.
Anna Bella Eema
a trailer park gothic for three voices
Written by Lisa D'Amour, Directed by Rebecca Novick
First week all tickets 1/2 price! June 8th - July 1st @ TJT, 470 Florida Street, SF
TICKETS AND INFO : http://www.crowdedfire.org/nowPlaying.html
WATCH A BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO : http://www.crowdedfire.org/
About the Show: A reclusive mother and daughter's trailer park is doomed to destruction for the sake of a new highway. As menacing inhabitants of the outside world bear down on the tiny family, Anna Bella Eema, the muddy alter ego of Anna Bella, is born. And then the true odyssey begins. A spoken-and-sung three-character gothic, Anna Bella Eema asks us to listen, and listen carefully.
Starring: Cassie Beck, Julie Kurtz, & Danielle Levin Design by: Jarrod Fischer, Melpomene Katakalos, Cliff Caruthers, Wendy Lynn, and Scotty Arnold
www.crowdedfire.org
Come, enjoy this world of fantastical and menacing adventure, underlined by a beautiful mother-daughter and coming-of-age story.
Anna Bella Eema
a trailer park gothic for three voices
Written by Lisa D'Amour, Directed by Rebecca Novick
First week all tickets 1/2 price! June 8th - July 1st @ TJT, 470 Florida Street, SF
TICKETS AND INFO : http://www.crowdedfire.org/nowPlaying.html
WATCH A BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO : http://www.crowdedfire.org/
About the Show: A reclusive mother and daughter's trailer park is doomed to destruction for the sake of a new highway. As menacing inhabitants of the outside world bear down on the tiny family, Anna Bella Eema, the muddy alter ego of Anna Bella, is born. And then the true odyssey begins. A spoken-and-sung three-character gothic, Anna Bella Eema asks us to listen, and listen carefully.
Starring: Cassie Beck, Julie Kurtz, & Danielle Levin Design by: Jarrod Fischer, Melpomene Katakalos, Cliff Caruthers, Wendy Lynn, and Scotty Arnold
www.crowdedfire.org
Thursday, May 24, 2007
improv - that's where the money is
So far, we've all done Radiostar because we like doing it. Nobody's gotten rich on it yet, in spite of our recent traffic increase to thousands of downloads a month. (Either that, or they aren't driving their Maseratis to the studio). This seems to work pretty well for us.
And apparently not just us. I read something interesting along these lines today on a tech blog I follow (I write software in my daytime life), about a benefit CD everyone -- musicians, producers, even the cover artist -- worked on for free:
(from O'Reilly Radar).
And apparently not just us. I read something interesting along these lines today on a tech blog I follow (I write software in my daytime life), about a benefit CD everyone -- musicians, producers, even the cover artist -- worked on for free:
But when we moved into the "professional" realm, working with people who were getting paid and performing their tasks as part of their everyday business, we met many more problems. The printing company kept getting the fonts in the booklet wrong (it took six go-rounds to get it right); an engineer input one song at the wrong sampling rate, forcing us to remaster one of the discs at the eleventh hour.
All these problems were solved and I am quite happy with the finished project. But I wonder if it's just coincidence that all the people on the project who worked for free did their work flawlessly and we only met trouble when we worked with people for whom this was just another gig.... Do people work better when they're working for free?
(from O'Reilly Radar).
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Interviews
Normally we do all the recording for Radiostar on Sunday nights, but we recently decided to leave Sundays for improv and try other nights for mass bulk recording sessions of interviews and scripted work. Thus it was that Diana Brown and I met up with Sam Shaw in the Cassandra's Call Studio on Monday night and recorded Radiostar: Studio Interviews: the Sam Shaw Interview.
Sam's a great guy and a brilliant improviser with a rich and varied history of both improv and scripted work. It's not surprise therefore that this was also our longest interview to date. We actually are splitting it up into two different podcasts, since we've agreed that 20 minutes is about as long as we want any podcast to go if we can help it.
One very interesting difference between this interview and others we've done, is that improv is a much more collaborative process than writing. Playwrights work with directors and actors, to be sure, but it's much easier to talk about the process on its own terms. Improv is something that cannot be done alone at any point, and so the interview has a potentially bewildering array of references to other improv troupes, performers, historical figures, and even fictional constructs. At first I was a little concerned about losing whatever audience we have to this continual cross referencing, but the more I listed to the interview the more convinced I was that this was the truest representation of improv as an art form. Improv is people bouncing off of each other and seeing what new trajectory is achieved from that collision.
It also helps that Sam is very easy to listen to, and is as engaging on the "radio" as he is in person.
Sam's a great guy and a brilliant improviser with a rich and varied history of both improv and scripted work. It's not surprise therefore that this was also our longest interview to date. We actually are splitting it up into two different podcasts, since we've agreed that 20 minutes is about as long as we want any podcast to go if we can help it.
