Cutlery is no longer the mystery it once was; F ate her porridge ambidexterously today, a spoon in each hand. "Cha cha cha cha cha," she said said later, heading towards me over the carpet. In one hand, she had a toy plastic knife, and she was stabbing it up and down like a psycho in a shower.
Rather than disturbing, I thought it was cute. In itself, this is a little disturbing, I suppose, in that if she really was a pyscho in a shower I would still be tipping my head to one side and saying awww by way of explaining her behaviour to the police.
It was cute to me because I'm fairly fluent in Freyish. I knew she was saying 'chop chop chop' because that's what you do with knives. To vegetables. Not Daddy, we've had that chat. "Are you allowed to do that?" is a coded sentence intended to supply the answer "no". It's currently 80% effective. Although she's started throwing the tv remote away from herself when we come into the room, as though she was never anything to do with it in the first place.
Godfather B was here over last weekend. Having someone else in the house makes you rather more aware of how peculiar you get as a parent. To me, F's cat, bird, dog and elephant noises are easily distinguished*. To the passing stranger, they all sound kind of like 'eep'. From an external perspective, I could admit it looks slightly odd to spend lots of time in playparks putting large handfuls of woodchips into the springs under the seesaw. F has always done this. I hope one day to learn why. I tried it myself today, I must admit it does pass the time.
Catching up with friends J and A yesterday, we both agreed parenting deforms the mind. I say catching up, I really mean exchanging fourteen or fifteen disjointed sentences over the course of about three hours, usually as we rushed past each other at the playpark en route to hurling ourselves in the way of some incoming disaster or other. I brought coffee and baked goods, and got more sand in me than either.
But that's sort of normal, is the point. Breaking off half way through a sentence to run across a patio and knock a cigarette butt out of baby's tiny hands is perfectly acceptable behaviour, if a little abrupt. Most people can accept that. To me, there's no difference between that and breaking off the same, resumed sentence five minutes later to attend to F's question of "gna gna da blah blah da" instead of whoever I'm with.
Not understanding what she's asking doesn't matter. From my skewed perspective, it's just more important.
-
F has learnt a new game today, one I remember from Giles Brandreth's book 'I'm a hearty, harmless sort really! Why don't people like me more?'
Rolling on the Floor
For 2+ players
You Will Need:
A floor
A blanket
Place the blanket square on the floor. The leader shouts 'Roll roll roll roll roll roll roll roll!" and lies on the blanket, rocking and rolling back and forwards. Everyone else must join in laughing hysterically, or the leader earns a free massive tantrum. The winner is the first person to break something they'd forgotten was in their pockets, e.g. a phone or their keys. Play continues indefinitely. What fun!
-
It's nearly the holidays. Bring it.
*Which reminds me of a family joke, much beloved of my dad when we were kids. What's the difference between a weasel and a stoat? A weasel is weasily distinguished, whilst a stoat is stoatally different.
Friday, June 27, 2014
Saturday, June 14, 2014
Filmstar - 3/3
Last chance, this.
Not just because it's the last day of filming, but also because my confidence is severely dented right now. Unless I can actually prove to myself I can still deliver clean takes regardless whatever ridiculous pressure I'm under, I will quite seriously consider whether or not I will keep on trying to be an actor.
Enough eventually gets to be enough, after all. I pull in a bit of decent extra pocket money from my voice work, no reason to stop that. Although F has deep pockets, and it never goes far. But stage and film work? Next to none these days. There are long gaps on my CV. Casting people can't vault long gaps on an acting CV. Purblind morons* that they are, they assume it means you've turned crap.
So last night, despite being in a rather shell-shocked state, my wife helped me run my lines for nearly two hours. She's rather more OCD than I am. She doesn't let approximations slip in. She doesn't take three successive perfect deliveries as a sign that it's good enough. She's a wonderful coach, and I wouldn't have managed to get this done without her. I also slightly want to punch her and then go to sleep. Tough luck, Hogg, you don't always get what you want.
So our first shoot of the day is in a packaging warehouse. True to form, the director has picked a loud environment full of curious employees in which the set is constantly being moved. Although to be fair, this lot express their curiosity with the occasional sideways glance as they robotically load boxes into other boxes, perhaps because their boss is babysitting us.
