Behind the Scenes at Bristol Riverside Theatre: Costumes

Posted on May 12, 2013 at 10:24 pm by John
Gina and Lisa B

Linda B. Stockton (left) and Gina Andreoli (right)

On Saturday May 4th, I arrive at the rehearsal studio after the lunch break.  I’m early for a scheduled meeting with the costume department, but just in time to catch a hymnal recital.  This time, the cast is practicing Rock of Ages and Walking to Zion and they are on their game as Keith Baker plays piano and coaches the chorus.  I feel like I’m walking into an old time tent revival. The last time I heard these tunes was at the Gospel Tent at the 2003 JazzFest is New Orleans.  When the cast starts clapping their hands and sings Old Time Religion a cappella, I’m tempted to join in. It’s catchy.

Marching to ZionThe two actors playing Howard, Erik Daughterman and Alexander Ryan, are due to be fitted today.  Howard is a young student of Cates, the teacher on trial, and has the distinction of being the first character introduced in the play.  It opens with Howard, in overalls, fishing and taunting a girl with a worm. Later, in the second act, he’s in a suite when he’s called as a witness in the trial. Two actors with two costume changes call for four distinct outfits. With a cast of over forty, the costume department has their work cut out for them.

Gina Andreoli and Linda B. Stockton manage costume acquisitions, fittings and tailoring. Director Susan Atkinson tells them what she’s looking for and it’s up to Gina and Linda to make it happen and button up the details. Clothes, shoes and hats fill the fitting room waiting to be tried on, but it’s far from the full inventory of all the prior productions. The rest is in storage and one of the challenges they face is keeping the inventory in rotation without going over capacity.

costume threadSuits and dresses reminiscent of the early 20th century line the length of the room. Gina explains that with The Great Gatsby in theaters 20s fashion has enjoyed a boost in demand. My expectation was that most of the shopping would be done at thrift stores for both cost savings and for the style.  To my surprise, Gina and Linda do most of their acquisitions online using eBay. And they have some contacts with other theaters open to sharing and swapping costumes.

Alexander’s suit is a just a bit large on him, but it fits the role of a young boy having to dress up for a special occasion. It brings my grandfather to mind, who insisted on buying clothes a size too large explaining I’d “grow into it.”  Gina then marks the hems and cuffs and the fitting’s done.

Keeping the costumes in order in a cast this size requires dedication to organization. The clothes go back on the rack in a definite sequence with the lead roles up front followed by the ensemble cast. In the next week or so it’ll all be transferred to the theater and readied for production.

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Rain, Rain, Get Out of My Brain

Posted on May 10, 2013 at 12:12 pm by Dawn Napier

Spring is here at last, and the fear of limb loss due to freezing has finally passed. My little shamblers made it through the winter with only two fingers and six toes lost in total. This isn’t bad for them; at least we got most of the toes back. What we couldn’t find half-buried in the snow was later fished out of the mouth of the neighbor’s dog.
Unfortunately, with the thaw comes week after week of nonstop rain. This is less damaging than frost, but it’s equally depressing. Has your mother ever told you, “You’re not made of sugar; you’re not going to melt”? Well this holds true for the life-challenged as well. We don’t melt—exactly. But we do rot faster in the damp, and there’s nothing more dreary than watching bits of yourself wash away in a heavy downpour. It also upsets our breather neighbors when they find hairy chunks of scalp in the gutters. They start freaking out about radiation, and then those guys in the plastic jumpsuits come out and tear everything up.
So I can’t let the kids out in the rain too much, even though they enjoy stomping in puddles and munching on dead worms. But I can’t keep them cooped up inside for too long, either. They fight over toys, beat each other up, and the only video games they like are those disturbing ones that feature zombies as helpless victims of rednecks with shotguns. Those games will rot their brains—more.
Fast food restaurants usually have indoor play spaces, but I worry about the quality of the food there. It doesn’t make much sense to take my shamblers somewhere so they can run around and exercise, and then let them fill up on meat that’s been fed a steady diet of greasy beef, processed cheese, and phosphorus-laden beverages. We go occasionally as a treat, but it’s not a permanent solution to our cabin fever.
Children’s museums are an adequate alternative to turning the kids loose on the neighborhood, but it can get expensive. Even the cheaper ones that only cost five bucks or so per kid can add up when you include transportation, snacks, souvenirs, and whatever I have to pay the parents of whichever kid that inevitably gets bitten. You’d think that in this helicopter generation parents would do a better job of teaching their kids not to grab toys away from the ravenous dead, but whatever. Somehow it’s always my fault.
Indoor gyms are the best choice all around. Most park districts have them; don’t go to one of those fancy workout places. Cost aside, everyone there is either ridiculously skinny or on one of those strange diets that makes them taste weird. There is no good eating to be had if you get the munchies. Go to your local park district instead. They usually offer a family pass, which makes it more affordable. Also there’s lots of space to spread out, so there’s less chance of some breather child invading my kid’s personal space. Best of all is the running track. Whenever I go for a jog in my neighborhood, someone always panics and calls the CDC. But on the running track at my park district’s community center, I don’t even stand out. Everyone there is moaning, shambling, and stumbling every ten paces or so. It’s the ideal place to take the family when Mother Nature isn’t cooperating.

