Thursday, August 20, 2009

"Broken Wings" & the 29 Days Later Film Project

Summer's already on it's way out and as per usual, it seems that I've been busy!

At the end of June, Deviated Theatre's production of "LORE" went up for an evening at Bishop Ireton in Alexandria. The space was enormous and for having as short a marketing period as we did, it worked out well: we pulled in a good crowd and turned in a good amount of donations from our ever-popular baked goods & concessions table.

In July, I found myself as part of Deviated Theatre's Mash-up project, "Token," for the Source Festival. The short piece revolved around several characters at a bus stop who come across a special Token that gives them everything they ever wanted... but for each character, it gives them something that perhaps they weren't bargaining for...

Of course I won't be spoiling it for you here, as you can come check out "Token" for yourself at UMBC this October along with "LORE". I'll be posting more information about it here once we're closer to opening.

I also had the great pleasure this July of FINALLY being able to make it to several productions in the Capital Fringe Festival! Of the 100+ performances that were going on in the area, I caught "Please Listen: A Musical Chaos" (Open Drawer Theatre Company), "Headscarf and the Angry Bitch" (Zehra Fazal), "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead" (Nu Sass Productions) and "Skywriter" (Angry Young Theatre Company).


Dean Storm, myself, and Sutisa Storm at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson in Baltimore


Towards the end of July, I spent a weekend shooting a short film with Running Storm Productions. Dean Storm, the director, along with Dawn Campbell, are organizers of the inaugural 29 Days Later Film Project, in which filmmakers are given a specific prop and 29 days to write, cast, produce, shoot, and edit their films. This is much like the 48 hour film festival, but with more time, the filmmakers have a longer opportunity to polish their works.

Dean contacted me and formulated a script around my makeup design for "The Birds". My character became the lead and I was happy to be able to have the opportunity to work on a longer piece of work (the abridged edit is about 22 minutes), but also I was proud to have one of my original makeup designs featured. Dean and DP Regan Garcia did a magnificent job editing and with some camera and post-production effects to make the bird look majorly creepy! Here's a before/after look at brave model Tina Martello:


"The pretty ones always make the best monsters!" - Tina Martello before (L) and after (R)


Transformative, huh? After a few short hours, I pretty much forgot what she looked like as a normal person! Hopefully before long I can get a clip of some sort up here on the site for you all to check out.

That's it on the homefront for now; please stay tuned for more updates as they come in!

-Vaness.
www.vanessastrickland.net