With 48 hour notice, Parker was successful in learning all the functionality of our toolkit. For this show, we thought we’d keep the routine similar so Parker could settle into the rhythm of hosting and the actors will be comfortable as well. We did try three new games, 185 (which is our new warm-up game where the improviser tell jokes), Entrances & Exits, as well as Powerpoint Karaoke.

In a post show interview done with Parker, he mentioned that he felt that the toolkit was easy to learn, albeit having some more of the functionality streamlined will be nice. It was a testament that someone else external to the team could also learn to use the toolkit, which we are happy about. It is the last show that we are doing with the actors for the semester, which is bittersweet because it seems like they did enjoy partaking this project despite all the mishaps and difficulties we’ve had. But, hopeful that someone else other than the tech team on our team and me will master using the toolkit, we are hoping that maybe some shows could be done in the summer!

We’re also finishing up with documentation. It has been a very busy week with preparing to wrap up the semester, which has been bittersweet, but also a relief for all of us. Cheers!

Soft Opening

I was told that traditionally softs is done in a manner similar to quarters with multiple faculty members walking to a project room and taking a brief look of our project; this year, however, four faculty members were assigned to us to chat with us for an hour long session. We asked the faculty members to watch our show before they come into softs as part of our product. We also prepped a series of slides of what we have been working on since halves, as well as a live demo to showcase the tech that goes behind the show.

It was good to see that the faculty was curious about what we have managed to achieve. We have received very valuable feedback from them, and the ones we managed to work on the most this week is adding more audience interactions and more elements that will juice up our show, since lots of them said that they found having too much time without anyone speaking in the show was awkward and dry.

With Softs behind us and finals only a week away (scary!), we took in the advice from faculty and decided to try whatever we could fit into changing in a week (or two), so some cool advice that is suggested by faculty (especially the one that is mentioned by Jesse with doing puppets) was not something that is within scope. If there is a Commit to the Bits third part, however, it will be really cool to have that kind of interaction!

Changes Made

In the beginning of the week, Brenda and I evaluated what went well with the last show, and what could’ve gone better. Both Brenda and the actors said that they felt prepared and warmed up with the current list of the games that we play for our show, so that was definitely encouraging. Upon that, we decided that we are going to extend the list of the games we play from five games to eight of them.

After our programmer’s hard work, we managed to incorporate the gifs that was created by Namrakant into our show. Now, if an audience member says “haha” or something similar in the chat, the gif will be trigger on a little corner of the screen. We thought this extra layer should make the audience feel like they are a part of the show a bit more.

We also decided that we are going to experiment with a laugh track. We found two different laugh tracks that could be used and incorporated that as a part of the show. We wonder if this will brand the show with a 90s sitcom like feel, but playtesting is a ground that allows for trial and error, so why not?

We adjusted and made sure to the best of our abilities that the game description output by the bot is accurate and straightforward. We tried to also tried to add a “chit-chat” element with the improvisers in order to fill the time gap of host giving out a suggestion prompt to the time that the audience actually receive that on their end.

The Show

Prior to the show, we decided that we are going to do a rehearsal with the actors the day before so we could talk through some games in more details, therefore avoiding confusion. We found the rehearsal to be profoundly helpful – having this one hour beforehand was very nice; I think psychologically, having a rehearsal not immediately before the show starts made it seem less daunting and it felt like we weren’t under immense pressure to both fix tech problems that we may have and also explain everything we will be doing in the next hour. We didn’t even do too much in our hour long prep time on Friday, but it felt nice to be able to fix all the tech problems we have and chat the actors and get to know them better.

The show itself went fairly well! It ran fairly smoothly; the lag time was filled up a bit more with the chit chat with the actors, but it felt sort of unnatural and forced.

But in general, all that participated seemed to have fun! I tried to pick a suggestion from everyone in the audience, as there are a lot of good ones. Some people did mention that they wonder how this is going to work with a larger audience size, and we are curious about that too!

Next Week

We are going to prepare for finals week, finish up on all the documentation for the project, and possibly run another final show with the improvisers while making some more changes! Stay tuned.

