ACT TWO

In 2017, Los Angeles County was planning to spend 3.5 billion dollars to expand the (already) largest jail system in the world. In 2018, a group of fomerly-incarcerated and system-impacted youth realized that if they came together, and wrote their stories into a script, it could help change the course of history.

After creating an original stage show entitled Act Two, which played to a sold out audience at UCLA the 21st Century Fox Social Impact program offered to support the film version of ACT TWO, and so in the Summer of 2018 the original stage show was adapted into a movie.

I had the incredible honor of directing the adaptation for the screen.

Because the funding was still very tight, and the program made it a priority to provide participants with stipends, food, and transportation to all of the rehearsals and shoot dates, we had to find a way of adapting the show into a movie with extremely limited resources.

The crew was made up of volunteer artists and filmmakers, and we decided that the best way to honor the original show and make the movie within our limited budget was to embrace the use of blackbox staging.

By embracing the stage origins of the script, but adapting for the camera, we were able to give the writer/performers a dual focused experience of both stagecraft and learning how to work on performing for the screen.

We brought in set elements and designers to build out the world they had envisioned, and took advantage of the cinematic elements in our coverage, transitions, camera movements, and lighting, but also retained key elements of their original staging, such as direct-to-audience addresses.

To learn more about Act Two feel free to reach out.