FOTO FRIDAY! - Staged Reading Edition! - 4/10

Hey LAN'ders, Aaron J. here!

I finally got off my lazy butt (too much Pokemon Platinum...) and am posting these pictures from the staged reading in March. Some great stuff here. I especially love Lenneth's costume and the way the mime fight turned out. Check out the pics below and 5 points to whoever can catch the Shaun Of The Dead reference!

Lenneth complains about another noise violation while the Mime Boss slinks into the background.

Watchtower Tom and his Rockers record their commercial.Christian, Izzy, and Natalie prepare to enter a MimefieldIzzy has a laugh with his Zombie friends

if it worked for Tolkien...

It's February and all's well! Aaron here! Just thought I'd drop a line for you guys to look at. Here's a few photos from our last rehearsal. We read through the first draft of Episode 6 and eventually tried to get it on its feet to see what it may look like.

Episode 6 turned out to be a bear of an episode. Y'see, a few months ago we mapped out what we had planned for every episode and throughout the development process some things have been changed around. For instance, the show was originally intended to be just Christian and Izzy, but we wanted a female in there so Natalie was born. We originally had Episode 6 being a regular episode. A clear start, end, and finish, but as we tinkered with it (added zombies, vampires, and other various notches of ridiculosity) the story evolved and well...what I ended up with was a 55-page Episode. To put it in perspective, we usually have episodes be about 20 pages at their longest. I tend to write alot of stage directions and some of them are more illustrative than informative so a 20-page episode can (sometimes) be read in as little as 10 minutes. 

So...Episode 6 was this crazy hulk of an episode. After discussing it with Ky, Dave, and James, I proposed that the episode be split up into two parts and now we have a 25-ish page Episode 6 and a soon-to-be-edited Episode 7. I'm going all Peter Jackson on these episodes right now, but it is fun because I can leave room for cliffhangers and such.

I should have some cast spotlights up this week so you guys can see just who is playing who in the reading. Just wait til you meet the cast though, they're all amazing. I'm incredibly proud of everyone. Hopefully when we get this up on its feet, we won't be saying goodbye to the cast for the reading forever...

Hope these pics get you guys a little more excited for the reading in March. I'll have some more to upload next week too.

Happenings...

Well, would you look at that?

The past week has been a sort of steamrolling experience for LAN'ded. Kyle and I talked about how the series was moving forward and a number of exciting possibilities were brought forward. I'd gush about them but I'd rather just continue working on what we've already locked down. So far we're looking at 6-7 episodes with an (ever-growing) cast of about 10-12. There's many re-occuring characters, and what's really amazing about going to a theatre school is looking around and seeing people that mirror who you write about.

I'll admit, it is very difficult not to just write for one person or another but if that's where the inspiration comes from, why push it away?

---

It's so...weird (great word right?) to consider making a Facebook Event for the readings the next big step forward. In talking to the Playhouse folks, we've decided that the only feasible time to have a staged reading of any kind would be late Feb or early March. I have always admired the playhouse for housing independent projects like ETP's amazing "Dotty Dot: The Musical" and other shenanigans, so I hope we don't disappoint them. So we've got a space, now we just need actors. Only 2-3 people have been approached to play parts in the readings, but we do need a few zombies and vampires...

Yes, there will be zombies and vampires. Episode 3 is almost pulled straight out of a horror movie. Can you blame me though? What's more fun than the undead?

We'll also need a puppeteer for the project, two maybe. With Kyle on the road, our usual puppeteer choice is out...hmm...the search continues.

---

I admire the amount of support people are giving me for this project as well. It's funny, people here are really supportive and I find that their enthusiasm rubs off on me and I just want to keep writing and working on this. Hopefully all this hard work pays off.

I gave Kyle publishing options for the blog as well, so if you see him chime in, take a second and look at his other projects he's working on at the moment at puppetfix.blogspot.com and at fisticuffpuppets.blogspot.com

~ Aaron J.