A Workflow for Structured Improvisation
by Alonso Mayo
How do you shoot a fiction film without a screenplay? And… Why would you? It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but using structured improvisation can be a liberating creative experience yielding surprising results. I will share my experiences with dramatic improv-based filmmaking in my experimental web series “Untitled Fiction Project.”
“Untitled Fiction Project” was born as an experiment in minimalist fiction filmmaking. The original plan was to make a handful of 5-10 minute short films that all shared the basic premise of “two people in a room” (two actors, one location, and one continuous scene). I wanted to create a space where I could concentrate on directing and feel free to experiment without a film shoot's usual time and budget constraints. I decided that I would have no crew but myself, a minimal camera & sound setup (DSLR shoulder rig and an on-board shotgun microphone), ambient lighting (no movie lights), a single location (borrowed), and two brave actors. And of course… No screenplay.
Being a sometimes “one-man band” filmmaker, I felt perfectly at home with most of the rules. But “no screenplay” was frightening. A screenplay gives a fiction project direction. Without a screenplay… What is there? Still, “unscripted” fit perfectly with the minimalist concept of the project, and it had the possibility of adding a freshness that would be unique. The first short became an experiment in finding an unscripted workflow, and my actors (Jeffrey Casciano & Lauren Plaxco) were key in helping shape the process. In fact, I enjoyed the process and its outcome so much that I decided to keep the storyline going. The short became the first episode of the 13-episode web series '“Untitled Fiction Project,” which was later expanded into the 160-minute web series Untitled Murder Project 2.0.
Now, I wasn’t looking for complete improvisation since I didn’t want to compromise visually (if I don’t know what the actors are going to do, where do I put the camera?). The process should have the freshness that improvisation can bring along with the visual variety of traditional film coverage. I decided to work under “structured improvisation,” where a basic storyline is agreed upon before the shoot, but the detailed actions and dialogue aren’t discovered until rehearsals or during the shoot itself. Here is our workflow in a nutshell:
Pick a theme: I started the process with only one actor, and together we decided what the general themes we were interested in were. Once we picked a theme, in this case, “an affair,” we found the second actor.
Develop characters: Once I had both actors, we developed backstories for their characters and came up with possible storylines. In their own time, the actors developed extended character backstories and dived deep into their relationship.
Lock down the storyline: The closest I came to writing was putting together a short description of what could happen in the scene. Once we had this general storyline, we could lock a friendly location, find any needed props and set a date for the shoot. Here is the 3 paragraph storyline that resulted in Episode 1:
They come home from a dinner party. They’ve both had a bit to drink and are in great spirits. She opens a bottle of wine as they make fun of the guests at the party. They kiss. She begins to undress playfully. He doesn’t respond to her teasing. He has something to tell her. He’s cheated on her.
At first, she thinks it’s a joke. It’s not. Then she puts on her jacket and goes for the door. He stops her; he has to really put in some effort as she is hell-bent on leaving. He holds her tight. She snaps and hits him as she breaks down crying. There’s nothing he can do or say.
She asks him for details. He refuses to answer as the questions grow more explicit. She is about to leave for good when he suddenly drops his facade. He begs. They embrace. He grabs the bottle of wine. They drink straight from it. He doesn’t try to convince her of anything, but after a while, he makes her smile. And laugh. She’s not leaving him.
Rough scene blocking: Once on location on the day of the shoot, I went over the general storyline with the actors, and we came up with a rough blocking for the whole scene that was refined through a series of run-throughs, where some ideas for dialogue were also added to the mix.
Rehearse and break up the scene into segments: We divided the scene into smaller segments, looking for natural breaking points (like the actors moving to a new part of the location or a change in direction in a conversation). The idea was to tackle each chronological story segment on its own and not move on to the next segment until the one before it was completely done.
Shoot by segment: This is where all the backstory work paid off as we constantly dipped into it to find details that would enrich the scene. We usually ran at least a couple full rehearsals of each segment before we shot to develop more dialogue, actions, or blocking ideas. The actors found it helpful to keep notes of their dialogue as we rehearsed, so by the time we started shooting, they had put together a dialogue list of the segment. I picked the wider shots to start with so we could continue to finesse the segment as we shot, and usually, only when we came to the close-ups would the dialogue finally be locked. Once we shot out the segment, we took a short break and started on the next segment. And on and on until the whole scene was finished.
In general, I would say that structured improvisation shooting takes 1.5 to 2x as long as regular scripted fiction. The average 4-6 minute episode took about 8 hours to shoot. This style also had a big repercussion in the editing room since it pretty much guaranteed a mountain of footage. I had an average of 2.5 hours of raw footage from each episode, or about a 30:1 shooting ratio. Still, it facilitated an incredibly fast turn-around from idea to finished product (as fast as three days). And it was damn fun.
Here is the finished result of this first experiment:
All of the 13 episodes of “Untitled Fiction Project” became the backstory for “Untitled Murder Project 2.0,” an interactive web series completely shot using structured improvisation, which is available on YouTube.
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