Liberatr Media Network

Saturday, May 10, 200812:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Orange County Regional History Center
65 E Central Blvd
Orlando, Florida 32801
(Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps)

Be ye photographers, videobloggers, people wanting to learn something about downtown Orlando? Are you interested in using your talents to showcase what the non-tourism-driven part of Orlando has to offer? The crew from OrlandoScene.TV will be taking the History Center's official walk of downtown, with dozens of historic stops all over the city. A link to the tour can be found on the always-atrocious downtownorlando.com

We are asking photographers to come with us on a photowalking expedition, because our video piece will be about the photowalking trend and Downtown Orlando will be our setting.

At the end of the day we will be attending "Improv en Espanol" at SAK Comedy Lab. If you're interested in snapping some photos there, it will be their first anniversary doing the show on Saturdays, and I know they will appreciate it.

If you have any questions, please direct them to [info orlandoscene.tv]

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Where does one begin? I often find that when writing these theatre reviews, it’s a good idea to gather my thoughts, think about what I want to say and in what order; I don’t have time for that, I’m going back to see the last showing in an hour!

I first learned about this production through a friend who helped to workshop the format for this improvised 90-minute board-game inspired murder mystery… she and several other students, under the direction of David Charles, PhD. - Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at Rollins College. The whole play is improvised, so there are bound to be some times during such a long show where the scenes may be stronger or weaker - to counteract that, “Dr. David” and his class developed dozens of devices to help them create a sustainable story throughout the length of the show.

We begin at the stately home of a Mr. Phil Reynolds, a successful lawyer with a deceased rich wife. His business partner Toni and spouse Gene the artist will be guests at tonights party, along with his child Bobby and sibling Toni, servant Pat, and lifelong friend Dr. Chris. An unexpected guest arrives, and, inevitably, there is a murder! Some classic (yet improvised) scenes are played on the stage of the Annie Russell Theatre, which has been masterfully converted to the perfect setting for these 8 unlikely murderers or murderesses to play out their little drama. You’ll laugh, you’ll scratch your head, and above all you’ll have fun.

I’ve got so much more to tell, but no time to tell it… we continue our recap when I return from the last showing of Murder We Wrote tonight!

**** Continued ****

As the play begins, you see a man sitting at a bar, and as he turns to the audience, he gives us the look the look that says “Are you ready for this?”. At all three showings, David’s entrance gave us a laugh. This audience was ready to have fun. The story is set up as an “exploration of the human psyche” where “a seemingly random series of events” may yield “murderous results”, and the setup for the game begins. Three decks of cards are passed out to the audience and shuffled, then used to select a victim, a murder weapon, a location and… the murderer. The recited banter during this section kept us paying attention, instead of looking down at our “ballots” where we would later guess whodunnit. Only the Assistant Director and the killer know all the details of the crime before the final moments of the play when a confession is yanked out of the murder him or herself.

Once the setup is done, we the audience have also suggested a song title, a nervous habit, an annoying catch phrase, and several other ways for the players to use to make us feel as much like the writers of the story as the people on and off stage. Just before, however, is perhaps the most exciting part: the character cards are shuffled, and 7 of the 8 roles are completely randomized by members of the audience. All the parts are non-gender specific, including the married couple, and relationships between siblings and children. Even the order of entrance for the characters is ever-changing, decided by the backstage team of a dozen or more people who are constantly feeding the actors suggestions, props, cues, even their catchphrases, and reconciling any plot holes during intermission. There are countless challenges for the lighting and sound team as well, and opportunities for them to drive the story as much as anyone down at the stage level.

The most rewarding parts of the show come in the second act, where the details of the murder are spoon-fed to us at fixed intervals (or as much as can be with an improvised show). We already know the victim before we take the intermission and make our guesses, and immediately after, the location of the murder is revealed. I don’t know to give credit to one person for this, or the whole team of students, along with Dr. David who playtested and researched this last summer, but there is some expert game design at work here.

