Hot summer, this one. Sweden has been basking in temperatures of thirty plus, if by basking you mean 'having massive forest fires'. We had sweaty nappy rashes instead.
The best cure for a big red bottom is to let the owner run about airing it. This meant a certain amount of involuntary potty training. F has an idea about potties. She knows you sit on one. Sometimes she tries to scootch it along as if it has wheels, sometimes she pulls it apart to investigate the subtle inner workings. Sometimes she takes Bunbun (now the settled name for her beloved plushy bunny), shoves her face first into the bowl and then sits on top. So we have a way to go.
Much of this way seems paved with poop. Parenthood generally seems to be.
I haven't written much about poop lately. Sadly, this isn't because my life is no longer saturated in it. It's just since F started doing adult-flavour ones, it's harder to sit and write about them with the same level of insouciant bonhomie I like to promolgate in this blog. Wit fails me, all I can think of it fatuous comparisons to chemical spills.
'Gong farmer' came low on my teenage list of dream jobs. Low it remains.
I have scraped handfuls of nutty slack off my parents' conservatory floor. Even with a nappy on, muddy algal sludge still managed to ooze round a loose corner to be smeared over my trouser legs during what I thought was an unusually affectionate hug. There was something that looked like a chocolate-coated pear under our balcony table. It wasn't.
The nappy rash is much better. I suppose that means having to hunt for landmines round our flat every so often was worth it. I don't know what produces more heartsink, the conversation that goes
J - Do you need a nappy change?
F - (reeking) Nuh.
or this one
F - (proudly pointing to her tummy and running up to me) Poop poop poop poop poop!
So far, she only runs to me with this diagnostic. Both of us are proud that we've at least taught our daughter this much on potty matters. Some of us may be prouder than others.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Monday, July 21, 2014
Holidays
Was it really over two years since we last went on holiday together? My, how the time flies when you're shackled to the hard reality of househusbandry and full-time employment.
We stayed in Dunkeld, where my folks live. It's a very lovely part of Perthshire, on the river Tay. For F, of course, this was a whole wealth of firsts. From flying to foreigners, gardens to gloaming - rather than attempt some kind of exhaustive, blow-by-blow retrospective, here is a short and disordered smattering of F's First Holiday in Scotland.
V and I are understandably tense on the plane. Ryanair don't do comfort, F has never experienced ear popping, it will be horrible for everyone if she takes against it.
She babbles excitedly all the way through the airport, says 'nyyeeeow' when we take off and then sleeps through the landing. What a waste of six hours of high-quality parental stress.
F gets to sleep in my old crib, one that Farfar made himself. It has a carved elephant and pig to watch you sleeping, and a side that flips down for easy baby access. When told this is where she'll be sleeping, F hurls her beloved bunny in, pats the mattress with both hands to assess bounciness and then chortles happily.
A few days later when she's cranky, I put F in for an afternoon nap. Much against her wishes - there's a five minute period of screaming, yelling and knocking noises as she tries to shake her way free. Then there's a short quiet pause followed by a loud clatter, a big thump and a long yell.
F has worked the latches and opened the side of the cot, it turns out, tipping herself out in the process. She's more shocked than hurt, much like V and me are. Good - now we can be anxious when she's asleep too. The cot gets turned with the flapping side against the wall and tied up with garden string for good measure.
Up at Rumbling Bridge, F paddles her feet in a chilly Scottish river and learns to throw stones into deep pools, ploomp. It's a beautiful afternoon, sun slanting through the trees into the dark brown water, midges weaving about as I carry F over rocks and under boughs to the safest places to dunk her feet. Farfar and Farmor are there too, it's very peaceful and happy.
Cousin S wants the green plastic golf club F has just dropped to be kept hidden. I ask why. "Actually, Uncle J," she says, "I just don't want her to play with it." I ask why again, but that's all the answer I'm getting right now.
Actually, S and F get on very well, sitting and mixing mud pies together in the garden or just running about on the lawn together. F is quite taken with her tall blond cousin, she follows behind copying her and giggling when acknowledged.
