Actor Growth

Today I got a script as I will be acting in another short tomorrow. It seems to be revolved around a poker game and it looks like there is going to be fake blood involved. Just from watching independent films I am always worried whether things like this will come out authentic or not.

I was just thinking too that this is the most violent short film that I am going to participate in. It’s going to be an interesting experience though and I look forward to seeing how it turns out.

I’m sure a lot of others have heard this story about that lady named Susan Boyle who entered the show Britains Got Talent. For those who haven’t seen it, you can watch a Youtube video of it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

I originally first heard about it on the news and when I watched the video I guess I wasn’t as shocked since I was prepared to see something surprising. But in general why there is so much attention to it is that it seemed like all the audience members and judges were so cynical of her at first.

It was probably mostly due to her mannerism and image on stage and her statement on how she wanted to be a professional singer. People couldn’t help but to laugh at that. Then, when she started to sing she just floored everyone. When I was watching it I was so much more tuned in to how everyone’s reactions and perception of her just changed.

How this relates to acting I thought is that this heavily reminded me of when I started to do acting back in high school and the snickers you can get as an unproven talent. For that it was almost the same thing though I thought where the expectation is so low for you that it can be a positive where if you do great it can become an out of this world experience for the viewers. So in many ways it can be great to be the underdog.

Even in the film business you often have to be able to tolerate people’s judgmental attitude to survive. This made me think about image too. I think it is safe to say that a person like Susan Boyle doesn’t exactly have like say a typical Hollywood/star look. It’s not hard to see why many opportunities would just fly by her as a result.

However, what I think it does show too which is kind of inspiring is that opportunities are always there for you to showcase yourself. It’s just that everyone has different circumstances that require different paths to be taken.

I was reading this advertisement recently about an acting coach named Margie Haber who appears to be based out of California. While I am currently schedule to attend the 6 week intensive workshop with Andrew McIlroy, this got me curious as her workshop would take place almost right after.

I was doing some research about her and she seemed perfectly legitimate and reputable. The thing that crossed my mind was how since she is a California US based acting coach it made me wonder how relevant it would be for me considering I am here in Vancouver. One of the benefits to getting trained normally is that local casting directors will recognize your teachers and hence will be more likely to consider you.

At this point I just in an inquiry as I was interested in learning more about the curriculum and the cost.

Today I received a surprising e-mail from my old agent. She simply sent an e-mail to everyone that worked on the upcoming pilot show of Caprica to let us know that it was a straight to DVD release coming out on April 21st. It is suppose to be a spin off of the Battlestar Galactica series.

I do remember her being a huge sci-fi fan so I guess this was one reason why she sent it to everyone. This straight to DVD release kind of made more sense to me now as when I was working on that show there were a ton of naked women in the scene. I was just thinking too that day how they could get away with that on cable TV and they did mention DVD sales.

Funny thing is shortly after I read that e-mail apparently the show has been leaked everywhere on the Internet. Guess die hard fans have probably seen everything already. I remember one scene I was in where the actress Magda Apanowicz, plays a character named lucy, who pushed me pretty aggressively since the context of the scene was a chaotic atmosphere. Don’t think that scene made the final cut though as they took more takes after that and that would have probably constituted as an upgrade for me.

Although, afterwards between a different take she was yelling on the balcony to me saying how I was her favorite. People sure have a funny way of showing it. lol

The plot seemed super confusing to me though since I only know the chunk of it based on the days I worked on it. Maybe I’ll check it out.

Some of those short films that I acted in has been published on various online platforms for fun by the producers and it is kind of interesting to see people’s reactions. At the same time, I was just watching some other videos that people have created with some people being Internet celebrities.

The funny thing too was that for these Internet celebrities people asked them how life is like being well known online. Some of them poked fun at themselves on how while people know them online, in the real world virtually no one knows them which means for the most part they can still live a normal life.

That’s kind of interesting I thought and made me wonder if in the future there will be such a thing such as a Web/Internet actor compared to a TV/Film actor. Most of the stories I have read for actors starting out on the Internet is that they get discovered online and eventually go on to do things in the traditional sense. Although, it’s mostly as a result of a web based show that gets a contract to show its work on network TV.

Acting craft wise I don’t see much of a difference though compared to say going from a theatre acting to a film and TV one. Must be interesting though to be successful online yet remain invisible to the mass general public.

Well this was an interesting day. Initially a friend asked me if I wanted to help out for his friend’s production as they were looking for some extra body help and I agreed. Wouldn’t you know it, on my way to their shooting location they tell everyone that it was cancelled due to the weather.

So, I headed back home. Just a few hours later another friends phoned me and asked if I wanted to get together to make another short film and that he was going to round up as many people from our last group. Sure enough I agreed and today we went to shoot it.

The plot was pretty straight forward as it was about two high school kids and a guy trying to do things to protect a girl from “players” where his motivation was that he really liked the girl himself but is too shy to ask her out, so to speak. I was playing that shy guy….

The shoot went well. It was cold outside due to the rain and I must say these are some dedicated artists for wanting to create all this. Especially the person who wrote the script and took the initiative to organize the whole thing at the last minute. It’s almost like a bunch of people that just call each other up to say play basketball except in our cases it’s creating short films. Kudos to everyone.