Then someone suggests “we should split up and search the house”, and each of the 8 characters takes one of the doors leading to various wings and levels of the house, only to frantically burst out of the door in a ballet of “who am I on stage with, and what do we do now?”, the inner workings of which I know is my job to keep a secret, but congratulations to J. Hannah White, the lighting designer for her brilliant stroke on that one. There’s also a more traditional improv game set up in the coat closet, at the bar, and up on the balcony, where the players pass lines to each other like a hot potato that is always unpredictable and fun. It’s these sort of moments that make us forget we’re watching the story being written in real-time.

Last but not least, all the cast re-assemble in the main hall to try and figure out for themselves who the murderer is. Things at this point can get rather tense, and apparently, a wrestling match broke out during this scene on Friday between actor Seth and Dr. David. The atmosphere teeters on melodramatic as actors are eliminated, concealed weapons are pulled, dead bodies lie on the couch and revealing letters are read… or none of these things happen and they just wing it, it’s really different every night.

What’s that? Sorry you missed it? I feel sorry for your too. This show could run every night down on International Drive if the team were so inclined. I don’t remember how much of Sleuths Dinner Theatre is improvised, maybe I’ll have to go back and do some post-game research. So far, the closest things I’ve seen to this level of story plus improvisation in such a long form are The Adventurer’s Club at Pleasure Island, which I would consider a distant script-heavy cousin of Muder We Wrote (all the endings are decided, most of the jokes and songs are repeated, but the cast is always changing), and SAK Comedy Lab’s The Early Show, which plays every other Friday at Midnight, and is completely improvised with no backstage magic, just the performers left to their own devices.

What makes these other productions around town the same or different from this show? In Murder, we the audience are all following this global discovery as we ourselves and the rest of the actors and around-stage hands and minds try to figure out the story. In regular improv or something more scripted, we either have a better or worse idea of where the ending is. We have an idea of how we think it could happen, and the several dozen people actually driving do as well, but there’s no way to know until the last possible moment when the killer reveals his or her secret and we have a collective pay-off. There’s lots more to say about what’s happening here and how they pulled off the format, but then this would be getting into research paper territory, and I’d need to start giving examples from other historic or contemporary works, and… well, we’re only blogging here!

I’ve never taken a theatre class in my life, and I graduated from UCF 4 years ago (almost to the day), but my biggest takeaway from this was a desire to enroll at Rollins under Dr. David Charles. You can tell everyone involved on this play was having such a great time, and the fact that people were coming back to watch a second, third, or even more showings is a testament to the fun and intrigue of this production, and the charm exuded by David and his cast. Congratulations to Megan Borkes, Ana Eligio, Joseph Bromfield, Chelsea Dygan, Erica Leas, Seth Strutman, Emily Smith, Roberto Pineda, Michael Neil Mastry, Danny Tuegel, Liz Weisstein, and Rob Yoho, along with all the other cast and crew, on an excellent run.

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Chris Zabriskie is a good friend of mine, and a damn fine filmmaker. This month, he put together a little video with some amazing stuff from the hit TV show LOST.

I saw this on a blog Chris co-writes for called Retro Low Fi (full disclosure, Marc from RLF and I do a podcast called Pop Means Cuddle, I used to be in his band).

As of right now, this video has 226,005 views and counting. Way to go, Chris.

Check out Chris’ other featured videos on Orlando Video.

If you’d like to see your Orlando Video here, email < liberatr AT gmail DOT com >.

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My Friends,

As you all know, I’ve done this Blogging Fringe thing for the past two years. Sadly, this year looks like I’ll be pulled in more directions than ever before. I’ve been up until 2AM every night for weeks on end and I’m not sure when this will stop.

At the same time, I really love the opportunities the Fringe Festival presents to show off some great groups in Orlando and Internationally, and introduce the world to our potential.

