Blog: Meeting Skills

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I headed back to leafy Angel after work for the first time in AGES yesterday, for LO! I was attending a meeting with my fellow MA students to talk about the WEB SERIES that we've been planning.

As I wandered over I was thinking about the Transferable Skills Of ROCK - when arranging the meeting I'd utilised one of these SKILLZ to select a date when everyone could attend. It's the same system we've always used for The Validators, for me and Steve's stuff, AAS meetings and all sorts, although I actually learnt it over TWENTY YEARS AGO in my first proper job as secretary to Professor J Lindesay in Leicester. Hey - if something works for drummers AND psychiatrists it'll work for anyone!

When I arrived, however, it turned out that ANOTHER skill would have been good to use: Rehearsal Room Etiquette. It is always the way that the band before you in a rehearsal room will ALWAYS still be in there when their allotted time is over. Steve and I ran into this problem a couple of months ago, and after waiting for AGES while they Took The Piss (you may recall that Steve, kind soul that he is, said they could finish the song they were playing - they chose to still be there 10 minutes later, doing OTHER songs) I applied the aforesaid skillset and BARGED in, plonking MY gear in the middle of the room, SMILING at them POINTEDLY and loudly SAYING things so they couldn't continue. It always works, and WOULD have worked in this situation, as someone was STILL in the room that we'd booked for our meeting. She'd been GLARED at and SPOKEN to, but we could clearly see that she was titting about on the interweb reading showbiz articles and taking AGES packing things away Very Carefully. Unfortunately, by the time I realised the transferable situation, I'd already been stood outside the glass wall for several minutes, so couldn't really suddenly Walk In Unknowing without looking like a twit. Next time though!

Once we DID get in we fell to work IMMEDIATELY. We've all written an episode each of a seven part webseries, with each script around 3-5 minutes long. We read them out in a proposed order, and then had a big discussion about how it all worked together. This was DEAD interesting - hearing all the stories together suddenly made characters LEAP out, demonstrating how they SHOULD be written and suggesting all sorts of tweaks and changes to make everything work better. Our SHOWRUNNER Emma also suggested that we needed more Actual Drama, which was certainly very true of MY script. It was dead good - having heard everybody else's, and getting a clearer idea of how everything fitted together, meant that whole NEW ideas presented themselves which will, hopefully, make it easier to make mine BETTER!

The two hours FLEW by at extreme speed, after which it all looked like it might actually work. All we need to do now is finish the scripts, cast the parts, work out how on earth to film it, get locations, rehearse, direct it, edit it and then tell people. PEASY!

posted 29/8/2013 by MJ Hibbett

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