Q4 Project day 1

Dear readers,

Been a long time hasn't it? Well that ends now as I have to give daily updates to the progress of my work. Today I created a post explaining how one properly uses parenthesis, dashes and quotation marks. I hope to be done with it by the end of either this week or next. I did not make any progress on the movie I have plans of writing as I've pushed that aside until my "A" project is complete. On top of all that I've looked into songwriting. I didn't really learn anything new from my research however once the current "A" project is done and I need a new "B" project, I think I'll make song writing my new "B" project. Still not sure who to include in my community and for what project however I have people in mind and will have reached a consensus by Friday evening at the latest.

Mike Hand

Intensive assignment

The workload of an intensive is, as the name implies, intense. For me the change in pace was a little less great because I had just got up to Day 370 in a 365 for poetry however I had never seriously attempted play or screen writing before. In fact my prior attempts involved improper formats aggravated by “actors” who refused to do the necessary work and the few actors who were insistent upon doing there acting also decided that they should be the director and the writer and changed the work into an unfathomable abomination.

That said these intensives come off from me writing in a poetic matter and we very little experience writing for other people to perform. Perhaps this is why I found our first task of writing our most memorable argument so it fills up 6 pages and then cut anything that can be seen as unnecessary and lower it to a single page. I can no longer say that I find this difficult and I can say that I find it necessary as I do find myself going off into unnecessary details in my head from time to time.

From there the next memorable upgrade to my brain obtained from the intensives would have to be Pinter. For the curious and/or uninitiated, Pinter is a writer who is famous for his use of such things as silence, pauses and the infamous “...”. Somehow I found his indirect style easy to work with and was able to write in it very well. To this time a good portion of my work has continued to use the style that was introduced to us when we worked with his style and I feel like it is very complimentary of my own style.

I also find now that I am a much faster and better writer. Where as last summer while I could create a five page poem in roughly six minutes I could create six pages of script in twenty minutes. As you can see this is a very large discrepancy. The current time for my script writing for six pages is more akin to four to six minutes when I have an idea of what I'm doing and who my characters are. The scripts are also of a much better quality and no longer has what feels like dialogue that has been forced through the characters mouth and they have begun to take on their own qualities of characters much separate from myself.

Starting out in these intensives I had some reserve of putting down myself on page with absolutely no change. Then came time for the monologues and the first subject was one where the character breaks down crying in the middle of it. For it I wrote what I knew and I would have to say that the end result was amazing, especially after I handed it off to Andrew and he performed it. He put a level of understanding on it that really drove it home, especially for me. I had heard what I needed to hear for months and only because the intensives made me write it down on paper. Now I feel a new courage in my writing, that I should not fear what I write.

As one can see the intensives allowed me to stop being a coward in my writing, develop the voices of my characters and how long it takes to write a script as well as what is and isn't important to have in the script. Because of this work I know have a movie in my head which I have developed into three acts with plot points and while it is still on the drawing board I do not feel that I would have had the ability to do this with out the intensives.

As always thank you,

Mike Hand

The End of TheReplyGirl Phenomenon

Dear Readers,

There is something on Youtube which all people who actively upload there hate, TheReplyGirl phenomenon. It works on the idea of creating a forty second to a minute long video with a misleading video title, thumbnail and a video in of which the person making the video shows off as much cleavage as possible with out it being marked as pornography be Youtube standards. Once this is done one would monetize their accounts and post their videos as a reply to that of a popular Youtuber such as Fred.

You may be wondering why this is a big deal. The answer is simple, some of these people were brought into partnership with Machinima and Youtube. Despite already breaking Youtube guidelines with their misleading titles and thumbnails they now had even more reason to bully their competition (also in violation with Youtube Guidelines and rules) and when anyone called them out on this practice they would tag team them and flag the videos for copyright violation. They would also employ bots so they could claim that they had more views than they actually did, earning them more money.

Once this was exposed, everyone who was not happy at having their views leeched or being attacked by these Reply Girls lashed out. I am writing this for those who have not heard that MeganSpeaks, one of the largest among these Reply Girls, will have her account and partnership terminated for hiring bots to view her and her friends videos. You may be wondering why this is a big deal. I'll tell you, first off it is a money making scam. Second off everyone on Youtube fears bots. There are very few people safe to them and some of the most legitimate Youtubers have been taken down for months at a time because of bots.