Gardens aren't new to F. Having one on tap, so to speak, is. It's a popular move. First thing after breakfast, she goes to the back door and says "run run run run run" until you let her out and chase her round the lawn. Two weeks of this gives her newfound motor confidence, she's trying out tiptoeing and stamping for the first time before we leave. The latter not just in the context of tantrums, amazingly, just stamping her right foot only on the floor for fun.
Old college friends N and J, with their families, come over for a day to catch up. Insofar as spending an afternoon giving children of various sizes and ages piggybacks all round Dunkeld is catching up. I think I exhanged a record of three sentences with N, one of which was 'great to see you, bye!'
F takes V's chocolate ice cream cone off her, to add to her collection. She's just eaten the last bit of mine. Her own is half-eaten and half-molten, flowing in luxurious pools over her face, hands and table setting. Cafe customers on the tables round us are turning to look, because F is not quiet in her appreciation of a good thing. There's a few disapproving faces, fusty old Scots muttering about messy children. Stuff 'em. Anyone who begrudges someone loud enjoyment of a first chocolate ice cream cone needs a good dowsing in sticky gloop.
There's a Medieval Festival at Dunfermline Abbey. With jousting! Once somebody's suggested it to me, I insist on making everyone go. Look, it wasn't my idea. If you don't want to spend a stickily hot afternoon being jostled by overweight re-enactors in jerkins, don't let me have wind of it in the first place, that's my advice.
I've never seen live jousting, despite having worked as a show knight at one of London's worst available medieval experiences. Sadly, this is rubbish, being more of a kid-friendly joust-themed knockabout, with somersaulting men-at-arms and exploding lances. F likes the horses for about five minutes, then we go and run around on lawns instead. Even I have to admit it's better.
Farfar and I go for a walk up Birnam Hill. It's a hot day, close and almost thundery in the way that Scottish hills do so well. You walk up the steep hills as though ascending into a furnace, and reach seemingly endless seas of bright green bracken.
Farfar has a mission - somewhere in the neck-deep ferns are some mysterious stones marked with cup-and-ring shaped depressions. Nobody knows their origins. Stone age? Pictish? Yithian cult? A Ponaptic fragment? I know which I favour.
If nobody knows their origins, it's perhaps because the map isn't very clear on their location either. Wading about in the bracken with big brown shield bugs pinging off our faces is great fun, if rather fruitless. We don't find all the mystery rocks, just the cup-marked ones (no rings). But we do find great swathes of juicy bilberries, which we pick until our water bottle is filled. So fruitful in some ways, I suppose.
After that, we join the ladies in a local hotel Spa for an afternoon of swimming. F likes swimming. I swoosh her about while V goes for a massage and Farmor goes jogging. Healthy.
As a treat, Farfar and Farmor buy F a ticket to see Peppa Pig's Big Splash, a live action puppet show in Perth. I sit in the foyer while V takes her in. I'm the only bloke in my age group present, although the place is packed out with mums and grandparents. This says something sad about the UK's approach to parenting, I think, but I'm too tired to think what. I'm also too glad not to be watching more Peppa Pig. F sits through both halves entranced, then we run round and round in circles on Perth's North Inch park for an hour. Which is how F approximates picnic behaviour.
V and I take a day to ourselves and stay in a decently cheap hotel in Edinburgh for a night. While we potter round shops, take in a tour of the historical Mary King's Close, get rained on and drink gin, F eats her own weight in pasta with Farfar and Farmor and blithely ignores the absence of her fretting parents as usual.
This is the first day we've had to ourselves for what, a year? I forget. Too long. It's almost like a first date, although without the same level of half-wittedly tentative conversational gambits. Having your first child already weighing on our minds is quite enough to make us half-witted anyway. We spend a fair bit of time at the hotel that evening looking at baby pictures of F and cooing, because we miss her.
She looks taller when we get back. Even if that's technically true, it's still ridiculous.
-
She sleeps through the takeoff on the way home. So do I - we were up at three to get to the airport, only to discover we'd set alarms on our Swedish phones and were actually up at two. Goddamn GMT.
