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| 10-minute play writing workshops.
This is a space that I hope to use so that people attending the 10-minute-play witting workshops will be able to double check information, or see what happened if they were not able to attended a week. I will also post the general schedule as soon as I finish revising it. In our first session we looked at the where to get ideas for plays, as well as what ideas can make a good play. Ideas can come from a verity of sources, and can take many forms. The launching off point for a play could come in the form of an idea about character, plot, theme, or many other situation. Good plays tend to have several things in common. For one thing there should be something that the audience can relate to, or sympathies with, or in some way make the audience care about what happens in the play. Linked to this the characters of the play should be interesting, or identify-with-able. Conflict is a major element in nearly every play. It keeps the energy going, and the audience from getting board. At its simplest conflict is simply somebody wanting something, and something else getting in the way. This something else, could be another character, and a factor of the environment, or even the character itself. The possible topics for a ten-minute play are limited by a number of factors. The most obvious of which is time: that the events portrayed in a 10-minute play, must be 10-minutes. Also because 10-minute plays are often produced with very low budgets, set and prop requirements should be minimal. The number of characters in a 10-mintue play should also be kept fairly minimal, for a couple of reasons. For one it is difficult to develop and personalize a large number of characters in such a small amount of time. Also looking at it again from the producer's standpoint, each character is going to be another actor that has to be hired. For next time the group was asked to come up with four or five possible ideas for 10-minute plays, that we will share with the group. After which we will talk about character. Additionally the Monday after the next meeting we will be talking about the 10-minute play A Tail. If anybody would like me to make a copy of it for them please let me know ahead of time (hansonm@stu.beloit.edu), and bring 25 cents to cover the cost of the copies. |
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