Blockbuster
11 May 2015
Early in the year, my friend & collaborator Frank Wurzinger and I sat down at a café on Broadway Market and brainstormed ideas for a show we could make together.Some of the ideas talked about that day:
A show with polar bear puppets, because everyone likes polar bear puppets.
Labrynth: A show where an audience has to figure out how to escape from a room together- straight into another room, into another room, and so on (this has since been made by someone else, darn it).
A show for dogs & and their owners. Which I still think would be a HIT.
Eventually we came up with Blockbuster: A show where kids make a movie, on the spot. I could immediately see how it could happen. In my work with Ladder to the Moon I often go into care homes to recreate 1950s musical films, casting staff and residents in the roles and as the crew. We could use some of those techniques for a theatre audience, only make a brand new movie, with up-to-date technology: greenscreen, projection, modern film terminology, professional camera/editing suite, everything.
The simple premise we wrote down that day was that an audience would be attending a film premiere where the film breaks down and disintegrates. It’s the only copy, and so we have to make a new one, right there, on the spot, with everybody.
The next step was finding collaborators. For a Director and third company member Frank suggested Dani Parr who had created a wonderful interactive show called Flathampton, where (among other things) a short film of the audience is projected at the end. I’d met Dani a few times and seen her work, and agreed she would be ideal. When we told her the premise, she said yes there and then.Dani had more ideas: introducing another character - a stressed-out producer who knows the film is going on world-wide distribution the next day, upping the stakes, and she wanted to get adults involved too, not just children. And she really felt there should be a story about the characters within the show, with a beginning, middle & end to pull the audience through, to make Blockbuster more than just a ‘filmmaking workshop’.We asked Kate Bunce to spend a couple days thinking about design ideas & Daniel Jamieson for dramaturgy, and Steve Tiplady was recommended to provide advice on drawing out stories from scratch. He’s created the super-successful Claytime, a show where the audience tells him a story and he brings it to life out of clay. He was a wonderful to work with.
Then we recruited the wonderful Bea Holland to be our third performer as 'Assistant Producer'. She's very funny, very experienced. Stratford Circus, Polka Theatre, Royal & Derngate Theatre, Jersey Arts Centre, and the Arts Council provided support, and last month we got to work testing our premise and seeing if we could make the technology work.
Blockbuster turned out to be quite something - a behemoth - in a good way, however. In order to both set up the rough story, introduce the original film that breaks down (tentatively titled ‘The Day It Happened’), then gather a new story from the audience, design the set, film in greenscreen, film with back projection, have a wrap party, edit it together and present it once again, the experience turned out to be 2½ hours long.
We kept trying to speed it up, kept looking to cut things, but ultimately once we accepted that in this small audience format this is the natural length, we relaxed and were able to enjoy ourselves.
It’s not all relaxing, though - after ‘the wrap’ within the show, when I have only 15 minutes to edit all the scenes we’ve just shot, there is pressure. Both times when we performed to a work-in-progress audience I over-ran - taking 20-25 minutes - but both films in the end turned out fabulously.
Narration and a few transition tweaks were added afterwards - on the day they were both narrated live. The small audiences in Jersey Arts Centre seemed to get deep into everything - the crew roles as much as the acting, and I overheard one young girl say to her mother, ‘That was the best thing I’ve ever done!’The Blockbuster crew enjoyed the process, too. We spent an extra day in Jersey together driving round the island with Dani's daughters and company friend Hayley Linthwaite, and it was stunning: gorgeous vista after beautiful beach after rugged castle after delicious seaside seafood cafe. A recommended cap to a first R&D session...Now that we know the premise is workable and have a good grip on the technology, the next step is a full production period to complete the show: to develop it into a play for a large audience that is both engaging for observers and inviting & thrilling for participants.
Blockbuster goals:
A dedicated website for all the films
A version for 100 people, another for 350.
A Blockbuster Tour
A Blockbuster format for use in schools/universities
A Blockbuster show at the end of every Warner Bros Studio/Universal Studios tour all over the world...