Team Commit 2 the Bits is a group of five ETC students consisting of Shiva Kannan (programmer), Hyoeun Kim (UI/UX Designer), Guimin Ren (programmer), Namrakant Tamrakar (artist), and Karen Xu (producer). Our faculty advisors are Brenda Harger and Jessica Hammer. Commit 2 the Bits is a discovery project that extends the work of “Commit to the Bits” who continues to explore the intersection of improvisational theater and Twitch live streaming. We sought out to incorporate the rhythms of a full improv show, including studying roles and agencies at stake, streamlining an improv show online, creating a sense of community among viewers despite the distance between actors and the audience, and helping teams practice the new skills needed to succeed at improv online. Our deliverable at the end of the semester includes running a weekly improv show, developing a production toolkit to smoothen aspects of the show, as well as a stretch goal of developing an audience participant game.

We spent the first 4 weeks going through documentations from Commit to the Bits and getting their prototypes up and running, as well as conducting research on Twitch, improv, as well as audience participatory games. We then started to plan extensively for our first show with seasoned improvisers, including studying structures of existing improv shows and Twitch streams from week 5 to 8. We spent week 9 to 11 on planning out our pivot for the project now that our previous setup of conducting the show in person in the green screen room will not work anymore. Weekly playtest and improvements has been conducted since week 12 and will continue till the end of the semester.

What went well

Commit 2 the Bits was able to build upon the work done by Commit to the Bits at the beginning of the semester, but also able to separate what we do from their work since the fundamental focus of the two projects are very different, despite this being a continuation. 

We were able to base on our goal, develop a smooth running improv show on Twitch, and we have delivered at least three smooth running twitch improv shows. And none of this would have happened without the team’s spontaneity, risk-taking spirit without sacrificing practicality when we encounter unprecedented design challenges on this fundamentally discovery project of building an improv show on Twitch. 

We realized that through several steps. An important first step is that we established a fairly clear division of labor within the group from the beginning, with the roles and responsibilities belonging to each person established. We planned to run weekly playtests since quarters; we tried to run them weekly, especially towards right before halves and the end of the semester after we’ve finalized our pivot, and playtesting provided extremely useful information. We were able to collect feedback from faculty and carefully craft more features based on the feedback we’ve received.

In building each show, we thought out each show carefully, establishing an arc with carefully selected improv games first vetted through Improv II, then determined that will both engage audiences and set the actors up for success. We also successfully utilized the spontaneous nature of improv and the audience interaction levels to encourage Twitch audiences to make suggestions, making our Twitch channel’s chat a robust environment that engages the audience with our shows. 

We were lucky to have gotten in touch with a group (Show & Tell Live Improv) that have been doing Twitch/Improv for a significant amount of time. They first located the paper written by Commit to the Bits and reached out to us. After the pivot of our project took place amid COVID-19, we reached out to them and scheduled meetings to have conversations about their experiences with Twitch/Improv. We were able to show them the tools that we have built and receive validation from them, which was a good feeling for us and kept us going amid our project pivot. We were able to make improvements on our shows based on their experiences, such as really trying to build a bridge with the audience and making them feel like they’re an important part of our show. We also established mutual support with each other by tuning into each other’s shows to provide support on a weekly basis. 

We were also able to bounce back from pivoting our project due to the unique COVID-19 situation this year. We were able to adapt from our situation and quickly work out a viable setup for our improv show due to losing the space in the green screen room. Our product was validated by those who have been doing Twitch/Improv, as well as seasoned improvisers. We used the situation in our favor, since entertainment options are significantly reduced and people are turning into platforms like Twitch, and improvisers are forced to look into options of doing improv on Twitch. 

What could have been better (or what went wrong)

Going remote was a double edged sword for us. While it benefitted us in making more people turn to Twitch as an entertainment option, it was also harder for our team to meet together and have brainstorming sessions as effective as the ones we had before we went remote. Having time zone differences was also difficult to have everyone working at their best energy state.

Additionally, due to the design oriented nature of this project, the members in our team who focus on art and asset creation had to take on the role of designers at the pre-production phase of our project, or otherwise they would not have much to do. Having gone through what is similar to two pre-production phases in the project due to the pivots, they had very little chances to showcase their talents and add to their portfolios. While their input was invaluable to the team, we wish that we could have better utilized their artistic talents. 

Lessons learned & Conclusion

It is very hard to summarize all we have learned in a couple of paragraphs. We have learned a lot about improv and Twitch culture in general. Through watching improv shows and Twitch streams, we got a solid understanding of how both mediums are uniquely different, but also having a ton in common that we could utilize. 

We have also learned that in solving a design challenge, the most important thing to do is not being afraid of making mistakes; instead, starting prototyping and building as early as possible and making mistakes is one of the best things that we could do. Only through building and constantly seeking for feedback could we validate our design and make changes and improvements upon those. 

