Next.

One piece of advice I've gotten from everyone here, from all angles. Do it yourself.

This follows Anne Bogart's "Don't wait."

You'd think theatre would be faster, but actually, it's not. For theatre, you not only need actors, but you need a space to rehearse in, a space to perform in and people to run lights, the house, the sound and the cues - every night.

Then you have to find an audience to make it worthwhile.

In film, you need those actors and technicians for one day (more if you have a budget and you're doing something bigger - but still less than theatre). The performance space can be as low rent as YouTube and my experience with videos on YouTube has been, you're likely to get more people watching your work by accident than you are to get in a theatre without a decent ad budget, a huge cast and a rave in print.

So I took all the collective advice and bought a Canon XH-A1. It's the low end 24f (or p, if you believe the hype) HD camera. I also picked up a Sennheiser mic and one lighting instrument.

My wife bought me a copy of Final Cut Express.

Two weeks ago I shot my first short. The script was from a play I wrote that imagines a conversation between Helen and Clytemnestra just before Clytemnestra gives birth to Iphigenia, (Iphigenia, the girl who will later be sacrificed by Agamemnon - her father - in order to please the gods enough to put wind in his Greek fleets sails and begin the quest to bring Helen back from Troy. Hilarity, right?)

The stills here are from the edited short - which runs about 10 minutes. I won't post the video of it because what I learned is just how limited my equipment is, but it gave me hope about continuing down this road.

And, it was fun.

I may in fact stop blogging soon, but I may start posting video shorts instead. All the while trying to find a place to do Dressing the Girl here in LA - naturally.


NOTE: While writing this, we had a 4.5 earthquake here in California. The bookshelves definitely SHOOK.