A night of fitful sleep. My agent is going great guns at the moment. Even though my passport expires imminently, they are getting me through the door for interesting and apposite roles.
Problem is I’m very busy. My head is full. I had three scenes due self taped at ten this morning. Normally I’d find a time to do them before bed, but today I had to take the whole process right to the wire. I set my alarm for 6am.
When I know I have an earlier start than usual I think I sleep even worse than I usually do. I woke up muzzy. No coffee in the house. And I had to set up my home studio.
I need a better system. In order to access the clean wall for backdrop, I had to unscrew the clip frame for the four Mucha prints. They all fell out while I was doing it, as you can’t unscrew it without opening it. Then I had to move my mirror, push the chaise into the corner, take everything off the desk and put it in the corridor. Then it’s assembling all the tripods and building the two lights. Screwing in the huge bulbs and covering. Then arranging it all so there’s not too much shadow. By the time I had it all set up it was gone 8.
Squeeze into a vintage suit. Contact lenses. Water in the hair. Shave – but keep the tache as I’m penciled for the advert. Thankfully it works for my guy this morning.
Scene One was just my character, so – very quickly shot and into scene two. It was during scene two that I woke up though. It was another monologue but I hadn’t had all the time I needed for the lines to sink in so I needed to focus. Somehow I’ve run out of coffee with no time to buy it so the easy wakey juice wasn’t in my system. Adrenaline started to do the job. By half eight I was done with the first two but scenes. Then I realised that other people had to speak in the third one. I was on my own.
I ended up recording the other people’s lines with gaps on my iPad and then pushing play on the audio mid-scene and hoping that the gaps I left were roughly the right length. By nine I had finished, an hour before the deadline, despite my phone running out of juice and largely having to pick up the lines on the fly. Then I had to watch myself (yuk) and rename the decent takes and decide what to send. By about quarter past nine I had decided that whatever the hell I was doing in the first scene when I was still asleep it was nothing to do with the character and delivery style I hit on later. The guy’s a barrister. He has his ways. So I reshot. Then review, rename, finalise, WeTransfer to my agent. The transfer landed in their inbox at precisely 10am. Then I had to deconstruct all the lights and tripods, move all the furniture back and try to put the fecking picture back up.
I failed. I’ve given up. I haven’t the energy for putting the picture back. I’ll need to take it off the wall completely, lie it flat and force it to behave. That’s what you get for buying the cheapest frame possible.
And that was the day really, finished at ten. With all the audition adrenaline going slowly stale in my system from then on, I wasn’t in a practical headspace. Plus I had to do lots of reading ghost stories out loud to myself for a thing on Monday. But it whizzed by.
Another prospect. Another possibility of an interesting direction for a while. It’s sent.
And now my split second decision to keep the tache before meeting for the waiter – it’s starting to get me into one of those spirals where I’ll end up having a moustache for months because there’s always something in the can with it waiting on a final decision and it’ll keep rolling over.
Still. It kinda suits me. Or so I tell myself.
AlBarclay 