There are a lot of heavy goods, oil drums, loosely stacked pallets and speeding forklift trucks around. Everybody is required to wear high visibility jackets and protective gear. Not me, I'm not really a person. I'm just a talking puppet with shit hair. After putting the hi-vi waistcoat on, I get told to take it off and carry sandbags, because the production assistant has called in sick.
Forty to fifty takes later, my confidence is entirely restored. Okay, it's taken us forever and a half, but it wasn't my fault this time. Two or three fluffed takes, yes. But by god, I know these lines. I can say them backwards. I just did. Four fluffed takes.
No, I'm not the limiting factor today. And from a couple of quiet remarks made by the lighting chief, even if it was clear to one and all I couldn't cope yesterday, it seems like I might not have been the worst offender after all. A slim hair, I'd say, but apparently the camera equipment is still ahead of me.
Full of mounting triumph, I hit the ground running at the next shoot. We're now in a container facility in a different part of the docks. Towers of multi-coloured giant lego blocks loom in all directions. I am asked to emerge from one, glide confidently across a stretch of open ground and finish with a backdrop of bustling loading cranes at work.
Predictably, the set is full of gigantic lorries. They keep stealing our containers. Ever seen a container-shifting forklift? I hadn't. By god, they're an intimidating sight. The fork is the same width as the average two-lane road. Half the time, it has something the size of a caravan dangling loosely from its jaws. The whole monstrous contraption looks like something Ripley would use to ensure Aliens never had any sequels. I wish she had.
Bored with the comparitive ease of trying to get a clean take in our shifting scenery, the director decides to up the ante. I am now to glide confidently across a stretch of open ground, leap jauntily on to one of these uberforklifts, pat it on the side as one would a docile horse and then disappear heroically into the sunset as it drives off, oblivious to the corrugated container wobbling two storeys above my head or the fact that I'm desperately clinging on to the side of an accelerating tractor.
I mean, okay, they only go about fifteen miles an hour or so at the absolute most, it's hardly Extreme Forklift Surfing. All the same, the tires are taller than my head, which I incidentally note would fit neatly into the gaps between the treads. And this isn't even part of the scheduled scene.
For some reason (insane bravado), I do this entirely unplanned and un-safety-checked stunt anyway. I nail it in four takes flat before it can do the same to me, and I feel like a king amonst men. Damocles, specifically.
It's plain sailing after that. Up and down an office lobby, filled with the ebb and flow of rubbernecking deskjockeys. For three hours, because the cardboard box towers I'm supposed to carry for this composite scene haven't been built yet, so I have to wait about for the crew to rig them together from gaffer tape and optimism. I retain my lines throughout, although my deliveries get tired, bored and irritable before the end.
- You're looking very red and sweaty, can you do something about it? the director asks me.
"The red is sunburn, the sweat is sunblock," I say tartly.
- Well, you looked kind of angry in your last take. Smile more for this one.
So I do. Because I'm imagining a series of tractors driving over his head.
Look, I just want to reiterate to any starry-eyed wannabes out there - this is not an atypical day of filming. This is just how it is. I'm writing about it to let off steam, and that includes a certain amount of bitchy whining, hyperbole and bruised ego. That given, everything here is entirely factual. I got paid for it, that's how I know, otherwise I'd assume I made it up to make people laugh.
At the end of the day, the director is pleased. The memories of my bad lines have phased out in the static joy of a wrap. Okay, I have to point out to him that there are four blocks of voice over text that he's forgotten to record. But that just means he gets to announce that it's a wrap twice. Extra value, right?
I haven't seen F for three days, because I've been leaving before she gets up and getting home after she's asleep. She grins when she sees me, points me out to mummy, then goes back to ripping up her envelope. I get a brief punishment tantrum when I try to pick her up as mummy goes out for a well-deserved drinks night with work colleagues, but my absence is soon forgiven. She runs up and down on the carpet, practising jumping on me with excited screams.
Honour, mental stability and pride in my work are all restored. I will not give up acting, not today. I'm Hogg-headed that way.
*If you're a casting director, I didn't write this. Someone else made me do it. Please give me a job. Even a chance at one. I'll do anything.
Not just because it's the last day of filming, but also because my confidence is severely dented right now. Unless I can actually prove to myself I can still deliver clean takes regardless whatever ridiculous pressure I'm under, I will quite seriously consider whether or not I will keep on trying to be an actor.