We have definitely managed to find ways to learn and grow in an environment that is foreign to us in the beginning; none of us were Twitch or improv experts coming into this project.. We have learned to communicate with each other effectively despite our different backgrounds. 

We were grateful to receive validation from the faculty from ETC, groups like Show & Tell Live Improv, as well as the seasoned improvisers that we have been working with. We have managed to develop stable products, and our production toolkits have the potential to be deployed in theaters that are facing the same problems of improv online. 

As the semester is coming to a close, Commit 2 the Bits will be doing at least 2 more improv shows on Twitch (as of 4/24/2020). After that, we might deploy our production toolkit in local theaters and beyond to help facilitate improv as a possibility.

Changes

This past week, we’ve been gathering the feedback from the playtest that we have done from last week, and we have been ramping up to prepare for our playtest this week!

We aimed to test out the toolkits that we developed, with some functionalities added this time around. We also chatted with our faculty advisor Brenda to develop an arc for the show that will both keep our audience engaged and have our improvisers warmed up to progress into more complicated games.

We ended up with an arc that began with a warm up game (Fortunately/Unfortunately), followed by a guessing game (Naive Expert), exaggeration game (Fish Guts), storytelling game (Conducted Story), then at last, competition type game (Good, Bad & Ugly) this time around.

One of the more prominent feedback that we got back last time was that the feed of our stream looked too much like a work conference call, which is sort of contradictory to the fun nature of our improv show. Therefore, this week, we implemented some overlay features for our show.

We also made some functional updates for our twitch improv bot. One change is that in game template, the host could simply click one of the games, and the game name as well as the introduction message will be outputted, which is much easier having to copy paste every time. The host could also access the script that controls this easily, so if a new game needs to be added or if a game description needs to be changed, they could modify the content in the Unity script.

Now that we don’t have to use the twitch client side to do the overlay as we did last time, you might notice that we still have a story board option in “switch game scenes”. This makes switch the story teller in the conducted story game as easy to control as last time.

We also added more proper branding images for our channel.

The Show

We brought in Parker, who is a second year of the program and one of the members of the original CTTB, as well as seasoned improvisers, including Carrie and Aaron who joined us last time, as well as Sam Turich. We were very excited to have them on the show!

We had lots of technical issues on our end. It took us a long time to set up everything in Streamlabs with adding everyone’s feed in (as it is the first time) with an hour to go on the show, and with Skype’s continuous problems, sometimes showing no video feed from the actors in our Twitch feed, despite the actors having their cameras on. This time around, we also experienced more lag on our show, as it felt like the suggestions took quite a while to trickle in, which is something that will factor more consideration in our next show.

Despite all the difficulties, we ended up having 41 unique viewers joining us, which was really awesome! The show lasted about 30 minutes with the five games that we prepared. Lots of audience members tried to make suggestions and be part of a show.

Feedback / What we will work on

We have used the show as a big chunk of what our feedback for softs (like an ETC wide beta opening event – which will be next week) will be based on. We are hoping that we will get valuable feedback in softs. Meanwhile, below are some feedback that we got through the google form that we sent out.

Something that we have been considering is introducing a laughter mechanism into the show. For a while, this is something that we felt like was simply hard to recreate on an online atmosphere. We have considered options of having the audience record their own laugh and uploading it, but felt like filtering through those for potentially offensive content was too much work. Due to the complexity of the problem, we never really thought about the possibility of doing so. In the more recent shows, however, it was pointed out that sometimes, the show felt dry without the laughter element. What we have decided to experiment is to use a laugh track available to us through an audio effect library on randon. The host will trigger the laugh button if she finds something is funny. We’ll see if that will help with this – there is absolutely no way of knowing before trying it out!

It was also pointed out that there is a lack of interaction between the audience and the actors. This time around, we are thinking that we might give the actors the choice to read off and react to some of the comments that the audiences have gave in chat (one other thing that was unclear is if the actors will be able to see the chat). We are also thinking of maybe doing a Q&A session.

We will also introduce some new games this time around and test out the types of games that could work. We’re very excited about this next show, as we are growing more comfortable with doing this with the professional improvisers.

The Playtest

What was originally playtest day has transitioned into more remote playtests. As a result, we decided to test the production kits we built, as well as games that we think would work well with improv through communication tools such as Zoom and Skype.

