That everyone in the world, including myself, is totally nuts.
Related posts tagged 'Making a show'
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Related posts tagged 'Making a show'
plotting can be tough because you're never quite sure you're doing it right - it's usually kind of like an exploration. You try something, and figure out what it needs. For instance, one episode we were plotting last night, I felt like it was all things happening, and no emotional connection from our charaters. So we figured out what my own personal connection to the plot would be, and that actually helped us figure out the things that would happen more easily. It's also helpful if your characters can have opposite points of view about what's occuring.
To motivate, I would try to outline as much as you can before you ever start writing a line of dialogue. If you're having trouble plotting, ...
The audition process for Drake and Josh was very extensive. Three auditions and a screen test. I KID! I auditioned at the Nickelodeon Studios and like every actor's first onscreen role, I shared a scene with a watermelon lamp that my character built for a science fair.
I come up with a few bits on TEAS a lot of the time, those are my genuine reactions to what's happening. He does some weird stuff on that show and it throws me off sometimes.
We had a writer's summit where for 2 weeks we had Weird Al, Emo Phillips, Maja Da Oust, Jason Louv, Johnny Pemberton, Brendon Walsh (Gawd I hope i'm not forgetting someone), come up with ways the world could end. Then we broke the apocalypses we liked best into beats and "hung" the podcast dialogue on that framework. It was REALLY challenging because too much animated plot distracts from the conversation but if a GIANT ZOMBIE is eating the white house you can't just keep talking about weed so we had to figure out ways to pin the dialogue to the animation using VO we recorded after we had pieced together the animatics enough to know where it needed it.
99% of the time, David and I agreed on what should go on, and why, and what was good. That's one reason the show was so great. I never just wrote off a sketch and thought "You don't like it, but I do..we'll put it on." However, the sketch about the waiter dropping food in the guy's lap and offering to pay for half the dry-cleaning never really worked and everyone agreed "Date With the Queen" was a huge clusterfuck of incomplete thinking. Those two sketches were real stinkers. Some writers hated "Hunger Strike," which i loved. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTdyMBtuDYI . I'm not sure everyone liked "The Story of Everest." That's a sketch that divides people. It's probably my favorite, though....
So cool people talking about this kind of stuff and having all the conversations about race, etc. since the show premiered. As far as Rachel (and other love interests too), we didn't set out to cast someone white and auditioned people of all ethnic backgrounds, and wanted to cast the person I seemed to have the best chemistry with to sell this huge relationship arc. In the end, Noel blew us away. And, for the writing, I'm pulling a lot from my own real current relationship, which is with a "white" person - so we can do interesting scenes like the scene in 109 (Mornings) about the parents (which many South East Asians have told me really resonated with them and they'd never seen an interracia...
As mean as that was, I thought that was incredibly poetic for a guy like him. Very unexpected. But I guess there are many sides to all of us.
On navigating the the challenges of having a main cast member pass away (in the show Silicon Valley)
On navigating the the challenges of having a main cast member pass away (in the show Silicon Valley)
The loss of CEW was fucking hard. I saw him with @rosepetalpistol at a place on the east side days before he passed away, his wife and beautiful daughter were there and we talked for 40 minutes about life, the show, and him. It was a huge blow to the show, he was the funniest person on it. So he's irreplaceable and I think that everyone felt that, and I felt worst for the writers and editors, seeing him over and over, writing him out of the show, the whole lot of it. But in the most disgusting and at the same time beautiful way, "the show must go on."
I think that saying means something bigger than most people think. The show is the most important thing in many ways, because it is for the w...
sometimes it just naturally goes in directions people didn't expect - i'm thinking of pam murphy and will hines on a recent episode. when we take a break, I'll usually ask, "Is there somewhere else you were thinking of going with it, and can i lead you back there?" Most improvisers don't care about where it ends up, because the journey is more important than the destination.
My parents were never informed of anything. They were never paid to do the show. They never shot promos for the network. They were just living their lives and we would show up and prank them. This was before anyone had seen anything like this on TV so it was a much different reaction from people watching back then. People freaked out!
Related posts tagged 'Human nature'
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Related posts tagged 'Human nature'
I read an article about bullying recently. Everyone is up in arms about bullying. A vocal minority thinks it’s a good thing. That it’s part of growing up, that it builds character. What was left out of this article and doesn’t seem to be part of the discussion is that bullying is a significant element of our culture. The bullying of children by children doesn’t come from nowhere. The question remains whether bullying is an inherent aspect of human nature, but that doesn’t change the fact that a culture which discourages rather than encourages bullying would have a better chance of curbing it.
A person once said to me that the homeless never get touched and that without human touch, the mind veers toward madness. So the homeless people I approach, I always give my money to, whatever it is I have, and I always hug them or touch them.
‘That’s two hours I’ll never get back,’ is a favourite thing for an angry person to say about a movie he hates. But the thing is, every two hours are two hours he’ll never get back. You cannot hoard your two hourses [sic].
So you are here, and I am here, spending our time as we must, it must be spent. I am trying not to spend this time, as I spend most of my time, trying to get you to like me; trying to control your thoughts, to use my voodoo at the speed of light, the speed of sound, the speed of thought, trying to convince you that your two hours with me are not going to be resented afterwards.
It is an ancient pattern of time usage for me, and I’m trying to move deeper, hoping to be hel...
There’s another quote that I like, this one’s a little long, but I think it’s good. It’s by a guy named John Garvey: ‘I am increasingly convinced that the need to be right has nothing whatsoever to do with the love of truth, but to face the implications of this means accepting a painful inner emptiness; I am not now what I sense somehow I am meant to be. I do not know what I feel from the bottom of my heart, I need to know. The beginning of wisdom is not to flee from this condition or distract yourself from it. It is essential not to fill it up with answers that have not been earned. It is important to learn how to wait with that emptiness. It is the desire to fill up that emptiness which le...
It’s weird to be a human. We get to think about things, we get to wonder. It seems like quite a privileged position in the universe. And I wouldn’t give it up for certainty because when you’re certain you stop being curious. And here’s the one thing I know about the thing you’re certain about; you’re wrong.
Of course this is a paradox, how is it possible to know that you can’t know anything? It isn’t, it’s just a theory. And I remain open to being proven wrong. This is also Harold Pinter – I like Harold Pinter: ‘There never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art, there are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each ot...
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