Enough eventually gets to be enough, after all. I pull in a bit of decent extra pocket money from my voice work, no reason to stop that. Although F has deep pockets, and it never goes far. But stage and film work? Next to none these days. There are long gaps on my CV. Casting people can't vault long gaps on an acting CV. Purblind morons* that they are, they assume it means you've turned crap.
So last night, despite being in a rather shell-shocked state, my wife helped me run my lines for nearly two hours. She's rather more OCD than I am. She doesn't let approximations slip in. She doesn't take three successive perfect deliveries as a sign that it's good enough. She's a wonderful coach, and I wouldn't have managed to get this done without her. I also slightly want to punch her and then go to sleep. Tough luck, Hogg, you don't always get what you want.
So our first shoot of the day is in a packaging warehouse. True to form, the director has picked a loud environment full of curious employees in which the set is constantly being moved. Although to be fair, this lot express their curiosity with the occasional sideways glance as they robotically load boxes into other boxes, perhaps because their boss is babysitting us.
There are a lot of heavy goods, oil drums, loosely stacked pallets and speeding forklift trucks around. Everybody is required to wear high visibility jackets and protective gear. Not me, I'm not really a person. I'm just a talking puppet with shit hair. After putting the hi-vi waistcoat on, I get told to take it off and carry sandbags, because the production assistant has called in sick.
Forty to fifty takes later, my confidence is entirely restored. Okay, it's taken us forever and a half, but it wasn't my fault this time. Two or three fluffed takes, yes. But by god, I know these lines. I can say them backwards. I just did. Four fluffed takes.
No, I'm not the limiting factor today. And from a couple of quiet remarks made by the lighting chief, even if it was clear to one and all I couldn't cope yesterday, it seems like I might not have been the worst offender after all. A slim hair, I'd say, but apparently the camera equipment is still ahead of me.
Full of mounting triumph, I hit the ground running at the next shoot. We're now in a container facility in a different part of the docks. Towers of multi-coloured giant lego blocks loom in all directions. I am asked to emerge from one, glide confidently across a stretch of open ground and finish with a backdrop of bustling loading cranes at work.
Predictably, the set is full of gigantic lorries. They keep stealing our containers. Ever seen a container-shifting forklift? I hadn't. By god, they're an intimidating sight. The fork is the same width as the average two-lane road. Half the time, it has something the size of a caravan dangling loosely from its jaws. The whole monstrous contraption looks like something Ripley would use to ensure Aliens never had any sequels. I wish she had.
Bored with the comparitive ease of trying to get a clean take in our shifting scenery, the director decides to up the ante. I am now to glide confidently across a stretch of open ground, leap jauntily on to one of these uberforklifts, pat it on the side as one would a docile horse and then disappear heroically into the sunset as it drives off, oblivious to the corrugated container wobbling two storeys above my head or the fact that I'm desperately clinging on to the side of an accelerating tractor.
I mean, okay, they only go about fifteen miles an hour or so at the absolute most, it's hardly Extreme Forklift Surfing. All the same, the tires are taller than my head, which I incidentally note would fit neatly into the gaps between the treads. And this isn't even part of the scheduled scene.
For some reason (insane bravado), I do this entirely unplanned and un-safety-checked stunt anyway. I nail it in four takes flat before it can do the same to me, and I feel like a king amonst men. Damocles, specifically.
It's plain sailing after that. Up and down an office lobby, filled with the ebb and flow of rubbernecking deskjockeys. For three hours, because the cardboard box towers I'm supposed to carry for this composite scene haven't been built yet, so I have to wait about for the crew to rig them together from gaffer tape and optimism. I retain my lines throughout, although my deliveries get tired, bored and irritable before the end.
- You're looking very red and sweaty, can you do something about it? the director asks me.
"The red is sunburn, the sweat is sunblock," I say tartly.
- Well, you looked kind of angry in your last take. Smile more for this one.
So I do. Because I'm imagining a series of tractors driving over his head.
Look, I just want to reiterate to any starry-eyed wannabes out there - this is not an atypical day of filming. This is just how it is. I'm writing about it to let off steam, and that includes a certain amount of bitchy whining, hyperbole and bruised ego. That given, everything here is entirely factual. I got paid for it, that's how I know, otherwise I'd assume I made it up to make people laugh.
