May 14 下北沢 Workshop - Start by Ending

Mother's Day! Not exactly the best time for a workshop, but we got a group out and made it happen. Some of our recent returning champions have shows up this month and we're looking forward to supporting as many as we can.

Today we worked with some of PIXAR's rules for storytelling. We explored how useful it could be to start a story by figuring out how you want it to end. Endings (as they say) are hard! By knowing where you are going, it's much easier to find fun ways to get there.

We played around with the fun of failure. It's great to try to do something and fail again and again. Or succeed in a way that seems a lot like failing ===>

We put those pieces together to create a story that we might really want to watch. Then we chatted about taking the first five solutions you can think of for a problem . . . and throwing them away. They're too obvious. Everyone will have thought of them.

Finally we took apart Momotaro scene by scene and rearranged those scenes to create new stories. It was surprisingly effective.

After the break we took on scenes from Fargo and an audition script called "The Teacher". The Fargo scene is tricky. Something feels wrong, but it's hard to put your finger on it directly. The "Teacher" scene is easier to play, but it's hard to use it effectively to really showcase your skills as an actor. We managed pretty well, all told.

After the scenes we sat around and talked about what people would like to be studying next and how and where and why. Good stuff. Looking forward to next month already!