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Behind the Scenes at Bristol Riverside Theatre: Orchestrating a Cast

Posted on May 8, 2013 at 2:17 am by John
Stage Design

Model design for the set.

The day after the script read-through, rehearsals of Inherit the Wind begin at the Bristol Riverside Theatre.  The cast is practicing rousing hymnals as Keith Baker plays an upright piano including Rock of Ages and Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.  While the script calls for a few verses of Old Time Religion and Walking to Zion, the other hymnals give the production team options for scene transitions or a preamble to the first scene.  The script provides dialog and action, but there are plenty of details left to fill in.

A ten minute break follows and then Act I Scene I begins. The room has been drastically transformed from the prior arrangement at the script read-through. It’s gone from tables arranged in a large rectangle to a mock court room. Tables sit atop one another to form a tiered jury box with the judge’s bench towering above the rest. This is the heart of the play where Drummond (Keith Baker) and Brady (Michael McCarty) face off against each other over the fate of a small town teacher, Cates (Jered McLenigan), accused of teaching evolution.

Rehearsal starts with seating the jurors and court room audience.  While watching a play, I don’t give these details much thought, but these are the practical concerns that need to be addressed.  No sooner than everyone is placed, Director Susan Atkinson has the cast get up and practice their entry and note their place in line.

Fewer actors are at this event than at the read-through, but it’s still a packed court room.  Some roles are filled by two actors.  Kathryn Moroney, assistant director, encourages them to shadow one another if both are present.

With places and movement worked out, Drummond and Brady start their legal arguments as the court observes and Susan orchestrates.  The cast demonstrates they know their lines, but they can’t see the court from perspective of the theatre audience.  An actor in the court room audience is seated behind Drummond fanning herself.  The script does describe the day as hot and stuffy.  It’s a perfectly natural thing to do.  Susan asks her to remain still since her movement behind Drummond tends to distract from the principle movement on stage.  That’s not something the actor could have seen from her perspective.

As Brady and Drummond verbally spar, the audience reacts in favor or derision and Susan guides and fosters it.  During jury selection, Sillers (Mark Collmer) has his religious beliefs questioned.  Ultimately, he responds with “I just work at the feed store.”  In context, it’s a funny response and the actors responded with a laugh. At the script read-through, the laughter was candid. Here, in the rehearsal, laughter is an unscripted part of the response.

The cast’s job is clear.  They need to read between the lines of the script and respond in character. Not as they would respond naturally, but as a Christian in a small southern town in 1925 might respond.

As the session winds down, Kathryn gives the ensemble cast a few suggestions that remind me of the advice I was given in my recent acting class. She tells them to consider their character’s background and their history. Let that inform how to respond and react.

Next up is another hymnal rehearsal and a visit to the costume department. Stay tuned!

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Behind the Scenes at Bristol Riverside Theatre: Script Read-Through

Posted on May 7, 2013 at 1:19 am by John

A few weeks ago Sanj and I completed an acting class in effort to improve our directorial skills.  It involved learning and delivering a monologue under the guidance of an experienced instructor.  We paid as much attention to the direction of other students as we did to the instructor’s direction of us.  Soon after the class finished, another opportunity presented itself.

The Bristol Riverside Theatre is putting on a production of Inherit the Wind with an opening night of May 23rd.  Along with the casting call, an opportunity to participate in a unique opportunity was announced.  For the first time, “all-access” reporters have been invited to see and document what happens behind-the-scenes during the production from the first script read-through to opening night. Having shot a short film last year and with an interest in seeing how other productions, both stage and screen are run, I jumped at it.

