Chaos Attraction

Sketch 101 Week 3: Funnier When Drunk

2016-09-12, 10:36 p.m.

Previous week here.

So we learned something this week: dealing with the formatting in Celtx (the program we’re supposed to write sketches in) didn’t go so well. Some people had issues uploading scripts to the drive at all, I apparently used the wrong format AND didn’t get that I was supposed to upload it in PDF format rather than the one the program saves in…oy. Good thing I printed a copy just in case.

Notes:
* Real life events-take the nucleus of it and don’t stick to the facts
* Put the craziest thing at the end.
* Economy of words-don’t do big chunks of dialogue, try to prune down words
* Make the stakes high.
* “I really do think it was funnier when we were drunk.” -I don’t recall the context of this, but I had to save it for posterity.
* Make a list of everything you know about your subject matter-what can you use?

After that, we read each other’s sketches aloud in table reads. Subject matters involved a coworker who nitpicked every detail, a theater guy working at Safeway, a guy who goes into bars and brags about how much money he has, and and a doctor who likes to playact at being a spy.

The homework I did for this week was a sketch I called “Roxy’s Revenge,” based on my coworker’s dog deciding to pee in her bed after she was gone for 10 minutes. He said I personified the dog’s angst and drama very well, but it’s not super unusual to have a dog trash the house-the unusual thing here was the dog’s voice when she was saying things like “leaving me here to die.” I hit the pattern really well, but I need to do something unexpected, like maybe the dog is singing “All By Myself” or accidentally trashing things.

After we got done with that, he had us find news headlines and pick out one of them to write a sketch idea bout. I did “Donald Trump Jr. Thinks Syrian Refugees Are Like Killer Skittles,” and wrote about a gang of killer skittles fighting against M&M’s as to who’s going to choke kids at Halloween, gang colors, etc. I was pretty proud of this one.

Then we did a little group discussion/pitching because he thinks the best sketches come from the hive mind. Overall, I think the idea here is that we’re supposed to layer two worlds on top of each other and mix them.

This week’s homework: write another character sketch with the idea “if this is true, what else is true” and work on escalating.


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