Actor Growth

Today I got an interesting message from the coach. As you all know, he is actively helping me to achieve my goal. Turns out, the person he was talking to couldn’t help me directly but instead is going to give him a list of potential contacts to share with me.

I was just thinking how there are so many twists and turns with this situation where at this point it looks like I am not going to accomplish the milestone goal and therefore will need to stop attending the workshop and begin the different route.

For my current remaining days of class, assuming my goal isn’t achieved, I have just sent off an e-mail to him too where I expressed how I think it is wiser to spend my workshop time going over all this business stuff instead. Basically, I would rather spend the time going over film industry stuff with like a mentor to better help me in achieving my goal rather than focusing on skill building at this point. Waiting for the response and reaction to that.

How many blog reader fans do I have? No idea really, but enough to be a nominee I guess for this mini online blog award. This looks like it is for fun and digital bragging rights. I think I am the only actor blog to ever be in this contest. Actor blogs in Canada must be scarce or something.

So in that sense I thought it would be neat if I could come in as a finalist. To my understanding the top five blogs, based on the highest number of votes, will progress to a second round consisting of a top five and the voting ends next week. So, if you are interested in voting for me the link is at the Canadian Blog Awards 2009 and simply go to the “Professional Life” category.

Apparently you can just vote for one blog if you want as oppose to having to rank everyone. So if I have any readers that want to vote for me and see where this goes it will be a lot of fun. Even if I don’t make it in, thanks for the nomination everyone. One thing that I definitely like about being a performer is being able to connect with fans where hopefully what I am doing is inspiring or entertaining you to make your day a little better.

So today I was acting in that film where the challenge was that the makeup artists had to make us actors look completely different for two different roles. Today we shot one character and tomorrow will be the second one.

It was definitely interesting and this is the first time I had to wear a fake moustache for a role. Lol. Something interesting happened during this shoot too. The script in general is very vague as it was designed to be more of a challenge for the makeup artists. Therefore, in most cases the director and actors can improvise on the available script to try and make something unique. Apparently, the same script has been used many times with a different team.

For my scene, in the end I started to cry and the director was so into it as well as the whole room. The makeup artist was telling me too that he couldn’t believe that I stayed so focus when the whole room was going ballistic. Everyone was smiling and clapping at the end and it made many people excited to work with me again tomorrow.

There were actually some industry veterans in the room too helping out. So, in many ways I guess it was good, professionally speaking, for my career where I made an impact to further help make a name for myself. Who would have thought volunteering for this project would do something like that huh?

Wow, what would you as an actor do in this situation? Remember about the schedule changes I talked about earlier in regards to a particular production? Well, today was supposed to be the shoot day. Guess what? Like literally 40 minutes before the set call time the guy tells me that due to a conflict they need to replace me and that they were thinking of bringing me in for a different speaking role.

Here is a quick summary of the conflict they allege which is the reason for the change and why I am upset. Essentially, this is an extremely low budget film where there is a large cast of actors that agreed to work on a deferral based on the roles we were offered. We all even signed contracts for it too. As you can imagine, the production is heavily understaffed. However, many of the actors volunteered to help whenever they could. Example, I saw one guy acting as like a production assistant.

The day when I was called on set they didn’t even shoot my scene as intended. Instead, they spent a lot of time shooting a different scene. Now for that scene the director wanted some extra bodies for atmosphere purposes where people would wear uniforms. So, it is kind of like a background extra where for the most part you are usually a blur.

However, there was no one else available. So, the producer mentioned that he wanted to slip me in one to help out. I was a little hesitant as I was like the only Chinese actor in the whole cast it seems with a fair amount of dialog. Therefore, if the camera even catches my face a bit in the background it will be bloody obvious that I was playing two characters. But, he reassured me that it would be okay and that I still had my original role.

While shooting the scene I was directly behind the other actor. What happened here is that the director said he wanted me to show a facial reaction as if I was shocked about the situation. Immediately, I was worried about this as if you are giving me a direction like that then that means I am extremely visible and featured in the shot. I even asked the director if that is going to be okay considering I am supposed to be seen later for my main speaking role.

He then smirked at me saying it would be okay. So, we shot the scene. Even I thought it was funny that they didn’t shoot my scene that day and script wise a lot of other actors noticed that a ton of dialog was cut out.

