#SecondCity Writing I: Weak premise. Weak sketch (Week Five)
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Today was a great class. We got feedback on our homework and got to attend The Second City’s Fall 2011 Mainstage Revue, Dreams Really Do Come True and Other Lies.
I got some great feedback on my homework this week. The purpose of our exercise was to write platforms (sketch opener) that allows the audience to know who, what, and where. Who the characters are, what they are doing, and where they are. Although I thought I did a pretty good job of expressing the where through character action and dialogue I struggled with defining the relationship between the two people in the scene. The feedback I got was to make it more obvious, pick relationships that are easier to define for the purposes of this exercise. Unlike a sketch we only have three lines to share this information so we have to make sure that nothing is inferred. For example, writing a scene between a parent and a child is probably easier than writing a scene between friends because you can slip in the word mom or dad at some point Someone from our class wrote a scene between a personal trainer and their client which I thought was good because she was able to use gym related actions with gym related action dialogue.
Natasha also gave us another recap of the 5.0 sketch set-up (this may look different from last week’s as my notes are being held hostage by my work computer and I wrote last week’s post from memory.
Platform: shares the who, what, where of the scene and gives the audience context by providing them with the information/letting the audience know what they are about to see.
Tilt: the first problem of the scene occurs. This is the part where the scene gets turned on its head i.e. in this Catherine Tate sketch its the point where Catherine declares herself ‘not drunk enough’. This is the point where the audience starts to invest in the characters.
Heighten and Explore: This is where the scene starts to push. Through dialogue and action the history of character is revealed and you start to understand why they are the way they are and why they can’t get what they want.
Second Turn: At this point of the scene this is where the problem gets resolved.
Blow line: The end of the scene or the last laugh. In some cases the writer takes you back to the first tilt (Natasha Boomer is a fan of this) – nothing has been solved.
We also learned what a premise is. A premise is the idea of the sketch. It is 2-3 sentences.that include a character, action,and nouns and needs to be vague enough to write 5-6 lines from it. A comedic premise is a sketch idea that includes the tilt for example, a man and woman go on date, woman is not drunk enough to let him inside. Natasha was very adamant that a weak premise would result in a weak sketch. The premise seems to be the nucleus of a sketch and the weaker the nucleus the faster your sketch can fall apart.
Our homework this week is to write three premises and three sketch ideas. I’m also going to rewrite some of my platforms and take another crack at Max/Mom.
So onto the show:
I finally had my first taste of the MainStage Revue and it was kind of awesome. There were a ton of great sketches one of my favourites was a sketch where a mother was bribing her son to help her use her technology like her PVCR (hahaha). I also loved how they pulled audience members up on the stage and got them to take part in various sketches. I was able to enjoy this without the anxiety of having to worry about being called up as we were sitting way in the back.
It was really good and I was really glad I was able to go. If you have a chance to see it I highly recommend that you do. Tickets can be purchased on the Second City website.
