Thursday, August 16, 2012

monologue project - one year in the making

I did a search on the NYCPlaywrights web site to see if perhaps we posted the Project Y monologue project call for submissions, and sure enough, we did. But it was over a year ago - their time-line for asking for scripts and then selecting and recording the five winners was an entire year.

Considering what kind of money they must have for their projects, it's really amazing how very little difference there is in the quality of the video recording, directing, etc. between their pieces and the NYCPlaywrights pieces. I expect this is partly due to the nature of Internet video - the dimensions of the image and the necessary reduction in image quality in order to speed up streaming causes the final product to lose a good deal of high-quality production values.

And of course NYCPlaywrights doesn't just do monologues - two of the 10-minute plays of the month are virtual short movies - BEAUTIFUL BOY and OCCUPY DISNEY. BEAUTIFUL BOY didn't come out as well as it could because I seriously underestimated how noisy the subway is - I guess I've learned to block it out during my commute. I should have had each actor over-dub the entire movie to fix the lousy sound. Oh well, live and learn. I think OCCUPY DISNEY, while still not exactly perfect, is a definite improvement on sound quality. It helps that we were in Union Square instead of on the N train.

And one more thing - and this is my own theory of Internet video, but I think that online video works best when you have close-ups of human faces. Most of the shots of the Project Y video are mid-ranges shots, where as I generally get right up in the actors' faces, as in my sonnet video.