F is clearly delighted to be home, even though she's had a fantastic time on holiday. And she has grown in the last two weeks, both in actual height (she can now reach the lightswitches to turn them both on and off), confidence and mastery of speech.
As is traditional with holidays, this one had an elastically long first week where everything stretched out ahead of us endlessly, then a frantic short second one where everything was suddenly over. And then we're home, everything back to routine normal.
Or as close to it as we get, at least. This is F's new favourite game she's developed out of nowhere, a game called Bake The Smurf. Cramming mummy and baby smurf head first into a cooker is normal. It must be. It's my baby playing it.
We stayed in Dunkeld, where my folks live. It's a very lovely part of Perthshire, on the river Tay. For F, of course, this was a whole wealth of firsts. From flying to foreigners, gardens to gloaming - rather than attempt some kind of exhaustive, blow-by-blow retrospective, here is a short and disordered smattering of F's First Holiday in Scotland.
-
V and I are understandably tense on the plane. Ryanair don't do comfort, F has never experienced ear popping, it will be horrible for everyone if she takes against it.
She babbles excitedly all the way through the airport, says 'nyyeeeow' when we take off and then sleeps through the landing. What a waste of six hours of high-quality parental stress.
-
A few days later when she's cranky, I put F in for an afternoon nap. Much against her wishes - there's a five minute period of screaming, yelling and knocking noises as she tries to shake her way free. Then there's a short quiet pause followed by a loud clatter, a big thump and a long yell.
F has worked the latches and opened the side of the cot, it turns out, tipping herself out in the process. She's more shocked than hurt, much like V and me are. Good - now we can be anxious when she's asleep too. The cot gets turned with the flapping side against the wall and tied up with garden string for good measure.
-
Up at Rumbling Bridge, F paddles her feet in a chilly Scottish river and learns to throw stones into deep pools, ploomp. It's a beautiful afternoon, sun slanting through the trees into the dark brown water, midges weaving about as I carry F over rocks and under boughs to the safest places to dunk her feet. Farfar and Farmor are there too, it's very peaceful and happy.
-
Cousin S wants the green plastic golf club F has just dropped to be kept hidden. I ask why. "Actually, Uncle J," she says, "I just don't want her to play with it." I ask why again, but that's all the answer I'm getting right now.
Actually, S and F get on very well, sitting and mixing mud pies together in the garden or just running about on the lawn together. F is quite taken with her tall blond cousin, she follows behind copying her and giggling when acknowledged.
-
Gardens aren't new to F. Having one on tap, so to speak, is. It's a popular move. First thing after breakfast, she goes to the back door and says "run run run run run" until you let her out and chase her round the lawn. Two weeks of this gives her newfound motor confidence, she's trying out tiptoeing and stamping for the first time before we leave. The latter not just in the context of tantrums, amazingly, just stamping her right foot only on the floor for fun.
-
Old college friends N and J, with their families, come over for a day to catch up. Insofar as spending an afternoon giving children of various sizes and ages piggybacks all round Dunkeld is catching up. I think I exhanged a record of three sentences with N, one of which was 'great to see you, bye!'
-
F takes V's chocolate ice cream cone off her, to add to her collection. She's just eaten the last bit of mine. Her own is half-eaten and half-molten, flowing in luxurious pools over her face, hands and table setting. Cafe customers on the tables round us are turning to look, because F is not quiet in her appreciation of a good thing. There's a few disapproving faces, fusty old Scots muttering about messy children. Stuff 'em. Anyone who begrudges someone loud enjoyment of a first chocolate ice cream cone needs a good dowsing in sticky gloop.
-
There's a Medieval Festival at Dunfermline Abbey. With jousting! Once somebody's suggested it to me, I insist on making everyone go. Look, it wasn't my idea. If you don't want to spend a stickily hot afternoon being jostled by overweight re-enactors in jerkins, don't let me have wind of it in the first place, that's my advice.
I've never seen live jousting, despite having worked as a show knight at one of London's worst available medieval experiences. Sadly, this is rubbish, being more of a kid-friendly joust-themed knockabout, with somersaulting men-at-arms and exploding lances. F likes the horses for about five minutes, then we go and run around on lawns instead. Even I have to admit it's better.