At the end of the day, the director is pleased. The memories of my bad lines have phased out in the static joy of a wrap. Okay, I have to point out to him that there are four blocks of voice over text that he's forgotten to record. But that just means he gets to announce that it's a wrap twice. Extra value, right?
I haven't seen F for three days, because I've been leaving before she gets up and getting home after she's asleep. She grins when she sees me, points me out to mummy, then goes back to ripping up her envelope. I get a brief punishment tantrum when I try to pick her up as mummy goes out for a well-deserved drinks night with work colleagues, but my absence is soon forgiven. She runs up and down on the carpet, practising jumping on me with excited screams.
Honour, mental stability and pride in my work are all restored. I will not give up acting, not today. I'm Hogg-headed that way.
*If you're a casting director, I didn't write this. Someone else made me do it. Please give me a job. Even a chance at one. I'll do anything.
Friday, June 13, 2014
Filmstar - 2/3
The Norwegian border is lovely at this time of year. - Ah, smell that! the DoP says as we slide out of the minivan at 0800. We all do.
It's somewhere between rapeseed pollen, manure, diesel exhaust, decaying horseflesh and dogshit, I judge. The DoP immediately catches flack for making us all inhale the cloying stench. But it's not his fault, there's really no escape from it here at border control.
The first scene today is outside another busy workplace. I strut my stuff outside the glass windows of a customs office, with a row of pasty white truckers staring out at me like doped cows. Some of them even chew, cud-like. Snus, probably.
My costume came home with me the day before. Giving an actor charge of their own costume is unusual in the acting world, we're tooself-centered focussed on our craft to handle details like that well. So I left my shoes at home and had to dash back on the tram to get them before we even set off.
Bodes well, that. At least my confidence in my lines is better today. I've been drilling all the way up, at least when I wasn't nodding like a dashboard ornament, dazed by the 0500 start.
Although it's cool, clammy and cloudy when we start, by midday the sun is starting to blister through the overhanging drizzle. So far, we've got one scene. It's taken three hours - the first one for setting up equipment and watching the director stride about choosing frames, the next two for takes. After a conservative forty or so of these, my line-learning is peeling like the cloud cover. I'm better than the day before, but still confusing words and stumbling.
Forty takes doesn't help anyone. It's not all down to me, it's a broad mix of sound, lighting, camera, background movement, unexpected lawnmowers, abrupt changes of direction and hair failures. I look bizzare, I think, my hair is in the awkward half-way house between long and short where I have strange curled coils spiralling sideways away over each ear. Apparently the client liked it. An embittered part of me suspects production just didn't want to spring for a trip to a hairdresser. In my grey waistcoat, shirt sleeves and a full can of hairspray, I look like someone has electrocuted The Mentalist.
Anyway - forty takes. Yesterday left me rattled. You don't want to be the limiting factor on the production line, and I very much feel like I am. All my lines are about customs. Is there a difference between customs compliance and customs clearance? How many synonyms for 'enable' can you fit in a single PR-packed paragraph? How more secure is your core business score if you ensure you're insured in your core? What does any of what I'm saying even mean?
We don't have lunch, we need to catch the light.
Four hours later, I'm in shock. The ball has been dropped, and I'm the butterfingers.
On the northern side of the border, we've been performing to another herd of truckers. This time, I'm walking along a strip of asphalt along the end of a lorry bay. I follow the curb for a bit, then veer diagonally across towards the parked big rigs on the other side. I must time my delivery so I vanish between two cabs after asking a rhetorical questions (something balanced and informative along the lines of 'but why is the company in question just so bloody good at everything it does?').
The sun is baking down. Specifically, it is baking my eyes. From two directions, because even though I'm walking into direct sunlight, the director scuffles along next to the camera, holding a reflector screen that bounces anything missing my retinas back up my nose to scorch the underside of my sockets.
The trucks keep driving away, so the marks I'm supposed to hit change after every second take or so. My timing keeps getting off, so I deliver the rhetorical question, then cover three to four metres of road holding the same querulous eyebrow aloft in order to sustain the question.
The director then decides he wants to get a take where I deliver the lines as a truck passes behind me. He is irritated that this puts me off my stride, partly because I wasn't expecting it as I didn't understand the conversation where it was explained to me, partly because I've been nearly blindsided by a forty ton lorry. We don't ask any truckers to help, of course, so we just have to wing the timing on this. Fine, I'm winging everything by this point, lines, facial expressions, breathing, the lot. All I'm really doing is walking and talking simultaneously. Who knew it was so hard?