One very interesting difference between this interview and others we've done, is that improv is a much more collaborative process than writing. Playwrights work with directors and actors, to be sure, but it's much easier to talk about the process on its own terms. Improv is something that cannot be done alone at any point, and so the interview has a potentially bewildering array of references to other improv troupes, performers, historical figures, and even fictional constructs. At first I was a little concerned about losing whatever audience we have to this continual cross referencing, but the more I listed to the interview the more convinced I was that this was the truest representation of improv as an art form. Improv is people bouncing off of each other and seeing what new trajectory is achieved from that collision.
It also helps that Sam is very easy to listen to, and is as engaging on the "radio" as he is in person.
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.
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.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Making "Post Traumatic Fairy Tail Disorder"
RadioStar has acquired a taste for fairy tales lately, and this was the fourth one we've tackled. There's something enjoyable about having a solid backstory already established, after all the time we've spent starting from absolute ground zero. What made this particular episode curious was that two of the major players are based on a variant of the tale that most of us were not aware of. Diana and I worked out the main outline of what happened in Hansel and Gretel, but Janna was the one who remembered a version of the story where the children were helped home by a goose and a turtle.
Since we recorded it, I've located versions of the story where a duck helps the kids across a river, but I still haven't located any turtle variants. Be that as it may, Goose and Turtle quickly became two of our favorite characters and provide the stability to a cast of very unstable humans.
This is the first episode we've posted with the addition of a third microphone and our new mixing board, which has given us an even cleaner sound than before. Each channel is brought into the computer as a separate AIF file, so I pull all three channels into SoundStudio3, which I've gotten really accustomed to. Unlike the CueBase software that we record with, Sound Studio gives me a large waveform which allows for a largely visual editing style.
The music is a little more random than past fairy tales, which had an intentionally "fairy tale" quality to them. Our Pied Piper show had a lot of flutes in it, and I would have liked to have brought in a lot of accordian music for this one, but I don't have any loops like that, and by the time Jam Pack: World Music showed up, it would have been too late to post the show. So, I decided to play with a more modern musical style.
For those who wondered, that's a fireplace in Turtle and Goose's home at the end. I wanted something nice and warm, but I made it as quiet as possible so that people didn't think that Hansel and Gretel had burned down Turtle's home....
Dan
Since we recorded it, I've located versions of the story where a duck helps the kids across a river, but I still haven't located any turtle variants. Be that as it may, Goose and Turtle quickly became two of our favorite characters and provide the stability to a cast of very unstable humans.
This is the first episode we've posted with the addition of a third microphone and our new mixing board, which has given us an even cleaner sound than before. Each channel is brought into the computer as a separate AIF file, so I pull all three channels into SoundStudio3, which I've gotten really accustomed to. Unlike the CueBase software that we record with, Sound Studio gives me a large waveform which allows for a largely visual editing style.
The music is a little more random than past fairy tales, which had an intentionally "fairy tale" quality to them. Our Pied Piper show had a lot of flutes in it, and I would have liked to have brought in a lot of accordian music for this one, but I don't have any loops like that, and by the time Jam Pack: World Music showed up, it would have been too late to post the show. So, I decided to play with a more modern musical style.
For those who wondered, that's a fireplace in Turtle and Goose's home at the end. I wanted something nice and warm, but I made it as quiet as possible so that people didn't think that Hansel and Gretel had burned down Turtle's home....
Dan
machines that improvise
Back in the 80s, someone came out with a program called racter that told stories, based on a simple templating system. There were also versions of a more sophisticated program from the 60s called eliza floating around, which simulated a therapist by asking questions, examining the answers, and asking more questions based on the user's answers. I read about stuff like this in the computer magazines that I devoured as a kid.
So ever since I learned to improvise, I've always been intrigued by the idea of integrating a machine that improvises into a show. There's not much room for this in our podcast format, but some of us in Radiostar have worked on multimedia stage improv shows, and it might fit in there. I guess we could do it with audio somehow in the podcast, but that room is already full of technology to navigate when we record, and anyway, if it worked really well, people probably wouldn't believe it was improvised. We have that problem already.
There's lots of machine improvisation around on the web. One example is a slick site that generates fake ads using images from flickr: the ad generator. Something like this would be great to just throw up on a screen and react to during an improv show. An operator could punch in keywords and see what comes up; we did this during shows with Google images, and people loved it.
(via the generator blog, a source for all sorts of clever things like this).
So ever since I learned to improvise, I've always been intrigued by the idea of integrating a machine that improvises into a show. There's not much room for this in our podcast format, but some of us in Radiostar have worked on multimedia stage improv shows, and it might fit in there. I guess we could do it with audio somehow in the podcast, but that room is already full of technology to navigate when we record, and anyway, if it worked really well, people probably wouldn't believe it was improvised. We have that problem already.
There's lots of machine improvisation around on the web. One example is a slick site that generates fake ads using images from flickr: the ad generator. Something like this would be great to just throw up on a screen and react to during an improv show. An operator could punch in keywords and see what comes up; we did this during shows with Google images, and people loved it.
(via the generator blog, a source for all sorts of clever things like this).
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