What I see here is an amazing attempt to clean up our internet for the future. There is still work to do but this is a step in the right direction.

To the internet,

Mike Hand

Me Trying to Makes Sense of a Stray Thought

Dear readers,

Well this has been a while. Long enough that I feel somewhat obliged to make a post but also somewhat clueless as what the post should address. I could do something easy such as Occupy Wall Street protesters having marched into the Queens Supreme Court and making a ruckus but that hardly seems post worthy. Come to think of it the biggest thing I did this weekend was realizing that while I really wanted a post made I didn't really have much to make a post about.

One thought led to another and I decided on trying an analysis on Model Congress and seeing if it is more than what it name says. Now there is a reason I am doing this. That reason is that I have been in it for four years and I want to see what direction it is going in. In order to do that I have to see where it is now. There are a few reasons I am doing this here with the first and foremost being that this blog has become my primary blog that I am using. The second reason is that I'm not sure if many people in congress will be able to grasp what I am trying.

Model in this case means a miniature representation of something while congress means the legislative body of the United States of America. Therefore we attempt to model the congress of the United States of America. The first argument popping into my head is that we have because we have debate topics ranging from issues in the year 2050 to whether or not we like Kim Kardashian. However because those are essentially jokes it does not model the serious manner of congress and therefore fails the definition.

That is what would appear to be true. I kept thinking on it and realized how dumb I was. Those were not evidence of failure but evidence for seeing what we were and expanding it from the inside out. What I had been a part of had already expanded itself far beyond what it was. I'm not sure if I should be glad about this or somewhat disappointed. Glad because I was apart of an organization that is more than an organization or disappointed because I have no way to tell where it is heading. I am leaving many friends and likely my sister will join in the high school and while I'd love to tell them what they can expect in the next few years I can't. Perhaps I should give up on trying to understand it and just let time take its course. Maybe that makes me a failure but that is better then being nothing.

Thank you for reading me making sense of my thoughts,

Mike Hand

Deformed babies

I have a confession to make, I've had deformed babies before. They aren't always a pretty sight and sometimes they are so deformed that I have to admit that it in its deformed form has some merits over what I envisioned. In this case one of my characters was played less aggressively than I had meant when I had wrote it and I loved the take on it. However I did see a certain deformity that a saw was taken and said deformity was sawed off and made so it would all look pretty.

Ultimately I thought it was a fun experience to have the plays shown in front of us. It showed everyone what they had to improve and reminded us that everything we do is ultimately co operative to other people. It was an amazing experience and I can not wait until the next time we get to see our scripts staged.

Mike Hand

Script intensive 2

I really don't think I need my "dear readers" opening for this. I found today to be a bit easier than yesterday, it might be that I am already used to throwing out work and starting again at a different angle and that the only difference here was saving the work and comparing the two but I did find it easier. That, however, does not mean that today was not interesting. In fact it showed me that I need to work on my control of how long or short my scripts are which is a lesson well learned and will be a lesson more well practiced. I still have some work to do with script writing but I think I'm getting there, be it one step at a time.

From one step to one leap,

Mike Hand

Script intensive 1 reflection

Dear readers,

Today we had the importance of brevity instilled with in us. While any one who has ever read Hamlet would probably look upon the word brevity with an ironic sneer and a laugh about how Polonius and how he had to many long speeches others will look upon those speeches and see where they could have been shortened. Am I saying to actually go and change Shakespeare's speeches? No, that would probably make it quite terrible.

What I am saying is that the ability to shorten what one has written and what others have written is a skill that one needs if one wishes to analyze any work of literature. For example a five year old can restate the plot of a movie (and often times my eleven year old sister will speak at length about every minor plot point in any film she watches) but it takes some one who knows what they are doing to take a lengthy movie and shorten the plot to all of two sentences. It also takes a good writer to shorten longer than necessary scenes to keep there play or film interesting. That is also the reason you cannot trust inexperienced people with improv; they will drag it on longer than the scene needs to be for their own screen time.

Kind of got a little off point at the end there,

Mike Hand