My brain is caught under a trio of magnifying glasses - trucker scorn, directorial ire and personal shame that my lines are falling apart. The lone banana propping up my blood sugar gives out at around three o' clock, and that's it. By the final takes, on the directorial command -Varsågod! all I can produce is blinking and spluttering.
There is no clean take of this scene. Before stomping off into a nearby ditch in a weakly contained fit of temper, the director tells the DoP to get closeups of my hands and feet in the scene, so they can use them as cutaways to splice together something functional.
We then spend the last filming slot of the day trying to get a take of a single sentence with a lorry driving past. You think there'd be plenty around, but the director has picked a stretch of motorway just on the other side of the customs pitstop. Rather than steaming along the tarmac, they all pull in to declare their goods some five hundred metres away. The few that do steam past don't have anything on the back. This spoils the artistic composition of the shot, it is alleged. Almost as much as, say, a well-steamed actor wilting into his grey serge three-piece.
The director seems oblivious to the logistics at work, however, and we keep trying. After thirty minutes of shots of skeletal lorries, he has a mild change of heart, and decides that he'll settle for a lorry that's leaving the truck stop, on the other side of the verge we're filming on.
But he doesn't give up hope of the original plan. For the next half hour, our production assistant (also our wardrobe mistress, runner, makeup artist, casting agent, extra wrangler, boom operator and floor manager) keeps a meercat-like watch on the incoming traffic. On the shout 'there's one!', we all sprint to our marks in the grass on the relevant side of the verge, hoping to set up, start shooting and time the shot right before the truck gets away.
The final moments of this deathmarch involve the director tromping back into the customs bay, plonking me down in the middle of the road and trying to get a clean take of my lines before I get hit by the next departing truck.
We do not succeed.
We go home with two scenes unbagged. Never before have I screwed up this much. In film terms, my face is Three Colours: Red, and only some of it is sunburn.
Nobody talks in the van. We're all too tired and cross, packing the BK meals we eventually get for our 1700 lunch into our grumpy faces. When we arrive back in Gothenburg, the director tells me to get some rest tonight, but spend a couple of hours running lines whilst moving around and multitasking first.
I go home. Still wearing my costume, because there's been no time or place to change.
Okay, everyone has a bad day now and again. Sometimes two in a row. But I can't really put the blame solely on the difficult conditions or the perhaps rather unreasonable hours. Turns out I just didn't know those lines well enough.
I've always had trouble learning stuff well. Innate slapdashery tends to makes me approximate at the best of times. Getting older makes it no easier - it takes so long to bed things in I run out of time. Sometimes they go in wrong as well. And it's not like I've got more free time suddenly, or extra energy to pour into this like I need. Two bad days in a row, both linked to my mnemonic limitations. Another day like this, and I'd fire myself. Even one would probably get you kicked off a film set or high-profile TV job.
A buck has stopped in my chest somewhere, and I'm wondering whether I'm really capable of this any more.
It's somewhere between rapeseed pollen, manure, diesel exhaust, decaying horseflesh and dogshit, I judge. The DoP immediately catches flack for making us all inhale the cloying stench. But it's not his fault, there's really no escape from it here at border control.
The first scene today is outside another busy workplace. I strut my stuff outside the glass windows of a customs office, with a row of pasty white truckers staring out at me like doped cows. Some of them even chew, cud-like. Snus, probably.
My costume came home with me the day before. Giving an actor charge of their own costume is unusual in the acting world, we're too
Bodes well, that. At least my confidence in my lines is better today. I've been drilling all the way up, at least when I wasn't nodding like a dashboard ornament, dazed by the 0500 start.
Although it's cool, clammy and cloudy when we start, by midday the sun is starting to blister through the overhanging drizzle. So far, we've got one scene. It's taken three hours - the first one for setting up equipment and watching the director stride about choosing frames, the next two for takes. After a conservative forty or so of these, my line-learning is peeling like the cloud cover. I'm better than the day before, but still confusing words and stumbling.
