Level 4 - Harold, Class #4, Ross White

Ok, where am I? A week behind, as usual, that’s where.

More than halfway through this class. I don’t feel like it should be that far. It used to feel like these classes lasted forever. Now they’re over too soon. And it’s made even worse by the fact that I missed the first one.

We worked on beats last Tuesday night. Different ways to play beats are… well, I already typed this last time I took a Harold class. From my entry of Feb 12th:

Quote:
We worked on beats tonight. On different ways to play second and third beats.
· Same characters at different times in their lives – a time jump.
· Same characters in different situations – ordinary, somewhat extraordinary, way over the top
· Same characters in different environments.
· Different characters in the same situation or with the same dynamic. You could be an animal in the second beat.

All well and good, but there is another: One strong character in completely different situations with different accompanying characters. I’ve seen Scott Jennings do this and it was lots of fun to watch. We did not actually manage to do this one in this class, but I am keeping it in my bag of tricks for later, because it is awesome.

We did first beats followed by several second beats to explore how many different possibilities there are. Then we did the first beat of two scenes, followed by three second beats, in no particular order.

One thing I noticed, well, I noticed two things. One is that I am better at second beats than I gave myself credit for, so yay!

Two, and infinitely more important, I bailed on my idea (my “deal” as Napier would say) when someone else came out with a different idea. Ok, that’s not the important part. I often do that. The important part was that I was aware of it immediately. I had already committed to the new thing and chose to stick with it because it was fun, but the very next beat, I came out with an initiation that walked all over something someone else had started to say, and I just kept right on with my deal. That warrants a very huge YAY!

YAY for me!