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Muder We Wrote at Rollins College April 26, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Orlando, Reviews, Trends, Games, OrlandoScene, Storytelling, Theatre, bloggingfringe, Rollins , add a comment

Where does one begin? I often find that when writing these theatre reviews, it’s a good idea to gather my thoughts, think about what I want to say and in what order; I don’t have time for that, I’m going back to see the last showing in an hour!

I first learned about this production through a friend who helped to workshop the format for this improvised 90-minute board-game inspired murder mystery… she and several other students, under the direction of David Charles, PhD. - Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at Rollins College. The whole play is improvised, so there are bound to be some times during such a long show where the scenes may be stronger or weaker - to counteract that, “Dr. David” and his class developed dozens of devices to help them create a sustainable story throughout the length of the show.

We begin at the stately home of a Mr. Phil Reynolds, a successful lawyer with a deceased rich wife. His business partner Toni and spouse Gene the artist will be guests at tonights party, along with his child Bobby and sibling Toni, servant Pat, and lifelong friend Dr. Chris. An unexpected guest arrives, and, inevitably, there is a murder! Some classic (yet improvised) scenes are played on the stage of the Annie Russell Theatre, which has been masterfully converted to the perfect setting for these 8 unlikely murderers or murderesses to play out their little drama. You’ll laugh, you’ll scratch your head, and above all you’ll have fun.

I’ve got so much more to tell, but no time to tell it… we continue our recap when I return from the last showing of Murder We Wrote tonight!

**** Continued ****

As the play begins, you see a man sitting at a bar, and as he turns to the audience, he gives us the look the look that says “Are you ready for this?”. At all three showings, David’s entrance gave us a laugh. This audience was ready to have fun. The story is set up as an “exploration of the human psyche” where “a seemingly random series of events” may yield “murderous results”, and the setup for the game begins. Three decks of cards are passed out to the audience and shuffled, then used to select a victim, a murder weapon, a location and… the murderer. The recited banter during this section kept us paying attention, instead of looking down at our “ballots” where we would later guess whodunnit. Only the Assistant Director and the killer know all the details of the crime before the final moments of the play when a confession is yanked out of the murder him or herself.

Once the setup is done, we the audience have also suggested a song title, a nervous habit, an annoying catch phrase, and several other ways for the players to use to make us feel as much like the writers of the story as the people on and off stage. Just before, however, is perhaps the most exciting part: the character cards are shuffled, and 7 of the 8 roles are completely randomized by members of the audience. All the parts are non-gender specific, including the married couple, and relationships between siblings and children. Even the order of entrance for the characters is ever-changing, decided by the backstage team of a dozen or more people who are constantly feeding the actors suggestions, props, cues, even their catchphrases, and reconciling any plot holes during intermission. There are countless challenges for the lighting and sound team as well, and opportunities for them to drive the story as much as anyone down at the stage level.

The most rewarding parts of the show come in the second act, where the details of the murder are spoon-fed to us at fixed intervals (or as much as can be with an improvised show). We already know the victim before we take the intermission and make our guesses, and immediately after, the location of the murder is revealed. I don’t know to give credit to one person for this, or the whole team of students, along with Dr. David who playtested and researched this last summer, but there is some expert game design at work here.

Then someone suggests “we should split up and search the house”, and each of the 8 characters takes one of the doors leading to various wings and levels of the house, only to frantically burst out of the door in a ballet of “who am I on stage with, and what do we do now?”, the inner workings of which I know is my job to keep a secret, but congratulations to J. Hannah White, the lighting designer for her brilliant stroke on that one. There’s also a more traditional improv game set up in the coat closet, at the bar, and up on the balcony, where the players pass lines to each other like a hot potato that is always unpredictable and fun. It’s these sort of moments that make us forget we’re watching the story being written in real-time.

Last but not least, all the cast re-assemble in the main hall to try and figure out for themselves who the murderer is. Things at this point can get rather tense, and apparently, a wrestling match broke out during this scene on Friday between actor Seth and Dr. David. The atmosphere teeters on melodramatic as actors are eliminated, concealed weapons are pulled, dead bodies lie on the couch and revealing letters are read… or none of these things happen and they just wing it, it’s really different every night.

What’s that? Sorry you missed it? I feel sorry for your too. This show could run every night down on International Drive if the team were so inclined. I don’t remember how much of Sleuths Dinner Theatre is improvised, maybe I’ll have to go back and do some post-game research. So far, the closest things I’ve seen to this level of story plus improvisation in such a long form are The Adventurer’s Club at Pleasure Island, which I would consider a distant script-heavy cousin of Muder We Wrote (all the endings are decided, most of the jokes and songs are repeated, but the cast is always changing), and SAK Comedy Lab’s The Early Show, which plays every other Friday at Midnight, and is completely improvised with no backstage magic, just the performers left to their own devices.