Forty takes doesn't help anyone. It's not all down to me, it's a broad mix of sound, lighting, camera, background movement, unexpected lawnmowers, abrupt changes of direction and hair failures. I look bizzare, I think, my hair is in the awkward half-way house between long and short where I have strange curled coils spiralling sideways away over each ear. Apparently the client liked it. An embittered part of me suspects production just didn't want to spring for a trip to a hairdresser. In my grey waistcoat, shirt sleeves and a full can of hairspray, I look like someone has electrocuted The Mentalist.
Anyway - forty takes. Yesterday left me rattled. You don't want to be the limiting factor on the production line, and I very much feel like I am. All my lines are about customs. Is there a difference between customs compliance and customs clearance? How many synonyms for 'enable' can you fit in a single PR-packed paragraph? How more secure is your core business score if you ensure you're insured in your core? What does any of what I'm saying even mean?
We don't have lunch, we need to catch the light.
Four hours later, I'm in shock. The ball has been dropped, and I'm the butterfingers.
On the northern side of the border, we've been performing to another herd of truckers. This time, I'm walking along a strip of asphalt along the end of a lorry bay. I follow the curb for a bit, then veer diagonally across towards the parked big rigs on the other side. I must time my delivery so I vanish between two cabs after asking a rhetorical questions (something balanced and informative along the lines of 'but why is the company in question just so bloody good at everything it does?').
The sun is baking down. Specifically, it is baking my eyes. From two directions, because even though I'm walking into direct sunlight, the director scuffles along next to the camera, holding a reflector screen that bounces anything missing my retinas back up my nose to scorch the underside of my sockets.
The trucks keep driving away, so the marks I'm supposed to hit change after every second take or so. My timing keeps getting off, so I deliver the rhetorical question, then cover three to four metres of road holding the same querulous eyebrow aloft in order to sustain the question.
The director then decides he wants to get a take where I deliver the lines as a truck passes behind me. He is irritated that this puts me off my stride, partly because I wasn't expecting it as I didn't understand the conversation where it was explained to me, partly because I've been nearly blindsided by a forty ton lorry. We don't ask any truckers to help, of course, so we just have to wing the timing on this. Fine, I'm winging everything by this point, lines, facial expressions, breathing, the lot. All I'm really doing is walking and talking simultaneously. Who knew it was so hard?
My brain is caught under a trio of magnifying glasses - trucker scorn, directorial ire and personal shame that my lines are falling apart. The lone banana propping up my blood sugar gives out at around three o' clock, and that's it. By the final takes, on the directorial command -Varsågod! all I can produce is blinking and spluttering.
There is no clean take of this scene. Before stomping off into a nearby ditch in a weakly contained fit of temper, the director tells the DoP to get closeups of my hands and feet in the scene, so they can use them as cutaways to splice together something functional.
We then spend the last filming slot of the day trying to get a take of a single sentence with a lorry driving past. You think there'd be plenty around, but the director has picked a stretch of motorway just on the other side of the customs pitstop. Rather than steaming along the tarmac, they all pull in to declare their goods some five hundred metres away. The few that do steam past don't have anything on the back. This spoils the artistic composition of the shot, it is alleged. Almost as much as, say, a well-steamed actor wilting into his grey serge three-piece.
The director seems oblivious to the logistics at work, however, and we keep trying. After thirty minutes of shots of skeletal lorries, he has a mild change of heart, and decides that he'll settle for a lorry that's leaving the truck stop, on the other side of the verge we're filming on.
But he doesn't give up hope of the original plan. For the next half hour, our production assistant (also our wardrobe mistress, runner, makeup artist, casting agent, extra wrangler, boom operator and floor manager) keeps a meercat-like watch on the incoming traffic. On the shout 'there's one!', we all sprint to our marks in the grass on the relevant side of the verge, hoping to set up, start shooting and time the shot right before the truck gets away.
The final moments of this deathmarch involve the director tromping back into the customs bay, plonking me down in the middle of the road and trying to get a clean take of my lines before I get hit by the next departing truck.
We do not succeed.
We go home with two scenes unbagged. Never before have I screwed up this much. In film terms, my face is Three Colours: Red, and only some of it is sunburn.
Nobody talks in the van. We're all too tired and cross, packing the BK meals we eventually get for our 1700 lunch into our grumpy faces. When we arrive back in Gothenburg, the director tells me to get some rest tonight, but spend a couple of hours running lines whilst moving around and multitasking first.
