Actor Growth

So I was working on the Tooth Fairy again and there was one thing interesting where it appeared that the actor Dwayne Johnson did not know how to ice skate( or at least the assumption is not adequate enough) as he was placed on this gizmo/platform that people pushed on the ice to make it look like he was skating. He then simply mimicked the upper body movement as if he was skating.

This kind of shows how too many times it is more about your acting ability and or presence on the camera as oppose to how great you are technically or athletically with something. I know martial arts especially there are so many people that learn it simply for film in hopes to make it big as a lead actor of some sort.

Of course there are people that are well known and do land roles because they are so good technically at something. But in general, this goes to show that you really need to have a good idea about your look presence on camera as well as your acting range as oppose to worrying so much on whether or not you are technically better than everyone else many times.

Today I did some voice dubbing for a short film I acted in awhile back as the sound apparently was very bad and so all the actors need to do voiceovers for it. It was interesting I must say and I don’t think I did as well as I hoped for.

The difficult thing about it is that you have two things crossing your mind when normally there is only one. Not only do you have to mimic the same emotion as before, but the length and timing of your voice needs to match your lips on the film.

Be interesting to see how this turns out.

So yesterday while working on the tooth fairy it was pretty much a cattle call as expected and I met a lot of interesting people. It was shot in an ice arena at UBC which wasn’t that cold, in my opinion, compared to what a lot of people were making it out to be.

There was this one funny part in the day where they were shooting a scene and Dwayne Johnson, who is the lead in the film, was suppose to enter the player box stand a certain way. For one reason or another there was some kind of confusion and he couldn’t get it right initially.

The director, Michael Lembeck, then joked about it by taking a shot at him and said out loud “And I begged For Vin Diesel”. You then heard all the crew in a “ooooo” tone of voice. I thought it was extra funny too cause I am used to seeing “The Rock” as usually the person who dishes out the insults.

Alright, this is a very early post as I have a 7:30am call time today and am about to head out to the UBC Thunderbird Stadium. So apparently this is a hockey scene and will be shot in cold arena of course.

I never heard of this movie personally, but I was reading who was in it and apparently Dwayne Johnson, or better known as “The Rock”, is in it. I used to watch wrestling all the time and so that name rung a bell with me.

My agent told me to expect to be there all day and that usually means 12 to 16 hours. This is apparently one of those cattle call type of situations too where there is literally hundreds of people that are needed to fill up an arena area. The last time I did this was for another hockey movie called “Miracle”. Hope I get to see some interesting stuff.

One thing that I enjoyed a lot from doing the last film was that people commented to me on how they appreciated that in our production the lead role I played was a strong and stern Asian character that was the protagonist which was definitely something that we don’t see much of. The festival was no different.

That was actually one of the goals before as you all know. I had a lot of fun playing the role too. For those who don’t know, the title of the short film was “Business is Murder”. Here is a small clip from the film:

Well, the Mighty Asian Moviemaking Marathon is of course over. However, there is apparently a lot of rumblings about one of the winning entries. The reason for the controversy from what I understand is that this competition was originally designed as a way to help promote Asians involved in the film industry.

Now one of the stipulations to the entry is that one principal actor must be of an Asian decent. For one of the films that won, the two lead roles were Caucasian actors and the person who was Asian played an almost non existent role in the film. Essential, to many it was like the person was thrown in just to satisfy the requirement.

I know one team who was competing did a movie in a similar genre as that one and they were definitely outraged over that apparently as they were definitely there to win it. For my team, with all of our obstacles we were more happy with the fact that we made a film still despite all odds.

In my personal opinion though, I thought there were many films that were a lot better than the one in question of this controversy. The story wasn’t that compelling and it was a pretty standard film. Guess it is just me maybe, but I was more impressed with some of the films that obviously did not have the best budget or resources as it seemed like they took more risk.

Wonder how all this will affect the event for the future.