Improvised filmmaking
One need only look to the success of “Whose line is it anyway?”, “Thank God You’re Here” and the number of people taking courses, to realise that improvisation is becoming more and more popular, and in some ways looks to become, particularly in business, a core people skill. What was once the domain of out of work actors performing competitive training games, has become a way for lay people (lawyers, I.T. geeks, call centre operators etc.) to discover their innner performer and develop both story telling and comedy skills.
With this increase in competency, comes the opportunity to create complex, entertaining and thought provoking narratives, without having to rely on the traditional writer/actor/director triad. In combination with recent developments in the citizen media space, we now have the opportunity to develop high quality amateur films on a limited budget and in a short space of time. One need only consider Chasing Windmills and even machinima like Red vd Blue, to understand how ideally placed we are to make a move from backyard videoblogger, to professional cinematographer.
I began this project in October 2005, as an attempt to bypass that traditional process, to create a televisual series by developing a high level story arc with short episode summaries, and have the actors improvise each scene and each episode. The production is shot sequencially, with continuity, and what I’m calling characternuity, monitored and reincorporated as the story progresses.
On the technical side, the use of small domestic video cameras with not so perfect lighting setups, is now generally considered watchable, as is the audio quality from most built in camera microphones.
So this is the production journal for an improvised video comedy series.