I go home. Still wearing my costume, because there's been no time or place to change.
Okay, everyone has a bad day now and again. Sometimes two in a row. But I can't really put the blame solely on the difficult conditions or the perhaps rather unreasonable hours. Turns out I just didn't know those lines well enough.
I've always had trouble learning stuff well. Innate slapdashery tends to makes me approximate at the best of times. Getting older makes it no easier - it takes so long to bed things in I run out of time. Sometimes they go in wrong as well. And it's not like I've got more free time suddenly, or extra energy to pour into this like I need. Two bad days in a row, both linked to my mnemonic limitations. Another day like this, and I'd fire myself. Even one would probably get you kicked off a film set or high-profile TV job.
A buck has stopped in my chest somewhere, and I'm wondering whether I'm really capable of this any more.
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Filmstar - I/3
A short break from being a stay-at-home dad this week. I'm doing some film work, a short corporate ident thing.
Learning lines. Hate it. Drudge work at its worst, it's never over. Every time I think 'ah yes! I can recite this speech three times in a row with no mistakes now, that ought to do it!', I discover that in fact I'll need to actually act during the recital. It's a right bugger.
Worst of all, nobody pays you to learn lines. They pay you to have your lines learnt, fair enough. For stage rehearsals, the time you spend working on scenes helps you learn plenty. But if you want to get properly off-book and ready to actually work on your acting, you need to put in the time at home, out of hours.
There is no excuse for not doing it. Not one. Not convincingly. Not ever.
So I was really busy over the weekend with various family-related activities, my hayfever has been really acting up, I didn't get a final script until the day before we started filming, I can't stride round the flat proclaiming my lines in the evenings because it might wake F, I had to go out drinking with my brothers-in-law the night before because we've been trying to do that for two years and finally managed to arrange it and, well, and I'm getting old and my memory is fraying.
All true. All useless.
Come the afternoon of the first day of filming, I'm in an office block somewhere in the docks on Hisingen island. The people who work here (it's their company we're working for) have been roped in as extras, because that way we can use their offices during the workday. So we're filming as they try and work - very convincing, but not especially great because they need to use photocopiers, talk to each other and generally stand about gawping in a way that actual extras get fired for.
It's not been a great start to the day. We're two hours over schedule because some of the camera equipment is faulty, and because the camera guy discovered he can't walk his steady-cam rig backwards up a flight of stairs whilst filming me. The radio mics aren't very good, they pick up a more of my clothing rustling than my lines. They gaffer it to my chest hair to counter this. Every extra in the room winces when they realise it doesn't work and rip it off again. It's stiflingly hot outside. People keep having to repeat direction to me in various languages, because they know I understand a minimal amount of Swedish and I'm stubbornly trying to speak as much as I can.
But I'm mildly hungover, very tired, out of practice at camera acting (over a year since I last filmed anything) and more than usually confused.
And I don't know my lines well enough.
We do about forty takes of a scene where I walk along a corridor, spouting eulogies on the corporate support team, then vanish behind a glass screen. I have to keep talking behind the screen, on which various computer graphics will appear, then emerge at the other side, still talking, stride confidently to a globe and spin it. And then talk some more as the camera zooms into the globe for more SFX.
And I can't. I can't get there. I learnt the lines, but in chunks that don't turn out to coincide with what the director wants because my script was just words, no scenes or stage direction. I can usually reach the glass screen, but emerge confidently? No. Even if I manage it, the globe has been gaffered to the table it's on, and if I spin it too hard, it falls off. This always happens, because I'm so glad to get there I clutch at the damn thing like I'm falling down a lift shaft.
Pressure mounts.
My brain counters this by dismounting. Increasingly, I can't get down the corridor to the screen without a fluff or a stumble. The extras start whispering to each other in disbelief, it seems to me, that we need another take. The director lets me rely on my script behind the glass, then eventually takes kicks that crutch away and does it himself.
We get there, eventually, but I'm rattled. The last scene of the day goes much better, but I suspect that's only because everyone's too tired to care.
At the end of the day, the DoP drives home with my clothes in his car before I can get changed. The film crew is only four people, and I'm counting myself as one of them, because I end up helping the director carry lighting boxes, booms and cables down to their cars. My lift home turns out to be an attempt to convince me to help drive the van to Norway tomorrow, after we stop at the van hire place. I plead illiteracy of the left-hand-drive, and wiggle out of it.