At this point I have received dozens of press releases from faithful producers who would love a mention on the blog. I’d love to contact them, conduct interviews, post them to the site, get everyone excited and oh so much more, but that’s not going to happen.

Some of you have contributed time to this project before, others are simply friends, but you are all tied to the theatre community and you have proven your interest in making our community something special.

My plan for Blogging Fringe this year is to write a small number of posts on my personal blog and have them automatically re-posted to BloggingFringe.com, and I’m going to open that up to everyone in the world. All the content on the site will be release under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone will be free to re-post and re-mix the work in any medium for non-commercial purposes This includes all archived content on the site as well.

Getting your content posted is simple. We’ll agree on a keyword, something like “bloggingfringe”, or “Orlando Fringe”, something you will only write on your blog if you’d like the content to be seen, and those posts will be re-posted with a link back to your blog. An example of this is on Liberatr.net where all the posts link to the original home instead of inside the site.

This project has never been about my own personal gain - I’ve sunk hundreds (thousands?) of dollars of my money into creating an environment for patrons and artists to have a conversation, but I believe I’ve fallen short of the mark up until now. Beth will be the first person to say that the Fringe website is not the place she’d like this conversation to happen - that’s one great thing about a site like ours.

All the editorial content on Blogging Fringe - the reviews, videos, audio podcasts, will no longer be called Blogging Fringe, but instead Ryan Price Media, Orlando Scene TV and Florida Creatives. These three websites will just be other first-class citizens of the community like anyone else in the world. If I end up being too busy to post many videos, podcasts or blogs, that will show, because they’ll be lost in the ocean of posts created by the blogging Fringe Faithful.

If I have to I’ll paint the administrator password to Blogging Fringe on a canvas and submit the artwork to Visual Fringe. That’s how open this should be. Anna, what’s the entry fee again?

More news on exactly how to get your blogs re-posted to a public, highly visible website for free coming soon. I hope the Fringe itself, the Orlando Weekly, Elizabeth Maupin, Orlando Arts Blog and others will be proud to include their blogs in the list, because the point is visibility, not exclusivity.

The contents of this email are posted here in order to make this information as public as I possibly can. If you’d like to contribute, you can start by posting a link to your blog in the comments! All serious submissions (and some not so serious) will be accepted.

321-441-3964
Any voicemails left here will be re-posted as comments unless otherwise noted.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Only Mark Baratelli can pull us out of this theatre community rut. And pot luck dinners.

Orlando Arts Blog: VIDEO: Orlando Theatrical Community

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Download Show 16
flcreatives_16_barcamp_ladies.mp3
Length: 14:00

Tisse, Katrina Priore, Dana Delapi and Becky Lane talk to Ryan Price during BarCamp Orlando 2008.

Florida Creatives on iTunes

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The idea here is that we can reproduce all of the features of Meetup.com and Google Groups in about an hour using a couple of off-the-shelf open source tools, like Drupal with the Organic Groups module installed.

I just did a really quick setup at FloridaCreatives.com/community - nothing fancy yet, but groups are turned on, so once you register you can create any group you like and ask your friends to join.

Right now there is a group called “Orlando”, and one called “Florida Creatives” that you’re instantly a member of when you join. I hope in the future this site will be more general purpose and a default like that will be frowned upon. We’ll see what happens.

Would anyone like to volunteer to help us move all the current blog and wiki posts over to the new Drupal site? We’ll also move all the wiki pages and then throw a bunch of permanent redirect links all over the place, then take away the /community/ at the end of the URL and make this the official site.

Rob Zienert has offered to do a design for us. Rob, let me know what you need. Obviously, please register for the site so I can give you permissions, and I need to get you FTP also.

Many projects remain:

• Creating a space for the podcasts to live
• Setting up event listings, aggregation, feeds
• Setting up blog aggregation (i.e. you post to your blog with a special tag and it goes straight to FLCreatives on your group)
• PayPal buckets? Poster contests? Wall-O-Groups?