We mostly aimed to test the toolkit that was presented in last week’s blog, as well as if improvisers will be comfortable with our Skype setup. We decided that we are going to try play three games, scene replay, the good, bad & ugly advice, as well as story conductor. We invited Parker and Sam to help playtest with us; in one point or another, Namrakant and I (Karen) also joined in. The playtest was setup and hosted from my end. We also decided that we will have the improvisers see what is going on in the twitch feed of themselves through a screenshare on Skype, as well as the chat.

As a result, we had around 18 people that were able to join us, which was a fairly good turnout! Our audiences were very avid commentors and they made some really funny suggestions from time to time, so we never ran out of materials and used them to the best of our avail for the scenes. If you want to rewatch the video, you could find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/585134992

Feedback

We received lots of very helpful comments from everyone – a shoutout to all that helped! There are quite a few different categories of comments, but some falls into the same category:

• In a scene with Parker and Sam, they established “eye contact” through Skype with each other, which wasn’t something that we thought of but apparently really worked according to the audiences
• Show should be set up sort of differently; it was difficult to do scene work right out of the bat at the beginning of the show
• Audiences wished that we had more engaging visual elements as well as sound effects
• Would be helpful in providing instructions on how to set up a twitch account
• We could possibly share more of our setup with the audience.
• Seeing the chat from the actor’s view was nice, because they were able to feed from the audience and have some buffer time to think of their next steps. This wasn’t clear to the audience though.

These are quite helpful feedback, and we will keep revamping what we have!

Next Week

We will also try to schedule a meeting with Show & Tell again (they put on an awesome show on Friday and we wanted to chat with them about their experiences). We will work from our suggestions, primarily adding more sound effects and visual effects.

We also thought that this playtest went well enough for us to get the professional actors back on board to do this again! So, we will work full speed towards that next week. We will be putting on a playtest with the professional actors on Friday, tentatively at 6:45PM. Please tune in if you can!

Meeting with Show & Tell Live

As promised, we got to chat with Show & Tell Live, who has been adjusting the way that they have been doing improv since the pandemic has hit. They have been doing improv on Twitch for about a year now, and they have quite a loyal base that will tune into their channel every Friday night.

We had quite a bit of nice takeaways from this meeting:

• Recognizing the audience member who made contributions to the show in any shape or form is important to building their community
• One word suggestions usually come from relatively silent people, chatty people try to give more suggestions
• Characters that get built over the course of multiple streams often is received very well
• From their experience – In order of importance :
  – Audio -Visual quality -Production – Content / Personality 
• Their role definitions seemed to match what we have discovered! 

Chatting with them and finding overlap between the work that they have been doing for a while is a great validation for all of us. It also seemed like the toolkits that we have created fits in with some of the games that they have developed, so we’re hoping that we could ship this production toolkit off to them with some of their games implemented!

More Production Toolkits

We continued to created production kits for more improv games with more complete functionalities. By the end of the week, we were able to set up the production toolkit off from all our tech’s computer, and we were able to restore the exact same setup by the streamer. This has definitely made us confident that we could ship our production kits off to theater and have them adapt to the functionalities of those production kits with ease.

We have also added more games that could utilize the production toolkits.

Here’s a screenshot of the toolkit overlay that was done for the game “Good, Bad & Ugly Advice”. On top of each “adviser”, it showcases which one they are. Down in the suggestions column, it will show which audience member is responsible in giving which suggestion.

Here’s a screenshot on what happens on the streamer/host’s end of things. They get to dictate which game we’re playing by clicking the options presented in “switch game scenes”, and different overlays for each game will show up. By clicking the blue circled area in Good Bad Ugly, for example, the host gets to dictate which players are the “good” advisor, bad advisor, “ugly” advisor, and so on.

And here’s a screenshot for the game “story conductor” that we have done. The host designates who is responsible for telling the story when, and whoever is telling the story will have the “presenter” icon shown on top of their part of the screen. 

And in the circled area, the host gets to control whose turn it is to “present” through the area circled in blue. By clicking which presenter, they get to dictate who tells the story.

After communicating with Show and Tell Live, we’re hoping with the framework we have established, we could adapt one of the improv games that they have been playing and incorporate those into our code.

Plans next week

With the toolkit we have developed, we are running a playtest on Monday and see how things go from there! We will also be in touch with Show & Tell Live.

• Communicating with groups that have already been doing Twitch/Improv stuff for a while, such as Show and Tell Live ( https://www.twitch.tv/showandtelllive ) and curious comedy ( https://www.twitch.tv/curiouscomedy/videos ); we will ask them what are some things that they have always wished they could have, and we will develop relevant prototypes for them
• Develop a bot that will automate the process of running a show: for example, when an audience member joins in mid-stream and types in a command, this bot will let them know what kind of suggestions we are taking right now, and what kind of game we are playing
• Develop an emote overlay effect on top of the stream, and maybe adding some of our own emotes
• Developing a unique interaction that will only work for improv on streaming platforms

Last week, we had varying degrees of success with those directions, specifically developing the bot that will help run the show and the emote overlay effect.

