It’s official! I earned my Dramatic Writing MFA at Carnegie Mellon University on Sunday and  now I’m working on putting together my full-length play commission for the Loud and Unladylike Festival through DivaFest at The EXIT Theatre in San Francisco, preparing for a live screening of the entire season of my web series Merritt Squad at PianoFight, and producing two shows for All Terrain Theater, including Women in Solodarity: Waking Up and Six Monsters: A Seven-Monster Play.

Some of the projects that I completed or had performed during my two-year MFA program include:

• Science Fair the Musical (full-length screenplay, winner of the Alfred P.  Sloan Screenwriting Competition at CMU)
• Plastic Nest (full-length stage drama)
• Ninja Scientist (one-hour TV action comedy)
• Merritt Squad (8-episode web series)
• Newbie Sally (short opera comedy performed by Opera Theater of Pittsburgh)
• Last Night in the Hague (20-minute opera co-written with Wei He and composed by Chung Wan Choi)
• Status Update (1-minute play performed at the SF Playwrights Foundation’s One-Minute Play Festival)
• Fashion Foes (8.5 minute short film; to be posted soon!)
• Around the Globe (10-minute stage comedy)
• Public Transportation (10-minute stage drama)
• Student Bake Sale (30-minute stage comedy)
• Friends or Maidens (10-minute film comedy)
• Alexis, the Bronze-Age Warship (10-minute stage comedy, staged reading at the SF Olympians Festival)
• The Sword (6-minute drama, staged reading at the SF Olympians Festival)
• Wrote a spec script for the TV drama “Masters of Sex”
• The Dinner Project (short media film designed by Dave Yen and Danni Zhang)

Bonus:

Princess Audrey (People’s Choice Award winner and finalist for the Best of PlayGround festival in 2013) received a staged reading at True False Theater in New York City.

It’s been quite a busy couple of years! I’ve definitely learned a lot about what I didn’t know and am excited to apply my knowledge to cleaning up my existing scripts and developing more projects for film, TV, and the stage (including opera!).

CO-OPERA is a collaborative opera production involving Carnegie Mellon University students from various parts of the university as well as community partner, Pittsburgh Opera. Students, alumni, and faculty from the School of Music, School of Art, School of Drama, and Master of Arts Management Program are working together to present a production on the cutting edge of opera, at the intersection of arts and technology.

Five newly composed operas, 15 minutes each, fully staged and sung in English, will be presented on April 10 at 7:30 PM in Pittsburgh Opera headquarters in the Strip District. The scenes will be created through technology, with the projection of art and other media on stage. Come and explore how an opera is created from scratch. An artist meet & greet reception will take place following the performance in the Founders’ Room of Pittsburgh Opera. This performance will be webcast live.

ABOUT THE OPERAS:
Cold Hands 
Composer: Dayton Kinney

Merritt Squad Pilot

Yayyyy!!!! I’m really excited that my web series Merritt Squad is now up and the world can fully access the zany antics that my co-writer Colin Johnson and I imagined for our rag-tag team of mystery solvers.

On Monday night, we hosted a premiere screening of the first five episodes with many of our collaborators and funders from our Kickstarter campaign, and on Tuesday we launched the pilot episode on YouTube.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Visit the Merritt Squad playlist on YouTube to watch all 8 episodes!

Follow the series on Twitter @merrittsquad.

Photo by Chris Compendio

In January, I had the pleasure of attending the 2015 Sundance Film Festival with three classmates thanks to the Carnegie Mellon Filmmaking Club.

This was the first time that I’d attended the festival and, although we showed up in the second week when all of the glamorous people have packed up and gone home, I got an incredible sense of the independent film scene through the 13 films I saw while I was there.

Some of the most memorable films I saw included Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which deservedly won both the Grand Jury and Audience Choice prizes due to great storytelling and cinematography (filmed in Pittsburgh!), Stockholm, Pennsylvania, a thoughtful drama about child abduction, Most Likely to Succeed, a documentary that studies alternative methods of teaching that can better engage students in learning, and Seoul Searching, a cheeky film about summer camp for kids who are visiting Korea to reconnect with their roots.

Listening to Marielle Heller, writer/director of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, was also inspiring because she’s based in the San Francisco Bay Area and she shared her experiences of interpreting a story that was meaningful enough for her to make her first big film.

I’m honored to be participating in this year’s Sloan Summit as a result of winning the Alfred P. Sloan Screenwriting Award at Carnegie Mellon University for my full length screenplay, “Science Fair the Musical.” This is me on dinner break after watching great films like “Particle Fever” and “The Theory of Everything” and networking with other filmmakers and getting advice from professional filmmakers and scientists. I wore my Merritt Squad shirt to promote my web series. People said I looked like a filmmaker, so I wanted to document that.

