News in Creative Writing: Working with actors and motion capture adventures!

The second term rolls around in the barrel of time and things have been very busy. I’ll be putting two interesting events together in this post as this is the only time (on the train to Farnham) that I’ll have a chance to write about things.

               

Writers and Actors Workshop

Yesterday CWers linked up with Acting and Performance students in our first workshop designed to give both cohorts a chance to peer in the world of each other’s craft. Acting and writing stand in relation to one another the way that a blueprint and a building do and we worked from this idea to help get scripts on their feet and to consider if another parking space was required or another stairwell needed to be built (extended metaphor here, don’t ya know).

After a warm-up led by my colleague Sian Rees, actors and writers were separated in order to have a discussion about the difference between the practices. Writers and actors were then pared off to begin exploring their scripts with a basic read through. The read through though has a different temperature and pace to even a basic reading with movement, so we then setup stage spaces to see how the scripts looked in action and time.

This process was perhaps the most interesting, as it showed some writers the difference between the page and the stage. While it is easy to emphasise the importance of the difference between the two, the best way to understand it is to see something played out and feel, perhaps with a red cheek or two, how ‘what is in your head’ might or might not translate to the acted environment.

After some more work and play with the scripts, we shared some of the initial results and I can honestly say I was impressed by what had been achieved. In every case there was a clear and interesting beginning and a real diversity of styles and tones. A great experience that will be repeated in a few weeks, where we will work more on these scripts and see how they have developed after a rewrite.

Motion Capture at Shepperton Studios

I’m a moderately busy person and while I spend too much time playing computer games, I do in fact get some writing done. One project I’m currently trying to get off the ground in a fantasy storytelling show called ‘The Book Garden’. The idea was fortunate enough to come to the notice of Phil Stilgoe who runs the motion capture company Centriod 3D, based at Shepperton studios. Phil is very interested in digital puppetry and its applications within a MoCap environment, so he invited us in for an R+D day to help develop the character pipeline for one of the lovely characters in the show. Here’s some very bad photographs to prove we were there and people were running up and down flapping their wings like a bird.

See the kind of interesting things Centroid do here: http://www.centroid3d.com/

Watch this space for more news as the project develops.

That’s all for now!

Craig