This week has been a busy yet exciting one. With interviews, project pitches and preparing for halves going underway for all of us, we tried to use the time that we have on our project in the most effective way. With our first show with seasoned improvisers on Friday and Halves preparation underway, we have divided our time almost equally for both of these things.

Our first show with seasoned improvisers

Going into this week, we were very excited and nervous about holding our first show with seasoned improvisers! The show would be a testament towards all the work that we have done in designing our own show, including the arc, the engagement of audience, the transitions that we have built, etc. We also wanted to see if we could run a longer show with four games for a change, compared to the shorter playtests that we did from before.

We ended up running a 26 minute show, with 21 unique audiences joining in, with two improvisers able to join us that night, Carrie and Aaron. The show ran really nicely, which definitely gave us a lot of confidence towards the work that we have already done.

A screenshot of our current improv show setup with streamer in the bottom left corner, and the actors in the centered screen.

There are a couple of key takeaways from the show with Carrie & Aaron, some we have proposed solutions for, and some we do not quite yet:

  • The actors themselves said that there are multiple ways that we could play one game, which is something we haven’t really had a problem with when we tested several improv games in improv because we have “showed” the class our take on how we think it is done, then everyone imitated what we did. We did not get a chance to talk through the games in too much detail with the improvisers, however, and that has caused some confusion. In the future, we will be scheduling more time for rehearsal before we put on a show.
  • Watching seasoned improv actors having such a different energy on stage is really new to us, probably because we are in a smaller and intimate space with them. This shows in the volume that they have been speaking in, and we haven’t seen anything like that with our improv actors, thus we haven’t adjusted our volume control beforehand, and some of our audience has complained about volume problems.
  • A lot of work goes into the two people with roles defined as host & streamer, as well as stage manager. Because we have people in our project practicing for such roles for at least a month before we did this show, we were good at executing everything, but it will be a lot to ask for theaters who wish to adapt our project into their own versions of twitch improv shows. Therefore, we need more automated tools in order to lighten the workload of the stage manager and the host & streamer person.
  • We had bad network for some audiences, resulting them not being to comment/suggest in time about what we should incorporate into our show.
  • Some audiences joining mid-stream are confused about what the audiences are suggesting about, and what we need from them
  • We need to have more suggestions backup plans, because it was during some of those time that we are waiting that audiences drop out.

We are excited to have them back again some time (our next show is still TBD but we will definitely hold one after spring break)! If you want to watch our show, you could watch it here:

Our show with Carrie & Aaron

Meanwhile, please subscribe to our channel, @thetwitchimprovproject. A sincere thanks and shoutout to those who have watched our show on Friday, including Show & Tell Live, Commit to the Bits, ETC students and faculty, and our friends!

Preparing for Halves

We are a team of all first years. After quarters, we have gotten more comfortable about articulating our project to other people who does not have any idea about either twitch or improv, and we have worked on reflecting on why we are doing what we are doing. Still, going into halves is still a bit intimidating.

In order to prepare for halves, we started creating rough outlines starting from two weeks ago. We have created slides that are more in-depth and designed better this past week. We have been rehearsing diligently, and we will be presenting on Tuesday!

I think preparing for halves has really clarified our vision and directions about how our project will be moving forward. Halves will be a turning point where our project will really move into lots of rapid prototyping and making lots of deliverable progress.

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