Right now the permissions on this site are very liberal - nobody can turn on new modules yet, but email me if you’re interested.

OK, this is a really insanely nerdy post for this blog, so I’ll stop now and let you get back to your regularly scheduled programming. Look for the “Ladies of BarCamp” post in a few minutes.

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Today at BarCamp I suggested we create a “secret” handshake for Florida Creatives members or people who are involved in the local community.

Here are some suggestions: hugs, peace sign, hang loose, three-fingered wave, etc.

What would you use as the Florida Creatives secret handshake? Record something and post it in the comments!

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Download Show 15
flcreatives_15_barcamp_sunir_alex.mp3
Length: 9:19

Sunir Shah and Alex DeCarvalho talk to Ryan Price at BarCampOrlando Dev Day about FreshBooks and ScrapBlog, where each of them are the “Community Guy”. We also talk about BarCamp and the aesthetic there vs. a regular conference.

Shameless Links:

• FreshBooks
• ScrapBlog
• BarCampOrlando
• Florida Creatives on iTunes

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BarCamp Orlando is a weekend for all types of creative folks to come together and share with each other. The event is dubbed an “unconference”, a format which derives power from the people instead of the event organizers or the presenters. Everyone has an equal opportunity to get on stage and speak, teach or lead a discussion, playing off of the idea that at any given conference, the people in the audience have more knowledge collectively than the presenter(s) on stage.

This second installment of BarCamp will be held over 2 days, Saturday and Sunday, April 5th and 6th, in downtown Orlando at the Wall Street complex, from 10AM - 6PM each day. Registration is free, and a registration promises a shirt and lunch on the sponsors of BarCamp, businesses who are passionate about the technology and media communities of Central Florida.

Saturday is the designated “Dev Day”, playing host to everything from web programming to robot building and video game development and everything in between. iPhone hackers, guys with soldering irons, the latest technologies, and plenty that haven’t been realized yet. Every 30 minutes, both venues will have a different talk going on, so if you’re feeling lost in the jargon, apply the “rule of 2 feet” and check out what’s happening in the other room!

Sunday is dubbed “Media Day”, and is the place for storytellers, journalists, writers, designers, filmmakers, musicians, 2D and 3D artists, podcasters, bloggers and social networkers to show off their work, share their tricks or talk about the state of the industry. From 12 to 1 we will be talking about the “Past, Present and Future of Media in Central Florida”, hoping to give our community a sense of our story, and where we’re headed.

Registration is free, and the event runs from 10AM - 6PM both days with a lunch break at 1PM. The event will be housed in Slingapour’s and One-Eyed-Jack’s, with Wall St Cantina acting as our “hallway”. There will be projectors and microphones, chairs and a space to speak. All you have to do is write your name on the whiteboard and you get 20-25 minutes to share your passions with a group of energetic, engaged geeks and creatives. I would not use the words “captive audience” to describe the BarCamp crowd, because they all want to get involved.

Visit www.barcamporlando.org today and register for Dev Day, Media Day or both days. Wall Street Plaza is at 18 Wall Street Plaza, Orlando, FL 32801 - barcamporlando.org/where has a map to the venue and information about parking.

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Over on the Orlando Sentinel Theatre blog, there has been a recent discussion about how to get Orlando’s Theatre (and theater) community together. They decided on having a pot-luck dinner in a local theatre space, namely Mad Cow. The date is April 6th at 7PM, the same day as BarCamp Media Day, one hour after our event wraps up, right across the street from our event.

These thespians have the same desires and pains we do, and it’s all been coming out out on Elizabeth Maupin’s blog in the last few weeks, and then earlier today one of the actors made a big leap into Coworking land. I instantly recognized the model and ideals behind Coworking, which we at the Florida Creatives have been dedicated to realizing as a space as well as a community for some time.