Tech Development

We want to develop the bot because we wanted our audience to have a clear idea of what is going on in our show at all times. After watching some other improv shows on Twitch and sometimes joining mid-stream, it was quite confusing to see what exactly they are doing; we also had the same problem when we ran our show last time. So this week, we made some progress on that, with a rough interface looking like this on Unity and Twitch message output:

We also added an emote overlay effect. One can trigger an overlay effect by typing in keywords “meme1” and “meme2” to get two different emotes to show up on the screen. In the future, we will be able to expand the keywords and the emotes that could be used towards an overlay.

Other Directions

We have been in touch with Show and Tell Live as well as Curious Comedy. As both groups are trying to find ways to move forward, I believe, we are going to chat with Show and Tell Live some point this future week. We might also branch out to some other groups as well as the improv actors we have been working with.

We have also been trying to design an unique audience interaction, as mentioned in our halves presentation. So far, we have been playing with a scoring system (as designed in the bot). Our instructors have pointed out that scoring improv actors, however, could be something that is really dangerous as that could usually tear theater groups apart, especially if there are people who are trolling, etc. So, we might be shifting the voting system towards doing a maestro type (one of Keith Johnstone’s forms) scoring instead. But we haven’t fully decided, and this will be something that we will spending our time extensively to figure out this week.

We have also faced difficulties with streaming with Zoom. Due to privacy settings by the CMU license, we wouldn’t be able to stream our Zoom feed onto Twitch. We have been also playing with Skype and Skype has proved to work better on Twitch, and we think we will try to use Skype for the future for our playtests and shows.

We also haven’t had the chance to playtest yet due to the development of bots and with figuring out streaming. Now we had lots of things figured out and with basic functionality good to go, however, we will definitely try to playtest this week and keep our goal of weekly playtests, especially now we are so close to softs.

For the future

This week, we will:

• Definitely hold a playtest, as promised.
• But before we do that, we need to reconsider the role definitions that goes into a show since the format of the show will be somewhat different for sure.
• We will also continue to research viable audience interactions and continue to develop on tech.

Pivot, pivot, pivot

A pivot for our project is the first things that is lying in our face that says “this needs to be tackled.” With social distancing in place and not being allowed in the ETC building, our original plan of having the improvisers coming in every week and playtesting with whatever prototype we develop will not work anymore.

For now, we have developed a couple of basic directions that we could work towards:

• Communicating with groups that have already been doing Twitch/Improv stuff for a while, such as Show and Tell Live ( https://www.twitch.tv/showandtelllive ) and curious comedy ( https://www.twitch.tv/curiouscomedy/videos ); we will ask them what are some things that they have always wished they could have, and we will develop relevant prototypes for them
• Develop a bot that will automate the process of running a show: for example, when an audience member joins in mid-stream and types in a command, this bot will let them know what kind of suggestions we are taking right now, and what kind of game we are playing
• Develop an emote overlay effect on top of the stream, and maybe adding some of our own emotes
• Developing a unique interaction that will only work for improv on streaming platforms

Approaching the Pivot

We are in touch with the two groups mentioned in our first direction, and our tech members have been working hard on our second and third directions. It is the fourth direction that will really move us into the next milestone of our project, and that is our broadest and most open and versatile direction that we are working towards.

We have gotten inspiration from our Improv II class where we did some improv games through Zoom, and they have worked surprisingly well. Because of the nature of the improv games (instead of scenes) that we played, lag surprisingly was not a big issue. We are definitely incorporating some of these improv games into our playtest.

We have also discovered a way to incorporate those Snapchat filters that went viral about two three years ago as part of our stream. Because there are many filters, and it appears like we could also develop our snap filters, which makes it even more compelling to incorporate these filters and utilizing that as part of our show.

Ideations

We have developed some games that will use some aspect of tech compared to traditional improv, and have listed our setup, technical challenges, and game play process. Here are some examples! And we will be playtesting those next week.

For next week

Next week, we will focus on playtesting with these games, and hopefully being able to engage in conversations with our professional improvisers, as well as the aforementioned improv groups that have already been doing improv Twitch, and we will continue to brainstorm and build.

