Trailer for last 3 shows of GTP MACBETH

Here it is! This weekend is the last chance to see these wonderful young actors in the most ambitious production we've done to date. Again, tickets are only $5. How's that for a deal?

Thoughts after opening night of Macbeth

I think few would argue that no night is tougher than opening night. In many ways it's the NASCAR night. Come to support friends and family, stay for the car wrecks - forgotten lines and technical difficulties. 

Other than the score lap-top crashing halfway through the final act (silencing two of my favorite tunes), everything went spectacular! The actors all showed up. No one spun out. No one hit the wall. There were no collisions unintended, and certainly no pile-ups. The Macduff's almost made Anna and I cry (the dead and the surviving!). A Macbeth afraid of never getting off book flowed eloquently through his lines.  

 And Hecate? Oh my, she was badass!

Seyton? Seyton was like Pyramidhead and Pinhead had a baby. His sword is my all time favorite prop out of all the things I've made for Anna's shows.  

 The fights worked (whew!). 

Every character felt like they mattered and was realized. The banquet scene was unnerving as hell. I could go on and on about everyone and everything. It was easily the best opening night we've ever had.

AND FROM HERE IT CAN ONLY GET BETTER. 

I know this because as good as it was some scenes were done better in rehearsal, so they have it in them and now have no nerves to distract them from it. I know this because we've figured out better ways to do things since last night. The only argument I can think of for tougher nights than opening are later nights on a show with a very long run. Actors can only invest in their characters for so long, but with only four shows remaining... that should not be a problem.  So come on out! 

Show starts at 4:00pm. It is WELL worth the $5 price of admission, (and this time we'll have soft drinks and water!).

 

Cheers!

 

Gorilla Theater Productions Macbeth Kickstarter

Though I already linked to the page in my last post, I thought I'd go ahead and embed the Kickstarter video for anyone curious.

As of today we've only made $80 towards our minimum goal of $550 (with 6 days left). Granted the page has barely been up two days, and I suspect this weekend is really when things will liven up. Still, I can't stress enough the usefulness of spreading the word around. We totally understand that not everyone can donate, but what anyone who wants to support GTP can do is share the link and spread the word to others that might be able to. :D

Also, I've put together a playlist on Youtube of past production trailers to familiarize people new to GTP with who we are and what we're about. It's all stuff I've posted in the past but now they're in a neat package with the new trailer and the sneak peek at the score I've created for the show. I've included the score video in part because that's one of the things we're giving away to people that pledge $50 or more. Each CD will come in a cardboard sleeve with track listing, some doodles unique to each one, and of course will be signed by me. There's some other great gifts on the page well worth checking out. We're even giving away 3 to 5 of the prop-SWORDS at the end of the show's run. These are all custom made for the show by Anna and I, and while comprised of hammered conduit INTENDED FOR DECORATION ONLY, they're still pretty darn cool.

So spread the word! It's gonna be a great show and with a little help it will be are biggest yet!

Cheers!

GTP Macbeth Trailer

I'll keep this short and sweet.

Here it is.



I mucked up some of the sound mixing rushing it out, but overall I'm pretty pleased with it. The show is going to be amazing. I've compared it to our Antigone from last year but it's in many ways on a whole other level. It's chaotic and insane, the way Macbeth should be.

Also, check out our Kickstarter project which should be going live soon.

Sneek Peek at GTPs Macbeth Score

Greetings and Happy New Year! As things start to slow down from the holidays they only seem to be speeding up with Gorilla Theater Productions of Charlottesville with our up coming production of William Shakespeare's Macbeth.

As I've noted before, I'm working on the score for the project. So, here's a little peek at what I've been working on!


I've put together about fifteen tracks for Anna to work with and am still adding a few finishing touches. Several of the tracks, as demonstrated by "Come, Thick Night" are fairly ambient, intended to be played low during scenes. Still others are quite musical. The piece for the closing battle, is going to be particularly insane, but I'm saving that one for the audience. Depending on how everything is integrated, this should easily prove to be largest musical presence I've had in one of her shows.

I've also finished shooting and editing the video for our Kickstarter promo which should be up shortly and the official trailer is on the way! (Hopefully it will be shot today at rehearsal.)

For more info, as always check out GTP's blog.

Updates: Busy, busy, busy!

I've been pretty busy at my day job since Black Friday (and especially Cyber Monday) and it doesn't look like overtime is going to be slowing down much this holiday season. So it's not very likely that I'll not be posting a lot for a bit, but here are a few updates.

GTP:   Macbeth is cast! Rehearsals have started and Anna is excited about the actors from CHS, Albemarle High, PVCC and all around. Many old and many more new. It's looking to be a great show. I'll try to post some score samples once things are more finalized as to what is being used.

Life:   I am starting to look into programming to advance my career options. While more web and data systems skills will have to be focused on for likely jobs, it is exciting to play around with gaming design as a means to learn some of the basics. I've always wanted to program a text adventure game, feeling that the medium has so much more potential than has ever been fully embraced, but I also have some less anachronistic ambitions. I'm getting very interested in expanding my commission work beyond GTP. I had a blast recently cranking out a score for a friend's student film, and can't help day dreaming of providing a score to some small (or big... I mean, I'm dreaming here!) company's release. I'm looking at next year pretty openly, hoping to get a few passion projects done but also hoping things will fall into my lap.

Blog:   Slowly updating profile stuff to express more current interests. I think the blog is going to expand. As a resume blog, I've already fumbled out of focus with theater updates even when my fingerprints are barely on projects... so it doesn't seem that radical to change things up a little bit.

The big thing I want to start including are pieces called Things That Should Totally Happen. Like most geeks, I daydream about things beyond my means. 'Wouldn't it be cool if there was an Evil Dead 4, or a film adaptation of Doom that drew from the original games, and was good' - that sort of thing. Cool actors working together, books adapted to film, games adapted from films and so on (and not just adaptations, but that's all I can think of at the moment without blowing this up into a full-blown article on one of the real ones). Things I'd love to do, but don't have the budget or connections or rights and will likely never have them. I figure I could hoard them all in my head, or share them, the projects I can't do or facilitate but I wish someone would.

I think here and there I might have other blog entries about theories and critiques, but hopefully few and far between. I want this to still focus on displaying my actual work, not what I think of other people's stuff. Still, it would be nice to be a little more active here.

GTP Macbeth Auditions and Concept Trailer!

Pippi was a fun and silly blast, and now that it's wrapped up Anna's hitting the ground running with her next project, the bard's infamous "Scottish Play," Macbeth.

I've been working on music for the show on and off with other projects for almost two months and it is now my main focus. Saturday, before Sunday's last show for Pippi Longstocking, we started going to work on a concept trailer for Anna's primal urban take on the classic. After shooting, recording voice overs, setting a few things on fire, editing, and sound mixing I uploaded this promo a couple nights ago to YouTube.


It was a collaborative effort. She gave me a list of shots she wanted and a basic structure and then we set out to shoot it. We were up until 3:30AM shooting the thing like madmen.

I think what I like most about this video over any other we've done together for GTP or otherwise is how much of a complete merging of our styles it shows. Some shots didn't work, so I added some footage and tweaked the original concept to be a bit more trippy. Some of my images didn't work at first either, then she did voice overs and I mixed them and with each exchange and layer everything started coming together as an effective whole where individual elements hadn't.

Needless to say, if you are interested in auditioning and being a part of this madness, head on over to Gorilla Theater Productions and check it out!