Kathryn Moroney, the associate director, invited me to the first read-through of the script Tuesday evening, April 30th.  I felt like I had arrived at a town hall meeting when I walk into the rehearsal studio.  Over forty actors were seated around a series of tables arranged in a rectangle.  About ten others are off the sides in support including stage managers, Greg Hartley, Audience Development Coordinator, and Debbie Fleischman, managing public relations. This is the largest production the Bristol Riverside Theatre has done in recent history, with a cast of nearly fifty. The play recreates a small southern town and, looking at the population of the rehearsal studio, I think they can do it.

Director Susan Atkinson observed the reading while Kathryn read the italicized portions of the script indicating action and movement.  Having just finished my acting class a few weeks ago, I have an implicit expectation that the script reading would need adjustment.  When the students in my class would read for the first time, it was generally delivered without any emotion or sense of character.  I must have had a subconscious expectation that the first reading would involve adjustment.

That wasn’t the case. These actors made it through auditions. They are cast and they know their characters.  I’m struck with how well the lines are delivered.  Genuinely funny lines in the script were met with candid laughter.  Here, the cast can freely respond to the lines.  Later, they’ll get direction and orchestration, but tonight it’s the first read-through.  Not a rehearsal.  If you’re not delivering the next line, the response is unscripted and that’s okay.

In less than three hours, the entire play had been read. Applause followed and Susan congratulated the cast on a job well done.  Next come rehearsals of both stage and song, but you’ll have to wait for my next entry for that.

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Blobageddon Screened at the Roslyn Film Festival

Posted on March 28, 2013 at 8:28 pm by John
Roslyn Film Festival 2013

A packed house at the Seventh Annual Roslyn Film Festival

Once again, Blobageddon has reared its head.  This time it was at the seventh annual Roslyn Film Festival, a community-based event held at the Roslyn Fire Company in Abington, PA to benefit the fire fighters.  This marks the fifth time Blobageddon has been unleashed on an unsuspecting audience and both Sanj and I were in attendance Saturday evening March 23rd.

I’d been living in Abington, PA since November 2010 and hadn’t heard about the festival until a few months ago – just in time to get a last minute submission sent in ahead of the deadline.  Sundance, it’s not.  But, it is more than either of us expected.  We recognize that Blobageddon is not exactly cinematic excellence.  What it is, it is and that’s cheese, glorious, indulgent cheese.  Go ahead and soak it in.  It’s less than five minutes. I’ll wait.

We shot it specifically with the Phoenixville Blobfest in mind.  It somehow managed to win the 2012 Blobfest Short Film competition, covered more fully in a prior post.  At that point, it was the most involved video we had produced, complete with an animated blob and a mad scientist’s lab (Part I and Part II).  As low budget as it is, we put plenty of work into it and want it to get as much exposure as we could muster.  The Roslyn Film Festival takes place only five minutes from my home.  We couldn’t resist an opportunity to see Blobageddon screened for another audience, so we entered.

While it’s not a high profile festival, it is a worthwhile and enjoyable fund-raiser for the Roslyn Fire Company.  We expected other films to be about on par with the dubious quality of our submission.  That was not the case.  Nine short films were screened, all of which had better editing and larger budgets than our homage to the Blob. 

Roslyn Film Festival

Audience members were given a ballot and asked to cast their vote for their favorite.  First, second and third place trophies were to be awarded at the end.  Going into the event, we thought our chances of winning a trophy stood at 33% with nine entries.  After seeing the competition, we quickly determine our changes fell to about 0.002% or less.

Both Sanj and I have seen Blobageddon dozens of times.  As it played, we were paying more attention to the audience reaction than the movie.  When the audience vote was tallied there was a Q&A session with the filmmakers.  Someone asked what it was like hearing the audience’s response to your own comedy.  I was frank.  The laughs were not as frequent or as loud this time around as they were at Blobfest or at Mascara and Popcorn and I think that has to do with the audience as much as it does with the movie.  Having seen Blobageddon in several different events, I think the response hinges on the context and expectations.

 

Roslyn Film Festival

John answering a question from the audience in the filmmaker Q&A session.

Blobfest is all about camp.  And camp we are.  That audience was expecting it and reveling in it.  The Mascara and Popcorn crowd enjoyed cheese horror and appreciated our short for what it was.  A crowd of sci-fi and horror fans I presented to last month also enjoyed the movie despite its apparent flaws.  This time, at the Roslyn Film Fest, it was different.  We were up against dramas and documentaries with a budget edited by people in film school.  The first film set the tone. Infinite, unlike our submission, had a set, crew, preproduction planning, etc.  A sci-fi drama, it touched on fundamental religious questions and the nature of the universe.  On the spectrum of quality independent films, it’s about as far from Blobageddon as possible.  Moreover, it set the tone for the festival.  There were just as many comedic shorts as there were dramas, but the dramas shined in terms of editing and cinematography.

