Assembly Day One

by Tessa Smith

Earlier today, Risa and I met at Soupesoup on Duluth with some of the writers, filmmakers, and musicians who are taking part in this Assembly Relay Project. Among new and old friends at the table were Paul Neudorf, a sweet filmmaker with a background in journalism and a preference for fiction, Jack Oatmon, a music columnist for the Mirror with a passion for stretching creative expression through collaboration, Alex Cooper and his friend (sorry, name name name..) who play in the local group, Parlour, and were excited about the challenge of creating music *nsync to a film, Stephen Taylor, the local filmmaker/musician, who wrote the rock opera piece that writers are using to create their scripts, and Jen, who’ll be helping Stephen figure out a way to perform his opera at the screening in March.

Although the usually wireless internet wasn’t working, we ran through possible Celtx hangups and talked about how exactly this whole thing will work. Risa made it clear to everyone that “you’re taking part in an experiment. You know that, right?”

It’s so important to have a group of people excited about the project and ready to get going, but also having a bunch of concerns coming from different personal backgrounds and knowledge bases. Figuring out exactly how to describe the project in ways that make sense to each of the maybe 100 people I’ve spoken to about it lately has been what’s given me the clearest understanding of how it’s all gonna work and what might be tricky.

It officially starts today, which means that writers now have access to Stephen’s rock opera and can begin writing their 5-10 minute scripts. They have to use 5 elements of the opera, one of which could be taking a character from the story, using a particular setting, turning a lyric into a piece of dialogue, and so on.

It was great to find out that the people I’ve been corresponding with for a few weeks about getting this thing together are such nice, interesting folks and it makes me giggle to think of how fun the screening is gonna be after working with these guys for the next month.

We’ll be posting daily updates on all the projects here on the blog, so keep reading for the madness that will surely ensue. Or maybe absolutely no madness will ensue. You never know…