F is asleep before I'm home. I'm shattered, so I watch TV with V for a bit and hit the hay after a bit of half-arsed line-running before bed. People still tend to think acting is glamourous. To which I say glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour BATMAN, partly because this is basically an entirely typical day of screen work (even if I work at the lower end of the glamour spectrum at the best of times) and partly because I'm exhausted and my brain is fucked.
Learning lines. Hate it. Drudge work at its worst, it's never over. Every time I think 'ah yes! I can recite this speech three times in a row with no mistakes now, that ought to do it!', I discover that in fact I'll need to actually act during the recital. It's a right bugger.
Worst of all, nobody pays you to learn lines. They pay you to have your lines learnt, fair enough. For stage rehearsals, the time you spend working on scenes helps you learn plenty. But if you want to get properly off-book and ready to actually work on your acting, you need to put in the time at home, out of hours.
There is no excuse for not doing it. Not one. Not convincingly. Not ever.
So I was really busy over the weekend with various family-related activities, my hayfever has been really acting up, I didn't get a final script until the day before we started filming, I can't stride round the flat proclaiming my lines in the evenings because it might wake F, I had to go out drinking with my brothers-in-law the night before because we've been trying to do that for two years and finally managed to arrange it and, well, and I'm getting old and my memory is fraying.
All true. All useless.
Come the afternoon of the first day of filming, I'm in an office block somewhere in the docks on Hisingen island. The people who work here (it's their company we're working for) have been roped in as extras, because that way we can use their offices during the workday. So we're filming as they try and work - very convincing, but not especially great because they need to use photocopiers, talk to each other and generally stand about gawping in a way that actual extras get fired for.
It's not been a great start to the day. We're two hours over schedule because some of the camera equipment is faulty, and because the camera guy discovered he can't walk his steady-cam rig backwards up a flight of stairs whilst filming me. The radio mics aren't very good, they pick up a more of my clothing rustling than my lines. They gaffer it to my chest hair to counter this. Every extra in the room winces when they realise it doesn't work and rip it off again. It's stiflingly hot outside. People keep having to repeat direction to me in various languages, because they know I understand a minimal amount of Swedish and I'm stubbornly trying to speak as much as I can.
But I'm mildly hungover, very tired, out of practice at camera acting (over a year since I last filmed anything) and more than usually confused.
And I don't know my lines well enough.
We do about forty takes of a scene where I walk along a corridor, spouting eulogies on the corporate support team, then vanish behind a glass screen. I have to keep talking behind the screen, on which various computer graphics will appear, then emerge at the other side, still talking, stride confidently to a globe and spin it. And then talk some more as the camera zooms into the globe for more SFX.
And I can't. I can't get there. I learnt the lines, but in chunks that don't turn out to coincide with what the director wants because my script was just words, no scenes or stage direction. I can usually reach the glass screen, but emerge confidently? No. Even if I manage it, the globe has been gaffered to the table it's on, and if I spin it too hard, it falls off. This always happens, because I'm so glad to get there I clutch at the damn thing like I'm falling down a lift shaft.
Pressure mounts.
My brain counters this by dismounting. Increasingly, I can't get down the corridor to the screen without a fluff or a stumble. The extras start whispering to each other in disbelief, it seems to me, that we need another take. The director lets me rely on my script behind the glass, then eventually takes kicks that crutch away and does it himself.
We get there, eventually, but I'm rattled. The last scene of the day goes much better, but I suspect that's only because everyone's too tired to care.
At the end of the day, the DoP drives home with my clothes in his car before I can get changed. The film crew is only four people, and I'm counting myself as one of them, because I end up helping the director carry lighting boxes, booms and cables down to their cars. My lift home turns out to be an attempt to convince me to help drive the van to Norway tomorrow, after we stop at the van hire place. I plead illiteracy of the left-hand-drive, and wiggle out of it.
F is asleep before I'm home. I'm shattered, so I watch TV with V for a bit and hit the hay after a bit of half-arsed line-running before bed. People still tend to think acting is glamourous. To which I say glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour BATMAN, partly because this is basically an entirely typical day of screen work (even if I work at the lower end of the glamour spectrum at the best of times) and partly because I'm exhausted and my brain is fucked.
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