After quarters, we got some good ideas of how we should articulate our project to our audience in a short time span of mere 15 minutes. First of all, we need to introduce Twitch, especially the aspects of twitch that is relevant to our project. Secondly, a lot of people were wondering what is the different between the project that we are doing compared to the previous team’s project. In our presentation this time, we have acknowledged CTTB as we go in our presentation, pointing what we are doing, where they have laid good foundations for us. People were also wondering about the significance of our project, which we did not quite sought out solutions during quarters, but were able to deliver quite nicely this time around (in how our projects expands Twitch territory, as well as building more opportunity for improvisers to act).

We were also really excited to present what we have learned from our Twitch stream. This has definitely attracted more ETC students and faculties to watch our future shows. From there, we were really able to consider and shape our vision for this project, and what our future goals are.

We have decided on some key goals/deliverables for the rest of the semester:

• Running weekly improv shows on Twitch
• Develop a show production toolkit
• Identify and build an APG interaction system for improv games that is unique to Twitch

And, like that, we have went on spring break, only to hear that we will not be meeting on campus, and all with projects will be done remotely. Which means…..

• Running weekly improv shows on Twitch – not possible anymore with improvisers, since we are not allowed in the building
• Develop a show production toolkit – yes
• Identify and build an interaction system for improv games that is unique to Twitch – yes

Which means that although we are still able to build a lot of show production toolkits and identify APG systems, without weekly improv shows, it will be very tough to test everything that we’ve built and how we need to improve upon those. But hang tight, we will discuss more about those in the coming future days… It will definitely be a very interesting remainder of the semester.

Our first show with seasoned improvisers

Going into this week, we were very excited and nervous about holding our first show with seasoned improvisers! The show would be a testament towards all the work that we have done in designing our own show, including the arc, the engagement of audience, the transitions that we have built, etc. We also wanted to see if we could run a longer show with four games for a change, compared to the shorter playtests that we did from before.

We ended up running a 26 minute show, with 21 unique audiences joining in, with two improvisers able to join us that night, Carrie and Aaron. The show ran really nicely, which definitely gave us a lot of confidence towards the work that we have already done.

There are a couple of key takeaways from the show with Carrie & Aaron, some we have proposed solutions for, and some we do not quite yet:

• The actors themselves said that there are multiple ways that we could play one game, which is something we haven’t really had a problem with when we tested several improv games in improv because we have “showed” the class our take on how we think it is done, then everyone imitated what we did. We did not get a chance to talk through the games in too much detail with the improvisers, however, and that has caused some confusion. In the future, we will be scheduling more time for rehearsal before we put on a show.
• Watching seasoned improv actors having such a different energy on stage is really new to us, probably because we are in a smaller and intimate space with them. This shows in the volume that they have been speaking in, and we haven’t seen anything like that with our improv actors, thus we haven’t adjusted our volume control beforehand, and some of our audience has complained about volume problems.
• A lot of work goes into the two people with roles defined as host & streamer, as well as stage manager. Because we have people in our project practicing for such roles for at least a month before we did this show, we were good at executing everything, but it will be a lot to ask for theaters who wish to adapt our project into their own versions of twitch improv shows. Therefore, we need more automated tools in order to lighten the workload of the stage manager and the host & streamer person.
• We had bad network for some audiences, resulting them not being to comment/suggest in time about what we should incorporate into our show.
• Some audiences joining mid-stream are confused about what the audiences are suggesting about, and what we need from them
• We need to have more suggestions backup plans, because it was during some of those time that we are waiting that audiences drop out.

We are excited to have them back again some time (our next show is still TBD but we will definitely hold one after spring break)! If you want to watch our show, you could watch it here:

Meanwhile, please subscribe to our channel, @thetwitchimprovproject. A sincere thanks and shoutout to those who have watched our show on Friday, including Show & Tell Live, Commit to the Bits, ETC students and faculty, and our friends!

Preparing for Halves

We are a team of all first years. After quarters, we have gotten more comfortable about articulating our project to other people who does not have any idea about either twitch or improv, and we have worked on reflecting on why we are doing what we are doing. Still, going into halves is still a bit intimidating.

In order to prepare for halves, we started creating rough outlines starting from two weeks ago. We have created slides that are more in-depth and designed better this past week. We have been rehearsing diligently, and we will be presenting on Tuesday!

I think preparing for halves has really clarified our vision and directions about how our project will be moving forward. Halves will be a turning point where our project will really move into lots of rapid prototyping and making lots of deliverable progress.