Bianca Filoteo » Improv

So in my last post, I mentioned that my friends and I are creating a web series and that we were going to film the “first few episodes”. Talk about ambitious! We were able to film the one episode and, wow, we learned a lot by doing this all on our own. I’ve read my fair share of blog posts and articles online about creating your own web series and when they tell you that there’s a lot of hustling and hard work involved, they weren’t kidding! I’m here to share our experience so far with our very first web series. If any of you have some insight/advice/feedback, don’t hesitate to comment – all is welcome and appreciated

Our web series is called How To Be A Friend and it’s sort of a mockumentary about a group of 4 friends who create their own web series of how-to advice on friendships. In each episode, the girls tackle on a different situation and give their advice on how a “good friend” would handle it. The only thing is, their viewpoint of what a “good friend” is might be slightly different from ours or mine.

The plan

We wrote brief summaries for each of the 8 episodes we have lined up and we decided that we’d improvise each episode and follow the outline we wrote for each.
Filming with a DSLR (Nikon D90) and recording the sound using an external audio recorder (Zoom H4n).
Edit using Final Cut then upload to YouTube/Vimeo.
Aim for 2-3 mins. per episode (max 4 mins.)
Create a website for the series
Use social media to promote it (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo)

On Set

We all arrived on set at Kelsey’s apartment and began planning our shots. We got a friend of ours from acting class (Andrew) to help us with the camera. Overall, filming was smooth. We didn’t really experience any problems with the camera and the mic (well, there was this one time where I pressed “playback” instead of “record” haha but that was quickly fixed). We mostly shot everything in one take, except for the last 2 very short scenes where we had to switch locations.

Notes after Day 1

Now that we all got the idea of how filming one episode for this web series would be, we decided to talk about what we’ve learned and what changes would we make for the future episodes. Here’s what we’ve learned:

We need a script: Improvising the episode was fun, but we ended up adding more time than we originally planned. (We initially thought of improvising because we thought it would be a faster turnaround and that we’d be able to film more episodes in one day.)
Character development: we’ve started off with great characters in this series, but we all felt that we can go even further for some of them.
Plan out the shots: after uploading the video and audio files on my mac, I started to try and do some editing on Final Cut. Most of our takes were all in one shot and each shot was around 5mins. Wowza. For the next few episodes, I proposed to do a variety of shots (wide, close-up, etc.) to see if that would be easier to edit.

We had an amazing time on Thursday doing the DIY method for this web series and now we’re even more excited to go on and film the upcoming episodes. Hopefully, we’ll have something to upload (even if it’s a teaser) very soon. We want these episodes up as soon as we can, but we want them to be great, so we’re going to make sure we take our time on the edits before we launch it to the world wide web

I guess that’s all I have to write about for now. If any of you have suggestions, tips, or resources you’d like to offer, don’t forget to leave a comment! Or send me an email. Thanks again for reading this post. Now I’m off to go learn more about editing with Final Cut!

This past Saturday, I had my first improv class at Impatient Theatre. It’s been just over a year since I took my first ever improv class at Second City Toronto, so I was really excited to get back into it!

One of the exercises we had to do was a name game where each of us received a cool nickname. You can’t choose your own name though – the rest of the class does this for you. You’re also given an action to do while you say your nickname. I was Bionic Bianca! As for the rest of the class:

Richard Ratatouille! Mariachi Meghan! Alana the Slamma! Sea-Farin Aaron! Doug Douglington! Cosmic Chris! Shawna Seashells! Vivacious Vincent! Jump-five Jamal! Allan Island!

We spent a good amount of time saying all of these names and doing all the actions associated with them. We were all crazy/energetic and we were really getting into the exercise. Fun is definitely the word to describe it.

The exercise after this was called Panel of Experts. We were in groups of 4 and we sat in chairs in front of the class. If you were in that group of 4, you were there for us to watch and interview about something you’d be an expert in. (Our class had experts on Mealworms, How To Manage a Restaurant, and Heroes). This exercise was great for team-building exercise. The things people came up with were not only creative, but funny too!

So where am I going with this?

After this class, I immediately had the urge to go and write. The energy in that room was intense and it really gets your creative juices flowing. When we all got in a circle to talk about how the first class went, there were a couple of us who mentioned that we were in the mood to write all of a sudden. Writer’s block? What’s that?

Here’s a few things I got from the first class:

You’re in a supportive environment. If you’re really shy or self-conscious (which I still kinda am sometimes), don’t be afraid: we’re all in this together.
Being “in the moment”. You have no idea what’s gonna happen next and pre-planning everything never really works. It’s a scary, nervous feeling – but once you’re up there, you’ll notice that it’s also a great one (thank you, adrenaline rush!).
There are no bad ideas, bad choices, or a bad scene. You’re thinking on your feet and that’s what makes it entertaining! I’ve learned not to edit myself and to not be so self-conscious about my ideas and what I’m contributing to the scene.

The last point can especially be applied to writing. I often find myself having writer’s block, but that’s because I was either getting too caught up in little details, being a perfectionist, or doubting myself. This class reminded me that the writing process can be fun and that I need to just keep writing no matter how bad or silly an idea of mine is. My main goal should be to just keep spitting out my ideas and to take care of editing later.

So to all my fellow writers out there, I strongly encourage you to join an improv class if you can. Besides have a blast playing all the different exercises, you’ll really get to flex your creative muscles.

Tag Archive: Improv

Creating a Web Series

Improv & Writing