Series Spotlight: Mixily Presents
Mixily Presents has always been about building, making, and supporting our community. With that in mind, we’re proud and excited to dive deep with our artistic community and share insights and knowledge with you about what worked, what lessons were learned, and what questions came up along the way. In this series: Presenting Mixily Presents, we’re excited to feature interviews with:
Bruce Jones (Beyond the Frame: Writer & Performer in The Night of the Pink Supermoon)
Dan Caffrey (Beyond the Frame: Writer of Slime Season)
Louisa Pancoast & Diego Funes (Beyond the Frame: Choreographers of First in Halves, Then in Quarters)
To get you started, here’s a few snippets from our upcoming Artist Spotlight line-up:
Bruce Jones on live Zoom vs pre-record vs theatre:
I think the line between live Zoom performance vs pre-recorded video and the lines between theatre vs film are all created by approach? The element of live performance, and seeing the story, sort of play out in real time with no editing, with real breaths is (to me) what it sort of takes to make a performance closest to what we would see at the theatre.
And the secret that helped them make The Night of the Pink Supermoon:
We used a software program called OBS Virtual Camera which acts as a plug in and takes whatever is happening on the stream and plugs it in as a camera source! Honestly the best choice we made for our little play.
Louisa & Diego on making for Mixily & Zoom:
Louisa: If you need a set change, you just change the location of your camera, it’s that easy. My apartment looked like three entirely different set designs simply because I moved my laptop to a different surface.
Diego: Timing is different, camera angles are different, you get a sense of depth and how bodies traverse space, but you, as an audience, only ever get one point of view. You have to consider not only how the body operates in the space, but how the space and the body operate in the frame of the computer screen. Which is fascinating, too. Everyone is watching on a different device, a different size screen. It’s exciting to know that we are producing work for an innumerable amount of scales and resolutions.
Dan Caffrey on next steps after Mixily:
My piece for Mixily Presents was about an ASMRtist who’s going through an emotional breakdown during one of her videos. My wife Susan Myburgh was in it, and we wanted it to work as both a compelling short (digital) play and an actual ASMR video. It went really well and actually energized me to create my own real-life ASMR channel called SLAYsmr, where I whisper about a different horror movie I love every week for 30 minutes. ASMR is a big part of how I relax and something I’ve wanted to try my hand at for a while, but I’ve always been too scared to do so. Because it was a medium that lent itself to Zoom really well, I never would have come up with that play if not for our current circumstances, and I never would have started my own channel if I hadn’t taken the leap with New Plays For Zoom. We’re still a pretty small channel, but I’m having a lot of fun!
Stay tuned for the full reads.
More Soon,
Mixily