Here’s what Scott Sidler of Little Fin Creative Proposed:

Brother & Sisters in Theatre,

There has been a lot of talk over the years about ways to strengthen our vast yet fractured theatre community here in the Greater Orlando area. After hearing so many “fixes” or temporary solutions to this peculiar problem I have rolled this challenge over and over in my mind and with lots of input from others I have come up with a proposed solution that I have been working on for some time. This is a co-operative solution which I do firmly believe can bring us all together as a community and allow us and our audiences to enjoy more and better theatre than we have previously been able to put forth. We can indeed be greater than the sum of our parts! Here is my vision.

THE GREEN ROOM
The Green Room is a space that is centrally located. It is a theatre. It is a rehearsal studio. It is a coffee/wine/tapas style cafe. It is THE place where creative and artistically minded people of Orlando can come together to mingle, network, create, learn, research, produce and play. The Green Room is a theatrical co-op, if you will, with a year-round feel like a fringe festival. There is always something going on whether it is a cabaret, a new work of theatre, a dance concert, a class on puppeteering or a music festival.

But how can we, the poor theatrical masses, afford a place like this? Together! How many of you work with, know of, or have your own “homeless” production company? How many of you would love to have unlimited access to a space where you can bring your creative ideas to fruition? And how many of you would like to produce your own works of theatre, music, dance or anything in a location that every actor, musician, dancer, artist, critic, graphic designer and writer not only knows about but frequents for their morning coffee, afternoon snack or nightly spirits?

How do we afford this? Let’s say there are 5 “Member-Companies” that pay $500/month and 50 “Individual Members” that pay $40/month. That equals $4500 a month in income to cover the expenses! And when you are a member you don’t pay reduced fees for use of the space. You don’t pay anything!! It is your theatre! The more members the less we all pay and the greater this theatre co-op can become.

This can take the shape that any of us desire! It changes with the needs of its members and is a truly flexible artistic entity. But before we can move forward with this I beg your indulgence. Since this will be a creation of its members I need to know what the members would like it to be. Below is a short questionnaire to determine the who, what, where and how of The Green Room. I encourage you to please answer the questions below to describe your thoughts and to let us know at Little Fin Creative if you would be interested in pledging your support to this endeavor. We don’t need hard commitments at this point, simply an expression of genuine interest will do. Lastly, please forward this to as many people as you can who might be interested in this. Dance companies, theatre companies, production companies, actors, musicians, anyone. Post it on blogs, myspace, bulletin boards or wherever, so we can see if this idea can truly fly!

Sincerely,
Scott Sidler
Little Fin Creative
PO Box 692204
Orlando, FL 32869
718-781-9847

If ye be a theatre type and checking out this blog, I urge you to head over to our Coworking Mailing List and start posting there. Please use the community tools that already exist.

We also have a Florida Creatives Happy Hour coming up this Monday at the Crooked Bayou - the details for this are always on the right sidebar of this page, but it helps to know that it always happens on the third Monday of the month at the Crooked Bayou, from 6-9PM. Crooked Bayou is just around the corner from the Mad Cow, where the pot-luck dinner will be taking place. No, really, it’s just around the corner.

Update: This is also post #100 here on the blog. Nice timing.

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Dear Fringe Freaks:

If you didn’t know, my Blogging Fringe site also has a presence on the chat / SMS / microblog thing that is Twitter:

www.twitter.com/bloggingfringe

What’s Twitter? The service asks the question: What are you doing right now? You answer the question by using your phone via SMS, or a website, or an instant message client (which might also be on your phone). Once you get the updates in, other people can choose to “follow” you. You can also re-post the updates to a widget on webpages, or you may see my updates in my facebook status message.

I only have one phone, so I tried to figure out how I could make a post about Fringe from my account and still have it show up on the bloggingfringe updates. I did figure it out, and I also decided to let all of my friends get the same ability.

Any updates you send to twitter containing the word ‘fringe’ or if you address a message to that account using @bloggingfringe will be re-posted. If this experiment doesn’t work out for everyone, I will take it down.

