My Rough Theatre

My rough theatre is my youtube channel from high school. It has since been deleted, but during its time, "MattMacProductions" was a good example of pleasing the crowd while using very cheap, crude, and imperfect equipment and techniques.

We would often make spoofs of MTV reality shows. For sets, we would just use locations that were available to us. When shooting, we would not even try to make the sets convincing to the viewer. Instead, we just played pretend. My favorite example of this was when spoofing the MTV show Next, the bus was just my living room. It looked nothing like a bus, but we as actors said it was the bus, and acted as if it was the bus.

When editing, we also didnt care about continuity, 30 degree rules, or anything like like. Instead, we just cut when we needed to, or when the take ended. Our only "calculated" cuts were for a kind of comedic effect.

YouTube was my "rough theatre". It was low class, it was crude, it wasn't flashy, but it resonated with people and entertained them. Because I was able to be imaginative as a filmmaker, my audience seemed to be willing to imagine along with me.