Infinite won third-place. We didn’t have a chance.  Dancing Outside the Box, a documentary about wheel chair dancing, won second.  Toy Soldier, a short about a boy who loses his father in the Iraq war, took first.

They are all well-deserved wins and give us something to aspire to as amateur filmmakers.  Blobageddon is only a start.  We’ve been moving along in post-production with Zombie Casserole and have a few more scripts churning away.  We will be submitting to the Roslyn Film Festival next year.

We continue to film in and around the Philadelphia area.  If you are interested in participating or would like to learn more, please feel free to contact us at zombies@forzombies.net.

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Make Up For Zombies

Posted on March 21, 2013 at 3:25 pm by John

We at For Zombies don’t let anything stop us, least of all common sense.  No experience – we’ll muddle our way through it.  And we’ve been muddling our way through make up as evidenced by the photo of ourselves in the banner above.  With some guidance from a friend of ours who had done make up for seasonal haunted houses, we applied cotton balls, latex and grease paint with no artistic still whatsoever.

And that was fine for our YouTube videos, but when we wanted to shoot Zombie Casserole, we knew we needed some help.  Fortunately, Derek and Alicia generously volunteered their time and skills and zombified a horde for our shoots.  That worked wonderfully for our weekend filming.

Sanj Before

Sanj, before I zombified him.

Sanj Intermediate

Sanj during zombification.

Sanj After

Zombie Sanj!

Sanj and I do have occasional cause to shoot our Dear Zombies segments that feature just ourselves and we recognize that we need to improve our make-up skills.  So, we enrolled in a one-day class hosted at FX Warehouse in Fishtown.   The Poor Man’s Zombie Workshop was taught by Josh Counsel, a make-up artist with plenty of experience in the field.  He owns Toxic Image Make Up Studios out in Utah.

There are a number of nuggets we picked up that will improve our zombie making skills:

  • Use tissue paper in addition to or instead of cotton balls.  A single ply of tissue gives your skin a crackled look.
  • Use Rice Crispies, Corn Flakes or oat meal to give the skin a distressed look.
  • Stipple and dab with the brush.  Don’t make long brush strokes.  My girlfriend later pointed out that’s how women apply make-up.  Apparently, I have a gross lack of experience in this area.
  • Do not use water to thin fake blood.   That tends to stain clothing when the food coloring is introduced.  Use vodka or some other alcohol base instead.
John Slightly Zombified

John with a slight cereal skin condition.

John Intermediate

John becoming a zombie.

Zombie John

Burn victim zombie!

Both Sanj and are better prepared to zombify ourselves and others at our next filming event.  A little learning goes a long way.  We haven’t given away all of the secrets.  A zombie has to keep a few for himself.

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The Zombie Casserole Chronicles – Part Ten

Posted on March 14, 2013 at 2:29 pm by Sanj

It’s kind of a big deal when you take a project you’ve been working on for months and get your first glimpse of what the end result might look like.  So it was a couple of weeks ago, when I produced a DVD of the rough cut of Zombie Casserole.  It clocked in at 31 minutes, 13 seconds and 17 frames.  After a couple of months of piecing together individual scenes, this was pretty much a watershed moment.

John and I slapped some beers in ourselves, the DVD in a player and kicked back with notepads and pens.  Surprisingly, it wasn’t far off from our original vision when writing the script last fall.  Some things came out better than we hoped, others not as well – but the overall film was pretty much on target.

Although the sound in this version hadn’t been mixed, we did have a catchy title song to go with the opening credits thanks to Shmoolie.  One big thing we learned was that even though when writing a script you may come up with separate scenes, when you actually lay everything out, those scenes and the ordering may not make sense.  I suppose that’s why it’s called a rough cut.

However, this is film – we can make anything happen.  We immediately decided in some cases that in order to make the timing make better sense, we needed to intercut parts of some scenes with parts of others.  We also saw some opportunities to use After Effects to clean up some footage.  And yes, while this does require work, it’s not nearly as bad as sitting in front of a monitor with lots of uncataloged footage you have to review and then pick through to decide what should be used.

I should note that once we take into account all our notes, we’ll still have a ways to go.  At that point, the film will be ready for sound mixing and scoring.  But there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel.

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