-
Farfar and I go for a walk up Birnam Hill. It's a hot day, close and almost thundery in the way that Scottish hills do so well. You walk up the steep hills as though ascending into a furnace, and reach seemingly endless seas of bright green bracken.
Farfar has a mission - somewhere in the neck-deep ferns are some mysterious stones marked with cup-and-ring shaped depressions. Nobody knows their origins. Stone age? Pictish? Yithian cult? A Ponaptic fragment? I know which I favour.
If nobody knows their origins, it's perhaps because the map isn't very clear on their location either. Wading about in the bracken with big brown shield bugs pinging off our faces is great fun, if rather fruitless. We don't find all the mystery rocks, just the cup-marked ones (no rings). But we do find great swathes of juicy bilberries, which we pick until our water bottle is filled. So fruitful in some ways, I suppose.
After that, we join the ladies in a local hotel Spa for an afternoon of swimming. F likes swimming. I swoosh her about while V goes for a massage and Farmor goes jogging. Healthy.
-
As a treat, Farfar and Farmor buy F a ticket to see Peppa Pig's Big Splash, a live action puppet show in Perth. I sit in the foyer while V takes her in. I'm the only bloke in my age group present, although the place is packed out with mums and grandparents. This says something sad about the UK's approach to parenting, I think, but I'm too tired to think what. I'm also too glad not to be watching more Peppa Pig. F sits through both halves entranced, then we run round and round in circles on Perth's North Inch park for an hour. Which is how F approximates picnic behaviour.
-
V and I take a day to ourselves and stay in a decently cheap hotel in Edinburgh for a night. While we potter round shops, take in a tour of the historical Mary King's Close, get rained on and drink gin, F eats her own weight in pasta with Farfar and Farmor and blithely ignores the absence of her fretting parents as usual.
This is the first day we've had to ourselves for what, a year? I forget. Too long. It's almost like a first date, although without the same level of half-wittedly tentative conversational gambits. Having your first child already weighing on our minds is quite enough to make us half-witted anyway. We spend a fair bit of time at the hotel that evening looking at baby pictures of F and cooing, because we miss her.
She looks taller when we get back. Even if that's technically true, it's still ridiculous.
-
She sleeps through the takeoff on the way home. So do I - we were up at three to get to the airport, only to discover we'd set alarms on our Swedish phones and were actually up at two. Goddamn GMT.
F is clearly delighted to be home, even though she's had a fantastic time on holiday. And she has grown in the last two weeks, both in actual height (she can now reach the lightswitches to turn them both on and off), confidence and mastery of speech.
As is traditional with holidays, this one had an elastically long first week where everything stretched out ahead of us endlessly, then a frantic short second one where everything was suddenly over. And then we're home, everything back to routine normal.
Or as close to it as we get, at least. This is F's new favourite game she's developed out of nowhere, a game called Bake The Smurf. Cramming mummy and baby smurf head first into a cooker is normal. It must be. It's my baby playing it.
 |
| Smurfia Plath |
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Faustus Act 1 Sc 3.76
During the heights of the Cold War, a top US agent working behind Iron Curtain managed to get himself captured. The KGB agents who took him were determined to get their money's worth for the time and trouble spent bringing him in. He was taken to a euphemistically-named Debriefing Centre somewhere in the Urals and tortured extensively for months. His name (or code name, at any rate, the stuff I read wasn't entirely sure) was John G Franklin.
Franklin managed to resist his torture, somehow. Conventional methods (insofar as torture can ever be considered conventional) weren't going to do it. But the KGB didn't give up. Instead, they worked with what they knew of Franklin, or his working persona at least - that of a typical family business man. Using that, they devised a new approach.
They released him into a carefully monitered labyrinth, specially built under the Urals. It had no entrance or exit, just the appearance of such. Although there were places he could rest, feed or relieve himself, reaching them required significant feats of nearly-superhuman endurance. Constant white noise, undercut with sudden violent blasts of sound, was present in every chamber, along with harshly artificial overhead lighting.
