#second beats

Consider a wall of bricks. Isolate three ascending bricks, such that you wind up with this configuration:

This, roughly, is how successful beats in a Harold proceed. Here’s some labels, for reference’s sake:

Huzzah, Macpaint!

  Anyhow- on the bottom of the picture, the loose structure of a game-oriented scene is laid out. At first, the game is not established, and so it must be discovered (that having been said, strong premise initiators are more than capable of doing this first step internally, after taking a suggestion/doing an opening and prior to the initiation of the scene). Once the game is defined, it can be played. Pretty soon thereafter, once the rules of the scene have been established, the game can be heightened, and it is the drive to heighten which will propel the scene forward from there.

  In a Harold, when this process is divided across multiple beats, breaking down the structure of a scene helps to inform how to initiate further instances of its associated game. As the beats progress, recreating earlier portions of the scene serve no purpose. The discovery portion, though critical in the first beat, is all too often repeated at the top of analogous second beats by players who are trying too hard to simply replicate the successes of the first beat with simple Mad-Libs type substitution. Though this may very well lead to a playable second beat, in falsely recreating a portion of the scene where players act ignorant of the game they already know they will play it removes the ability of the player to react honestly and in the moment until they get back to the game.

Let's talk a bit about Analogous Scenes. Creating Analogous Scenes is a fun way to heighten the comedy of any situation by placing it in a surprising context. Imagine two schoolchildren trading lunches. That is a very normal behavior and there's nothing particularly funny about it. Now imagine two soldiers in a foxhole trading C-rations in the manner of two schoolchildren trading lunches. That's a much more interesting situation. This is very similar to a game that you may already know: The Blank Family. In this game we see how a normal family situation might be if everyone were Ninjas or Werewolves. But here we're going to open up that concept to delve more into the emotional territory. To exercise this, we're going to do some Mapping.

Mapping 

Have two people get up on stage. Give them a very mundane activity. Then give them a heightened dramatic situation. They will now enact and talk about that mundane activity as though it has the weight of the dramatic situation.

Some examples:

Telling someone you got their lunch order wrong as though you are telling them they were adopted.

Telling someone they've won a trip to Bermuda as though you are telling them they have a disease and about to die.

Telling someone you've drank the last of the milk as though you are denying you have a substance abuse problem.

Elicit other mundane activities from the group and assign very dramatic situations. What we'll notice is how weird and silly these scenes are. But it's important to point out that all scenes should have dramatic stakes. Like our heightened emotions from the other day, scenes work well when things matter. This is a fun and easy way to make scenes matter to the players. 

After we've done a few straight mapping scenes, we can now play with doing it in our second beats. Have 6 people on stage. They will perform three different 2-person scenes. After the third scene, 2 different people will step forward and perform a beat for the first scene. They will take the behavior that they saw and map it to a totally new situation. We will do this with all of the scenes.

La Ronde

A structure known as the La Ronde is useful in figuring out how to follow Character Game. The La Ronde works like this:

Scene 1: Characters Alex and Bert

Scene 2: Characters Bert and Catherine

Scene 3: Characters Catherine and Dmitri

and so on, adjusting for how many players until the final scene is:

Final Scene: Characters Zelda and Alex.

We edit by tapping the player we want to exit on the shoulder and then initiating a new scene with the remaining character. For exercise purposes, we're going to stay very rigid with the progression. One character per player, and if you've gone you have to wait until your turn comes around again. 

Before we begin, we'll point out two important things. One: No scene may be about or discuss what had happened in the immediately previous scene. If Scene #1 features a break-up between Ivan and Jessica, Scene #2 cannot begin with "OMG, Jessica, I can't believe Ivan broke up with you." Two: In order to come up with new situations, it is helpful to think that characters exist at home, work, and play. If we see a scene of a young man and his mother, we can then see that mother with her MMA Kickboxing Club. This helps us broaden the world's of our characters. Remind people of this as the scenes go on.

Let's begin the workshop. First we discuss the kinds of second beats with the group. Then we'll do a couple of scenes, and after each scene ask everyone what they thought the scene was about. Follow it up by asking people to brainstorm what they might do for a second beat. There are no wrong answers here, we just want people to start thinking about possibilities.

What's going to help us is drilling our ability to pay attention to and recognize what is most important about a scene. Personally, I feel following Character will always be the strongest choice for creating second beats, though however we choose to structure our second beats we should always be creating strong characters in the first place.

Half Life

In regards to recognizing what a scene is about we will do an exercise version of Half-Life. We'll do a scene in one minute, then again in half the time, then again in 15 seconds, and again all the way down to 3 and 1/2 seconds. Get a relationship as the suggestion and have two players act out that relationship.

After running it for a few times, we can debrief the exercise. What we're looking for here is to figure out the essence of a scene. Each scene has the One Thing that is most important in it, what that scene is about. I'm sure we noticed what things needed to be hit in order to make it clear we were creating an abridged version of the scene. It's obvious when the shortened version feels different. And when it feels too different, it feels like it was a totally different scene. We'll use this awareness when trying to figure out what to do with our second beats.

Paying Attention

Now let's do a longer exercise. We begin with two players, playing a scene based off of any suggestion at all. After calling scene, have two new players get up. They will now recreate the scene that they just saw as closely as possible. Now, after that scene is over, have the original two get back up and recreate the scene they just saw. They will recreate the recreation. 

As with all exercises, we'll do them a couple of times to give as many people as possible a chance to try it out. Also, repetition helps drill in the concepts at work.

Let's start by talking about second beats. We begin talking about second beats by first talking about the first beats. The question of what to do in a second beat is answered by what has already happened in the first beat. The stronger our first beats are, the easier it is to figure out what do when it comes back.

I've identified three basic types of second beats. They are:

1: Time-Dash

2: Character Game

3: Analogous

This list is by no means complete, nor are the three types mutually exclusive. Defining these types is just going to help focus our thinking.

Definitions

A Time Dash means that there is a gap of time between when the first beat ended and when the second beat begins. It could be a jump forward in time from ten seconds to ten million years. It can also be a jump backward in time from right before the first scene started to years before. Going forward, we can use the Time Dash to show the ramifications and fallout of someone's actions. Going backward, we might see what past experience led to the original events taking place.

A Character Game follows one or both of the characters from the previous scene and places them in a heightened situation. We use this to explore how a strongly defined character(s) might act. They may be presented with a more extreme version of what they have already faced or they may be placed in an entirely new context. Strong characters are ones that can easily exist anywhere and have something interesting happen.