Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Visiting Comedian Teaches Students about Storytelling

A large, three-sectioned triangle colored the whiteboard. The top partition was labeled “Brilliance”, the thin middle section “Worst” and the lowest “Mediocre”.
“Can someone tell me why it looks like this?” asked filmmaker and comedian Ted Tremper, to a class of less than 20 undergraduates. “Why is mediocrity below worst?”  
This was one of many questions posed last week at WSU’s most recent “Visiting Writers” workshop.
Led by the swift-speaking Tremper, the class consisted of three discussion-based lessons and a personal meeting with each student at the end of the week.
Tremper’s simple answer to the question: risk. In creativity and storytelling, risk is necessary to achieve the best possible work. Without an element of risk, without taking a chance on an idea that could be the worst, work will be relegated to mediocrity. It is better to try and fail than live in the tame and forgettable bottom section.
“Your best and worst ideas will both be memorable,” he said.
Trember graduated from WSU in 2006 with a degree in Creative Writing. After a one-year stint teaching English in Japan, he moved to Chicago and began working his way up the Chicago improv comedy scene and learning filmmaking. For several years he was a member of the renowned Chicago improv comedy troupe Second City, the same organization that birthed the careers of comedy icons like Bill Murray, Chris Farley and Tina Fey.
While in Chicago Tremper created, directed and acted in an improvisational web series called Break-ups: The Series.” The videos won the 2010 Vimeo Global Film Festival Award for “Best Original Series”.
Tremper led the class in writing-room fashion. Pacing back and forth in caffeine-hyped strides, he illustrated his points again and again through student-created examples.
“The class was really interesting and helpful,” said senior Baylee Sinner, a general studies major and aspiring filmmaker.
The class-generated stories were worked and molded like clay. Genre was shown to be transitory. White board story ribosomes illustrated the limitless quantum universe of fiction. Romantic comedies were tweaked to become dramas, which then turned to horrors. All at the light speed intuition of creativity. Tremper smiled with enthusiasm at all suggestions, quelling self-doubt and encouraging the weird.
“Yeah!” Tremper said in response to a student-originated story scenario about a woman who would never realize she’s beautiful. “I looove that. Oh! That’s tragic.”
Tremper encouraged the workshop participants to live out the dynamics of creative storytelling in their own lives. To embrace the risk and shoot for the top section of the pyramid, and to accept failure constructively.
“Get to know those woods,” Tremper said, when asked by a student on how to deal with failure. “Failure can be the best thing for you.
After creating “Break-ups,” Tremper went on to create “Shrink”, an improvised web series that won the 2012 New York Television Festival Awards for Best Comedy Pilot and Critic’s Award. “Shrink” is about a young doctor who loses his residency and begins to operate as an independent clinical therapist. It features many well-known Chicago improvisers.
He now lives in LA and is pursuing a career in television.


Sources:
Ted Tremper: tedtremper@gmail.com
Baylee Sinner: 425-281-8757








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