Interns Acting Like Eight Year Olds… NOTHING Better.

Yesterday, the 826LA West staff learned how to make tabletop movies. Birte, our lovely programs/administrative assistant, sent an email out last week giving us only a few clues of what this moviemaking business would be (I use the word “us” loosely, because it could have been just me who was totally clueless as to what tabletop moviemaking was). She said 1)if we could, we should be in the office at 10:30 for an early start 2) we are going to use the moviemaking for a workshop camp sometime this summer, and 3)it’s going to be fun, fun, fun!!! (She just used one fun, but I added those last two to imply my brain’s excitement to any type of fun). Gee, I sure do use a lot of parenthesis. (That’s ok).

So, naturally, as soon as I hear about this tabletop moviemaking, I am curious as to what it may be. For some reason or another, the first image that popped into my head is some kind of new technological device in which a touch screen movie player that sits literally within the table – really, like an iPad Table. Which, on a side note, I am sure will be invented soon. Kids would gather around the table, touch the screen, drag things, and type things, and then BOOM, a movie shall be made! Just like that! Now, I don’t know why I would imagine this as the process we would soon be trained on – since I have seen no such thing before, and since that would require heavy carpentry on our parts to create. But you know, that’s just what I pictured.

I arrive early on Monday, too smart to know that iPads would not have been magically installed into our tables, but too dumb to think of any alternative. A man named Brick was puttering around the office – he clearly was the one in charge of all this. I calmly sat on the couch, tentative and waiting, and then an important fact dawned on me as I looked around the room – clearly, it was Hat Day in the office and nobody told me. There was Julius, our director of education, in a dark and light green knit skull cap; Danny, who wears hats normally, donning a black and grey SKI cap; and Brick himself, the newcomer, wearing a great train-conductors-ish type hat: khaki in color. Even Karin was wearing a bandana!!! Luckily for me, it felt as though I, too, was wearing a hat, since over the weekend I got my hairs chopped off and now have this mop-top which feels so heavy yet so light that I get confused. So I wasn’t completely out of the hat-loop.

Oh, goodness, I digress. Soon enough, we were all guided by train-conductor-hat-Brick into the tutoring room and on the table were a mash-up of paper dolls attached to halved popsicle sticks, half pages of funny scenery (i.e. a piñata, a cafeteria, a food court…), props attached to halved popsicle sticks (cop cars, more cop cars, bookshelves, etc), a tiny little flip camera, and an iPhone. Welcome, all, to the process of REAL tabletop moviemaking!

The stage was set. Around the table sat interns Taylor, Karin, Nina, Sarah, Chloe, and Kat (… me), as well as Birte and Danny.  Brick began explaining the process: first, the kids (i.e. us, in this particular training session) would pick a background, two or three popsicle stick characters, and maybe a couple props. Next, using the background as the scene, a short story would be written, using narration and dialogue between the characters. Then, after this is done, on scratch paper, any necessary props could be drawn and cut out for the characters to use. When the scene is set, the fun begins. Each person verbalizes their story via IPhone microphone, and then acts the story out with their characters via flip camera mechanism. Voila! A movie is made as soon as the pieces are converged together on the computer!

The best part of the training was Brick’s insisting that each of us try it out. We had to think of our own short script – then we would narrate it, film it, and edit it, so we could better instruct the kids during the workshop later this summer. Some of us teamed up (Karin and I acted as a pair, as well as Taylor and Birte). After 20 or 30 minutes, beautiful, beautiful scenes were completed. Allow me to show you how creative, strange, and, in my humble opinion hilarious we are here at 826LA by explaining some of our movie scenes. Be prepared.

First up: Taylor and Birte. These two set the stage using a party background – you know, balloons and such. They featured two main characters. Some skinny paper dude, and one fat guy, wearing one of those shirts that made his belly button protrude out the bottom. Skinny dude was throwing a party for himself and fat guy was the only one to show up (albeit with a fruit plate)! Skinny dude was so upset that he ordered fatty to go find Justin Beiber and bring him back ASAP if he wanted to come to this party. What would fat man do!? (FYI, all stories were to end on a cliffhanger).

Then… Nina. Two paper dolls were “walking” in front of a cliffy-deserty background. The guy doll says to the girl doll, you need to go to the hospital! What you are doing is not normal! The girl refuses – what could a hospital do for her, especially a hospital in the “third world country” in which they were? Guy comes back with – if you were sneezing for six hours straight you would go… right? There is obviously something wrong! The girl still refuses. What would happen? (p.s: the girl’s problem was that she couldn’t stop jumping.)

Chloe featured two sisters, one black and one white, both fat and wearing the same sweatshirt which we ALL coveted, as it featured four puppies all sitting in a cut out pumpkin.  Why a paper doll would feature such a terribly amazing sweatshirt, nobody knew. So these women were making pie for the state fair, and for some reason they needed tree-sap from a hippie eco-gardener named Todd. Voiced by Karin, one sister insisted, “Skootch over, TODD, give us dat SAP!” end-scene.

For the finale: Karin and I. I will just be blunt about it: ours was the bomb.  It featured a man named Herman and a woman named Pearl (the same paper doll as the sisters in the above story… what can we say, we liked her sweater). Pearl happened to have a penguin son named Charlie, who was having a birthday party (Pinata scene!) little did Charlie know, his piñata was not filled with candy, but with a real-life dead horse!!! Clearly Karin and I are the most mature of the bunch. Anyway, Herman knew exactly what was going on, and as Charlie took a swing and hit the piñata, he DOVE at Charlie, moved him out of the way and got COVERED with horse intestines!!!! (intestines were not a featured prop, as you may have guessed, so Karin and I had our own home-made guts drawing featured in the movie). But then, the COPS CAME……..

Reading over our movie makes me both giggly and disgusted. But what an original idea for a horror story – a horse piñata with a real horse inside? Gross!!!

So really, to conclude, all I can really say is that the day was filled with tears of joy… from laughing.

Fun facts I found out yesterday:

1) Chloe Searcy was born on top of Searcy Mountain in North Carolina. Her family owns the mountain.

2) Karin had a dream one time that a turtle guarded her apartment day and night. Now she has a turtle statue outside her apartment door.

3) Nina’s girlfriend’s apartment was “really ugly colors of green and brown” – close to the colors of the very outfit I was wearing yesterday (this was funny, not offensive).

4) Chloe recently drove by a run-down shack that had a spray painted sign on it that read:” P-Nuts and Haircuts Inside”.  She drove by another one that read “Watch out for Angry Bull”.

5) There are people who live in the Appalachians who have no teeth.

An informative day, indeed.

On a closing note, I can only say that I hope this blog wasn’t one of those “you had to be there” blogs. Did this make any sense at all? Or did you read this and think to yourself, what the heck did I just read about… these people are freaky… Well, in any case, we ARE freaky, but in a fun kind of way. So take that, world.

And then I found an 8 dollar bill……..

Kat.

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