This is not implemented yet, but I think a neat addition to this would be if you started or ended your post with an exclamation point ! that might work well to include or exclude your message.

To get started, sign up for twitter and follow the bloggingfringe account:

www.twitter.com/bloggingfringe

…then include the word “fringe” or @bloggingfringe in your message.

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59 times out of 60, Orlando Video highlights a clip made right here in Sunny Floria, but today I must give props to two gentleman more talented and dedicated than myself at showing off cool videos. Their names are Jim Kirk and Chuck Baker, and their talent produces many podcasts, one of which is The Clip Show. I really have to hand it to them for following the KISS methodology and just keeping things super-simple. The show within the show that you see The Heap, actually gets it’s own web site and feed, because they write and produce things that last 2 to 10 minutes and just get it over with.

This particular episode of the Clip Show doesn’t follow the familiar format, where they rate video podcasts on the C.O.G.D.N. Rating System, which is a modest scale of 1 to 13 COGDN, 13 being knock your socks off amazing. In fact, the reason why I linked to this episode is to direct you readers to 13 shows you should really check out, a great sampling of video podcasts. Add these 13 shows to your iTunes / Miro / FireAnt player, or visit each web site individually each week and get a cramp in your hand from all the clicking like I know so many of you do, but give all of these shows an equal chance.

Visit the Clip Show and make sure you subscribe!

If you’d like to see your Orlando Video here, email < liberatr AT gmail DOT com >.

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John Cusak in High Fidelity, created by Steve Steger
Source: VCC Graphics Technology Blog: We’re on YouTube!

I’ve been reading the Graphics Technology program’s blog from Valencia Community College for as long as it’s existed, I think. The best part is: it’s an interesting read! There are always students winning awards, getting jobs and the like, and now there are videos, too!

Amanda Kern writes:

I’ve uploaded six new projects from my Interactive Design 1 course to share with you all. Last semester I began assigning a new typographic animation project which has had some great results. You’ll just have to check out the videos for yourself. Enjoy!

A BIG thanks goes out to Digital Media Professor, Rob McCaffrey, who was instrumental in spearheading our new youtube account. Keep an eye out for new videos by visiting Valencia’s digital media/graphics youtube account directly.

I know I’m going to continue keeping an eye on this blog for more videos. It looks like these were captured with a screencasting software instead of exported from Flash. There are also several more examples of animated type on the blog post where I found this video, so go check them out.

If you’d like to see your Orlando Video here, email < liberatr AT gmail DOT com >.

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Tough love is necessary sometimes... CentralFloridaNews.TV - I have met Chaz Yorick and seen him perform poetry to a decent degree, but these initial videos are not his strong suit. Here's some free advice - for anyone posting lots of videos to the web - do post your videos to YouTube, but on your web site post higher-quality vids from Viddler, Blip.TV or Revver - all three of these allow for contextual ads in the video, and their playback quality and video players are much better. A service like TubeMogul can help you post and tag the video on multiple sites, as well as tracking the number of viewers you get. More free advice - as much as I love "A Comic Shop" and the plan for what they announced for their MegaCon booth, as a producer, you need to understand when your interview subject is as exciting as a wet noodle and you need to read the copy yourself. We made that mistake on the TASTE video and paid the price. You can catch Chaz any Wednesday night hosting the poetry open mic at Austin's Coffee. Also this weekend at MegaCon. Something about live streaming, but it doesn't really say where or by what method...? Twitter - something called College Boys Live that looks like a Justin.TV thing. Not too sure what zombies and comic books have to do with college boys streaming 24/7 on the internet, but it will make my google ads more interesting for a few weeks, yes? If you'd like to see your Orlando Video here, email < liberatr AT gmail DOT com >. We also started a show called OrlandoScene.TV - it is open for anyone to contribute so we aren't duplicating efforts and splintering the viewership. Anyone out there making videos like this, we want to work together.

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