CURRENT PROJECTS
TEACHING
Teaching
Filmmaking Basics - In this class we will learn the very basics of filmmaking from screenwriting, direction, camerawork, and finally editing to produce a short video (under five minutes). We'll start with script analysis through story/character development. Next, we'll shoot our scene, and lastly, edit the footage (using Final Cut), and upload in a digital format. Depending on size of class and resources, students will all work as one film crew, or in pairs, creating individual videos. Please view my students' video channel here.
Performance Technique for the Actor - This class focuses on acting as taught by the Stanislavski method based on finding a character's objective, obstacles, and action employed to achieve the objective - which all create believable emotion onstage. We will start with pantomime and physicality, progress to words with improvisational and voice exercises, and finally, work with scripts from monologues to scene-study. Advanced classes focus on the business of acting, including: branding, headshots/resume, auditioning, acting for the camera, and voiceover work.
Mask - This class is an in-depth psychological exploration of how to create a complete character from the ground up, with as much detail and specificity as every unique life demands. For anyone who wants to know what it's like in another's skin, to walk in someone else's shoes, this class achieves just that. Based on Libby Appel, former Dean of CalArts and Director of Oregon Shakespeare's text "Mask Characterization", we will bring each new character to life, culminating in an original performance scripted by the characters themselves.
English Language Arts - Certified by New York State in English Language Arts, grades 7-12. Courses taught have included: American Themes (literacy course for NY State Regents prep, focusing on fiction and memoir through theme and critical lens analysis, vocabulary building); Theater History (chronological study of the origins of theater to the modern musical, texts include - Antigone, The Fantasticks, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf [sic]); and Film Studies (using films as text, analyzing narrative, myth, gender dynamics, psychology, story structure, history, ethics, and psychology, films include - The Virgin Suicides, Born Into Brothels, Exit Through The Gift Shop, The Matrix, JFK).
(Below classes can be taught in a workshop, semester, or year-long basis. Detailed class syllabus for all of the below classes are available upon request, please click here.)
