Just in time, the doorbell rang. I ordered a ring light. My two halogens are useful for balancing shadow, but I needed a central light and a tripod for my phone and this thing kind of does both. That’s the plus side. In close up it can reflect a halo in your eyes which breaks the world so it needs careful handling. It’ll take me a while to make sense of how to get the best out of it, but I pressed it into service on Zoom this afternoon for its first outing.
A quick meeting. An online recall. My first.
A casting director I like, an actress I kind of recognised called Claire and a director I’ve wanted to meet for a while. All of us, gathered on Zoom, simply for a reaction shot. I literally just had to look from one side of the camera to the other. Loads of money is riding on this. How dare you tell me this is a ridiculous way of earning a living. I bloody love it. When it works. Now we’ve done the thing we came there to do. We’ve looked and it’s been recorded. We will now wait and either hear or not hear. The only comfort is that I know I did enough that any decision will come down to the cut of my face rather than the cut of my jib. It’ll stand or fall on which actors look the best together… I would like to be one of them thankyouplease. But the important part of the waiting game is to try to forget about it. It’s like “The Game” where you can only lose if you remember you’re playing it. Sorry.
Sometimes it can take weeks to hear from an audition one way or another. Often you just watch as day one of the shoot ticks closer, and you only know for sure when it clicks past. If they haven’t told you the shoot dates it’s even less exact.
One time it was two months from a very very strange recall that I got a call telling me I’d be flying to Bangkok. I’d already buried the memory of the meeting and chalked it up to experience. It ended up being the audition where I learnt that my monitor on myself in auditions is probably the worst in the room. That’s cool. Means I can rationally try to forget about it just as soon as I’ve dumped it here. Just don’t ask me if I got it. I’ll probably volunteer it if I did. And if I didn’t I’d probably prefer to forget it ever happened. Just as if I was playing that ridiculous thoughtgame that some of you have just lost because of me.
It’s a big old job right now without a dedicated studio space in my flat. About an hour of moving furniture and setting up lights. Another half an hour of sound-check. Twenty minutes of watching the clock and waiting. Ten minutes in an online waiting room fretting that maybe I wasn’t getting in because of a problem with my internet. About 2 minutes of niceties. About a minute of practice. A minute of shot, with a crucial 1.8 seconds of footage. 30 seconds of polite goodbyes. Then hours of adrenaline unwinding.
A pint or six usually does the trick, but that’s not on the menu. Instead I had a cup of tea and played computer games and suddenly it was evening and I was hungry.
Delivery curry, six episodes of South Park, and now I’m in the bath pushing the last of the adrenaline onto the screen of my phone like this. Yaaaarrrk. Bleeeeeuuuuurgggh.
That’s better.
How was your day?
AlBarclay 