What makes these other productions around town the same or different from this show? In Murder, we the audience are all following this global discovery as we ourselves and the rest of the actors and around-stage hands and minds try to figure out the story. In regular improv or something more scripted, we either have a better or worse idea of where the ending is. We have an idea of how we think it could happen, and the several dozen people actually driving do as well, but there’s no way to know until the last possible moment when the killer reveals his or her secret and we have a collective pay-off. There’s lots more to say about what’s happening here and how they pulled off the format, but then this would be getting into research paper territory, and I’d need to start giving examples from other historic or contemporary works, and… well, we’re only blogging here!

I’ve never taken a theatre class in my life, and I graduated from UCF 4 years ago (almost to the day), but my biggest takeaway from this was a desire to enroll at Rollins under Dr. David Charles. You can tell everyone involved on this play was having such a great time, and the fact that people were coming back to watch a second, third, or even more showings is a testament to the fun and intrigue of this production, and the charm exuded by David and his cast. Congratulations to Megan Borkes, Ana Eligio, Joseph Bromfield, Chelsea Dygan, Erica Leas, Seth Strutman, Emily Smith, Roberto Pineda, Michael Neil Mastry, Danny Tuegel, Liz Weisstein, and Rob Yoho, along with all the other cast and crew, on an excellent run.

Wii News Channel, iPhone, Multitouch January 28, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, News, Links, Video, TV, Trends, Standards, Design, Games , add a comment

Yesterday, Nintendo released the Wii News Channel, which gives you a news interface and a world map showing where all the stories come from. What I think is different about this product is the fact that you’re using the “Wiimote” (rhymes with “remote”) to navigate through the interface. This video from YouTube demonstrates the interface:

I’m sure the Wiimote is built on some proprietary technology, because previous applications like a Gyromouse cost a lot more (about $70) than the console remote ($40). I’m excited about technologies like this becoming more affordable and available to consumers and application developers. If the big companies (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, ?Apple?) do basic things like news, weather, music, movies, then what can the smaller niche guys come up with? Internet-enabled, beefy video, tactile interfaces could be yet another of the movements that bring home users and creatives out of keyboard and mouse land.

On the same trend is Apple’s announcement of multi-touch interfaces on a mainstream device like the iPhone. Honestly, I think they really still have a few tricks up their sleeve as far as using a touch interface with their software, but the handful of tricks the showed us with the iPhone are a good start.

I looked far and wide for a video that would just show off the multi-touch features of the iPhone, but I didn’t find any I liked, so instead I decided to show off this video by (I think) NYU’s Media Lab on future applications of multi-touch interfaces.

I think my favorite is the sound board they had. Can you imagine a node-based compositing system that uses this interface? If you know anything about compositing for film, you know that your tree can get very confusing even for a simple composite. Being able to “pinch” in to find the node or filter you’re looking for would be great. I’m sure there are thousands of other applications just waiting to be written. What would you do with multi-touch?

UPDATE: Here is a neat use for the Wiimote: they use it for gesture recognition, just like mouse gestures, that then trigger a command.

Florida Creatives Happy Hour - Dec 18th December 7, 2006

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Markteting, Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, SEO, Music, Links, Events, Video, Puppets, Film, Rails, TV, Trends, Standards, Design, Fringe, Travel, Games, Liberatr, floridacreatives , add a comment

Florida Creatives » Blog Archive » Florida Creatives Happy Hour - Dec 18th
The first post here on Florida Creatives will be to announce our first networking event! One of the goals of this podcast is to serve the community of entrepreneurs, filmmakers, thespians, bloggers and podcasters, artists, designers, architects - all are welcome at this event. The goal is to start a discussion amongst these groups and stir things up in Florida.

You can get directions and more details for this event over at Upcoming.org.

Monday, Dec 18th
Dexter’s Thornton Park
5:30PM - 9:00PM

Digital Camera! New Computer! Gaming! December 29, 2005

Posted by Ryan in : ryanprice.org, Reviews, Books, Games , add a comment

So the computer is only 2 months and 3 weeks late, but who’s counting? I actually decided NOT to plug it in today, because I know it will consume my life for a while, just gadgeting around. I need to get up in the morning and work for 3 hours before I do this (or as long as it takes to add a new preference to Unity. I also found out the RAM I bought is no longer good for my new machine, so now the decision is re-stock fee vs. eBay. If anybody is looking for 2GB of 184-pin RAM, ask me. I need you to beat $200 to make it worth my while.

I think I need to start keeping a log of every single change I make to my work, just so I feel accomplished. I always say “I need to work” or “I worked really hard”, but I am the only one I can prove that to. I guess if there were another developer working on stuff it would be more practical.

