‘appen I’m by the seaside again.
I didn’t really anticipate this, you know what I’m like with planning. Suddenly this morning I had to pack a bag for a week. Cat must be sat. I knew about this in plenty of time but somehow only packed this morning. I had this nice tape come in that’s bang on the money for me. It took all my thinking. I wanted to give it the time it needed. I sent a copy of the finished product to Minnie as she and Rhys provided the other roles as an audio track that I then edited for time. You lose the immediacy of a live actor if you’re working to a track, but actually you gain a huge amount. The reader will be an actor and will therefore send a smart line reading, and if there are interpretation options they might well record a few takes. Then you can edit the pauses. I’ve got it all sorted now. It’s fluent. iPad for sound. Lights for lights. Phone to record on selfie mode so I can monitor as I work. Twisted Wave on iPad to edit pauses and eventually live play the recorded voices – I tend to hold my iPad in one hand unless the shot needs both my hands. If you play the other characters through the recording device they might be louder than you. YouCut to edit.
Gone are the days where I had to fly back from Portugal early in order to do a commercial casting. And then the times when there were two castings in a day across town and the first one for FORCEFACE SPIKED CONDOMS is running late and you aren’t sure you want to be the face of spiked condoms really anyway and it’ll take you an hour to get to the theatre casting across town and if you don’t go in and say “Spongle spingle plop!” to camera with your serious face well and truly on, then the casting director will be pissed off with you, but if you stay then you’ll bruise the other job which is the career job and thus, really, the only one that matters in the final analysis.
I improvised a cunning studio with this tiny background I had ordered online. It needed to be in exactly the right place as it was so tiny that it could only just frame the shot. I tried to run with it, I gaffered a spoon to a fork and jammed the fork into a screw in the wall. Then I attached two riding crops gaffered together through a small hole below the straps of the background. I made it work, wondered if I was insane or a genius. Then after the very first take the whole thing collapsed when the screw got pulled out by gravity so I took a picture off the wall and did it against a slightly less clean background. Still looked great. My new LED lights are very handy, even if natural light is always better. I recorded this morning and it was grey so they helped. It’s a whole new world but there’s a joy in it. Karaoke self tapes … I got to act with Minnie, obliquely. I learnt it, I always do, but it can be consuming. I’ve got friends who swear by autocue, but I’m not getting enough auditions yet to make it necessary. Would be great if I was, eh?
AlBarclay 