I recently wrote two new articles for Cinemastilo magazine.

Submit or Produce? What to do with your masterpiece

Filmmakers have a lot of options for getting their movies in front of audiences, but what’s the best strategy? Is it better to submit your film to festivals in exchange for laurels and accolades, or should you post your work online for instant clicks and the hope that internet buzz will send your film into countries that you’ve never heard of?

These are tough questions that filmmakers across the country face. This article offers insights that can help you maximize your time and dollars.

The Festival Circuit

Traditionally, filmmakers relied on major festivals like Cannes, Sundance, and SXSW to premiere their movies in front of elite members of the film industry and press, gaining them credibility, promotional buzz, and possible opportunities to connect with distributors.

The power of the festival remains immense. Pittsburgh filmmaker Christian Lockerman, Creative Director of Maverick Visuals in Pittsburgh and Visiting Artist at Point Park University, notes that acceptance into reputable film festivals provides “prestige” as well as “validity” to the films chosen, as well as their creators. He notes that festival approval can help emerging filmmakers get their careers rolling through acknowledgement of their talent combined with opportunities to network with other film professionals.

Los Angeles-based writer and director Katherine Vondy agrees, “It doesn’t hurt to accumulate laurels; I see each one as sort of a stamp of approval that someone else enjoyed the film.”

Visit Cinemastilo.com for the rest of this article.

New Developments at Steeltown Entertainment Project

On Saturday, October 18, I’ll be moderating a panel discussion called “How to Get Your Work Produced” in Berkeley, CA for Play Cafe. The panel will be a fantastic opportunity to check in with other writers about what it takes to get work produced for theatre as well as to hear advice from five knowledgable and experienced panelists: Melissa Hillman (Impact), Eric Reid (Theater MadCap), Jennifer Roberts, Carol Lashof, and Anthony Clarvoe.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

2pm-5pm

Berkeley School of Theatre, Bakery, 2071 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA

Play Cafe presents a panel discussion to help playwrights gain insights into how to get their plays produced.

Featuring Advice and Experience from artistic directors Melissa Hillman (Impact) and Eric Reid (Theater MadCap) as well as experienced playwrights Anthony Clarvoe, Carol Lashof, and Jennifer Roberts.

Moderated by Tracy Held Potter

Our panel represents decades of experience from Bay Area artistic directors who are committed to working with local and emerging playwrights as well as playwrights who have had their work produced locally and nationally and have experience writing pieces on commission or self-production. (Bios are available at http://www.playcafe.org.)

We will open the discussion with moderated questions to the entire panel, and then we will continue the discussion with an audience-led Q&A. The afternoon will conclude with social time and refreshments.

Our panel will be held at the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre at 2071 Addison Street. We will be in the Bakery Room on the first floor (wheelchair accessible). There is paid parking across the street and our venue is one and a half blocks from Downtown Berkeley BART.

Pre-purchased tickets are $30.00 general admission and $25.00 member (to become a member, visit http://playcafe.org/memberships/). Door sales are $35.00 general admission and $25.00 for members.

For more information, contact Tracy Held Potter, Executive Director, at tracy@playcafe.org.

Purchase Tickets Online

http://www.playcafe.org

Two minutes before the 31 Plays in 31 Days Challenge ended, I submitted my 31st play.

Rachel Bublitz and I founded this challenge to inspire writers to write 31 plays in the month of August purely to generate more material and to get out of our heads. In the first year, hundreds of writers from around the world participated. This year we hosted our third challenge, marking the second year that I’ve participated as a writer.

Even as a founder who knew the purpose of the challenge was to generate scripts without self-criticism (re-writes come later), I still had to fight against my self-doubts and critiques. I also realized about half an hour before midnight that I wasn’t as far along with my scripts as I thought–whereas I thought I had written 28 scripts, I had really only written 24. Yikes!

As the minutes clicked toward midnight, I started to tell myself to stop writing and just go to bed. But what kind of a role-model would I be if I gave up so soon?

I crammed out as many scripts as I could–modeling them after objects in my immediate vicinity and, thanks to a Facebook comment, my trip to Chuck E. Cheese. Six minutes before midnight, I pushed to complete a typo-ridden yet “complete” script called “Winning” and I submitted all 31 plays before deadline.

Sometimes, success comes in spite of other people’s criticism, disbelief, and negativity. Often, though, we create our own obstacles.

It’s true, I could use a lot more sleep than I get, and I wouldn’t push myself to do a challenge like this all the time, but I wasn’t going to bed within the next half hour, so why not just write?

The image I sometimes call forth at times like these is of the fitness coach standing by shouting for just one more push-up. If you can just go a little further whenever your mind tells you to quit, how much would you be proud of?

Congratulations to all of the writers who participated this year–let’s do this again in 2015!