Months went by and they kept changing the schedules over and over again for my character. Just like less than a week ago as I mentioned, I even cancelled and adjusted schedules with other productions to adapt to this one. My original commitment was with this production and so I stuck with it and there was no notice whatsoever about anything changing even with the phone calls I made to them.

So when I got this phone call the last minute I was just thinking to myself, did they have this planned all along? Was I duped where they did this just to get my help as an extra body? As mentioned he did tell me on the phone that he wanted to potentially put me in another speaking role. But that makes absolutely no sense the more I think about it.

Example, if the conflict before was that my face was seen for that background role where I can’t be seen anymore for the original role, how does it make sense that you can magically make it adapt for something else now? Are they just Bs’ing me for example so that I won’t make a big deal out of it? On top of that, the main shooting was supposed to be wrapping and going into editing. Hence, it appears that there is no time to add in additional roles.

What would you do as an actor? In some ways it feels like I have been intentionally misled and not to mention the opportunities I have lost as a result of me committing to this. I mean, people get changed and cut from film roles all the time which isn’t a big deal. Even in professional settings though if you worked on a set and they say cut you out in the editing for whatever reason you would still get your compensation. But for this situation it feels like I will be getting nothing. Nothing I can use potentially for my acting portfolio footage, no compensation, etc.

The fact that they gave me their re-assurance and only decided to tell me this at the very last minute again makes me think that they took me for a ride which I find a bit unethical if that is the case. Because of that and the fact that they didn’t fulfill their end of the contractual agreement I am inclined to tell them that I don’t give them permission to use me at all in the film. Honestly, there is no way I would have volunteered and committed my time to this capacity to simply do a background cameo unless I really knew the people well.

Am I being too emotional about this? What would other professional actors do in this situation I wonder.

As I expected, there definitely was a lot of gloomy news type of commentary at the film and TV forum. A comment that stuck out to me was from the talent agent Richard Lucas who operates one of bigger talent agencies here in Vancouver called Lucas Talent.

Essentially, all of the panel was asked to start off by telling people something very positive that happened for them this year and something negative. He starts off by pretty much just saying that he has no good news really and brings up a thought about how he noticed there seemed to be a disappearance of middle class actors this year. Basically, you are either killing it as an actor or are getting virtually nothing. This was the clip:

It was kind of interesting too as he commented that his agency made a good chunk of its income this year from what sounds to be oversees and foreign films. Kind of made me think if that meant having say a second language or being a minority should have been a great benefit this year.

If I was an outsider I would personally think that is always the way the acting business has been where you are either super successful financially or you are not. You realize when you start immersing yourself in the business that is not the case. Even when I watch TV or movies now I tend to pay a lot of attention to not just the lead actors but the supporting cast and people that just have small principle roles too.

That puts things in perspective too if any actor out there in this area was wondering just how bad the state of the industry was when you compare it to the more booming times. In cases like this, I’m inclined to say everyone that was not with a very established agency or took initiative to produce your own work must have had a hard year.

Excited to share all the information with you guys as I attended the BC Film and TV Biz forum where basically a panel of industry professionals commented about the current state of the industry here and what to do about it. I think this gives us a lot to talk about too.

While there are a ton of topics that I think will be cool to discuss that are specifically geared towards an actor’s growth like myself, there is a lot of content for me to go over. Everything from comparing the Vancouver film industry to other markets and what we as actors can do for our career growth. So, I’ll start it off with this one.

This is a footage I took during the introduction where it was the casting director Stuart Aikins. He is actually the person that casts the Twilight movie that was shot here. For me, he mentioned what I thought was the underlying message of the night for all actors I’d say. Essentially, we as actors need to take this opportunity to create our own work and to learn other skills as well. Here is a clip of the speech:

Funny thing is too that I actually told my acting coach that I was seriously considering trying to find a group of actors and other people that want to seriously make something on the web so that we can make our own future. Cause in many ways for me personally going to like workshops and doing the same old doesn’t seem to have produced dramatic results thus far.

Guess the only tricky thing about this is that many people are usually super enthusiastic about starting something but then never follow through with it in the end. So, it’s a matter of trying to find people that are willing to be just as dedicated and hungry as you are to succeed. One can argue that you can always just do something solo, but I would love to work with a group of people personally.