Everywhere he looked, Franklin was presented with the reminders of freedom that he no longer enjoyed. Pictures of smiling, happy people in expensive clothes, eating and drinking impossibly luscious food. None of this was the masterstroke in the Russian plan, however. That was to harness explosives to Franklin's chest with thick and indestrucible webbing, explaining to him that entering the wrong room at the wrong time, or exposing the explosives to the 'wrong stimuli' would cause an instant and unpleasant death.
Unless, of course, he cooperated. Which he did after only two days.
It may not seem like a particularly remarkable form of torture to you now, in an age where waterboarding, sensory deprivation and so forth are more widely known. Which goes to show you how ahead of its time it was - the KGB's methods were so widely adopted and expanded upon that they're now universally acknowledged. The influences they've had on modern culture are far wider than previously accepted. Books, games, even architecture.
I myself have had firsthand experience of this. Only today, I went round Ullared's massive indoor retail outlet for seven straight hours with V in full-throated shopping frenzy mode and F in a pram.
If that place wasn't devised by insane torturers expressly trying to damage, if not entirely quash, the human spirit of any entering it, then I don't know insane torturers. An eternity of aisles crammed with a random assortment of things you think you might like but probably could be forced to admit you don't need, all at low low prices. Queues for everything! Queues for food, queues for changing rooms, queues for loos. Queues to get into the queues! My blood runs cold even now on thinking on it! Ahahahahahahahaaa!
Franklin, if you ever existed beyond a pointlessly long run-up to this venting of anguish after a long, long day, then my hat would be off to you. I called the KGB about six hours ago and offered to tell them everything. They were very politely confused in their rejection of my offer, but I think they're just being coy. I shall call them back now and try again.
Franklin managed to resist his torture, somehow. Conventional methods (insofar as torture can ever be considered conventional) weren't going to do it. But the KGB didn't give up. Instead, they worked with what they knew of Franklin, or his working persona at least - that of a typical family business man. Using that, they devised a new approach.
They released him into a carefully monitered labyrinth, specially built under the Urals. It had no entrance or exit, just the appearance of such. Although there were places he could rest, feed or relieve himself, reaching them required significant feats of nearly-superhuman endurance. Constant white noise, undercut with sudden violent blasts of sound, was present in every chamber, along with harshly artificial overhead lighting.
Everywhere he looked, Franklin was presented with the reminders of freedom that he no longer enjoyed. Pictures of smiling, happy people in expensive clothes, eating and drinking impossibly luscious food. None of this was the masterstroke in the Russian plan, however. That was to harness explosives to Franklin's chest with thick and indestrucible webbing, explaining to him that entering the wrong room at the wrong time, or exposing the explosives to the 'wrong stimuli' would cause an instant and unpleasant death.
Unless, of course, he cooperated. Which he did after only two days.
It may not seem like a particularly remarkable form of torture to you now, in an age where waterboarding, sensory deprivation and so forth are more widely known. Which goes to show you how ahead of its time it was - the KGB's methods were so widely adopted and expanded upon that they're now universally acknowledged. The influences they've had on modern culture are far wider than previously accepted. Books, games, even architecture.
I myself have had firsthand experience of this. Only today, I went round Ullared's massive indoor retail outlet for seven straight hours with V in full-throated shopping frenzy mode and F in a pram.
If that place wasn't devised by insane torturers expressly trying to damage, if not entirely quash, the human spirit of any entering it, then I don't know insane torturers. An eternity of aisles crammed with a random assortment of things you think you might like but probably could be forced to admit you don't need, all at low low prices. Queues for everything! Queues for food, queues for changing rooms, queues for loos. Queues to get into the queues! My blood runs cold even now on thinking on it! Ahahahahahahahaaa!
Franklin, if you ever existed beyond a pointlessly long run-up to this venting of anguish after a long, long day, then my hat would be off to you. I called the KGB about six hours ago and offered to tell them everything. They were very politely confused in their rejection of my offer, but I think they're just being coy. I shall call them back now and try again.
Friday, June 27, 2014
Priorities
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.
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.
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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