Maeve Ryan consults with film directors to help them generate scripts for their films, and uses improvisation and devising to generate her own.
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Previous Consultancy Work
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• Award winning NFTS film director, Sophia Seymour, hired Maeve to consult about improvisational script development on the set of In Service.
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• BFI-programmed director Christopher O’Donnell asked Maeve to lead improvisation workshops with elder actor Ruth Posner to help him create a script about Alzheimers, to create the film Before. ​
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• Maeve was Improvisation Consultant on The Man With His Fingers In His Ears which was produced by Dame Emma Thompson and made by filmmaker Thomas Michaelson of Trader Films with Keif Gwynne.
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• Maeve has devised and wrote eight new plays with the young people of the award winning performing arts charity Dream Arts, over four years, working in collaboration with a musical director.
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​• Maeve was an actor/writer on the long-running online satirical comedy British Rationals.
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• Maeve uses improvisation and devising methods to create all her scripts, including the short film Compliance. ​​
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​Short Films in Development...
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About Home to Vote
Sheila is dead and has left a note: she wishes for her body to be prepared in the traditional Irish way. She wants her wife and sister to do it together. Meanwhile, the seminal Equal marriage referendum in Ireland plays out on TV in the background. Home to Vote explores themes of grief, reckoning and acceptance and captures an Irish cultural ritual around death that contributes to the transcendence of all three characters.
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About Baked Alaska
Breda has a lot of housework to do – but first, she needs to avenge the one who harmed her lover. Baked Alaska inserts the Irish Mammy trope into a Tarantino-style Western, and explores her power.
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About The Lovely Girl Competition
In an alternative timeline, the hegemony of Catholic Church hasn’t disappeared in Ireland and continues to shape misogynistic views. Yet capitalism has arrived and is pushing sexual mores. The result is 'The Lovely Girls Competition' which is broadcast on State TV. A group of secretive activists plan to free the ‘Lovely Girl’ participants from their psychological prison.
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About Ghost Train
It’s 1992. Ghost Train follows a thirteen-year old and her best friend to their first teenage disco, where the misogynistic culture underlying the culture in their twin threatens to stop them blossoming just as they have begun.
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Feature Scripts in Development...
About Kick It!
Kick It! is based on Maeve's memories of an All-Girls Gaelic Football team she and her friends founded as children.
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Writing Biog
Maeve's writing method relies upon her training in improvisation at The Second City, Hoopla Impro and The Spontaneity Shop, as well as her training in Uta Hagen's Object Exercises and Chekhov's gravities whilst studying for a MA in Acting under scholarship with Dr. Adrian James at Arts Ed London. Backstories are detailed, research is done, improvisations explore character, then the dialogue is improvised, recorded and edited over a long period of time.
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Maeve is also a producer of London's seminal female/non-binary improvisation night LadyProv, at Hoopla Impro. With LadyProv, she has co-produced many experimental improvised short films. Her improvisation work for film led her to co-producing a film for the London Transport Museum’s digital archive, which was exhibited as part of the Hidden London exhibition.
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Maeve is a senior teacher in improvisation for the UK’s foremost Improvisation school, Hoopla Impro for which she directs improv shows for graduating students. She also teaches devising and improvisation to BA in Acting students for Robbie William's performing arts school LMA, which is conferred by Regents University.
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Maeve is certified in PACE, a model which helps her to establish safer relationships with colleagues and aims to give everyone space to contribute their talent.
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