I have a 5.2 MegaPixel Hewlett Packerd digital camera. It does the job, and it’s just what I asked for. I will post some pictures after I get some things set up around here.

Gaming is fun. Last week we went to Sci-Fi City and got some games. 2 games I have not played in years.

  1. The Great Dalmuti is Asshole (the party game) with pretty pictures. That’s about it.
  2. The Settlers of Catan is the computer game Civilization brought to the table. All I can say is that it is one of the most fun and challenging games you can play. “Stategery” is the operative word here. Nathan doesn’t like competitive games, but in this game you are competing against the evironment (the robber) and yourself as much as the other players. Especially when we added the expansion pack called Cities and Kights of Catan which brings in the pirates and adds extra resources to collect and more goals to acheive. One of my favorite games of all time.

I want to go back and get Robo Rally before the 30% off sale is over, but I have already spent a bunch of cash on this crap.

A very old friend deserted me waylaid my plans to see her this Christmas break. I have to say I’m not entirely surprised. :’( I still haven’t heard back from said friend with the normal “I’m sorry, the spouse and I were busy”, or somewhat.
EDIT: She called me today and bitched at me for writing such things, and explained that her phone was dead. She is forgiven, even though I did not try to make her feel as bad as she felt.

I started reading my favorite books again - the Deverry series (starting with Daggerspell) by Katharine Kerr. I am picking out SO MUCH more detail than my 8th grade self. I am also getting pretty anal about the ancient Welsh words, which is helping me build the picture in my head a bit better. I wish I was more familiar with what a Welsh accent sounded like in comparison to Irish. Most of the voices come out Irish, with a bit of Scottish thrown in.

Katharine Kerr - Daggerspell

There are 11 books total, 4 Deverry books, 4 Westlands books and 3 Dragon Mage books. She is planning 3 more books as well, which are planned to be released in June, but I have been hearing that for the last 3 or 4 years now, so I’m not holding my breath. If it does actually come in June, then hooray for me because I should be done with the 11th book by then, and re-bought Black Raven because it is missing…

Got to clear off my bed so I can actually get in there and sleep at some point. Damn I wanted to get to bed earlier than this. Maybe my new toy will wake me up in the morning. If anybody reads this before 11AM and I have not re-posted, call me. Even if I have re-posted you can call me. We will say Merry Belated Christmas or Happy Hannukah to each other.

After much delay,

End of Line.

Most Important Report Ever - New Server? September 27, 2005

Posted by Ryan in : Career, Cervo, Design, Games , add a comment

What is the pinnacle of your carreer? What defines the greatest achievement for a young entrepeneur like myself? How about writing a report for guys down at Wizards of the Coast? I think so.

I got a wierd random email from Erik of Unity Entertainment asking me how to access the web stats… I thought this was a little out of the ordinary, so I informed Erik that he would have to ask me at the exact time he wanted to see the stats, since I don’t have instant control over stats.

In talking to Jeff one time, I was trying to explain that I have to query support every time I need new stats, and he said “Well, why not just buy a server?” I reply “Well, that costs $170!” He says, “As long as we could make money, then whatever!”

I think it would be a bad idea to go into business wiht a client to resell hosting and have to play sysadmin to bunches of users just because I was sharing profits with Mr. Jeff. No offense to him, but… no thanks, Jeff. The end of that is I will most likely be hooking up a Virtual Private Server pretty soon, and I will be getting a small chunk of a server that lets me control it like it’y my own dedicated server, meaning I get root access and i can run scripts whenever.

But back to the topic at hand. My special special report. It turns out the reason why Erik wanted to see the stats is because Wizards of the Coast was running a number of TV ads on Adult Swim with location-specific endings, like the Florida ones apparently advertised my client Unity Entertainment and MY website. SWEET! The goal was to prove that the advertising was driving traffic to the site, and that it would be profitable to run the ads again for future events.

WELL, I knew it would be pointless to start the report until Sunday, since the event was a Friday to Sunday thing. I emailed the dudes Sunday afternoon and asked them to run my stats. Then I got lazy and didn’t check very often, so I went to hang with my friends for a little while. By the time I got back, it was after 1 AM, and I still had barely written any of the report. I spent the next three and a half hours cranking away at it, and then emailed it to Jeff, with instructions to wake me up at his earliest convenience. Around 10 AM, I get the call and the instructions to actually write something based on the data. I said “The advertising worked”, and I got a pat on the back. Hooray. Now I get to charge Jeff for time well spent.

My report is going to be reviewed by the largest gaming company in the world. I mean, they are owned by Hasbro, and they own almost every major gaming license they could get their hands on, including Dungeons & Dragons. That is major.

I doubt you’ll be seeing my name in lights anytime soon, but I feel special today.