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Thrive
November is usually a pretty busy month for me on a personal level because I have preparations for my grandparents’ Christmas suppers, I now participate in Nanowrimo (where I have to write 50 000 words in a month) and I generally start panicking about all of my resolutions for the year that I am nowhere near completing. This year, I had all of those things, plus I was actually going out and doing things with people, and working at my two very awesome Thrival Jobs. Even I usually refer to them as Survival Jobs, as in the things you have to do to make money until your dream job starts…
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Coffee, Country, Café
I think we have already established that there are few things I enjoy more than being on set, so it was really fun to film a short a few weekends ago. On the Saturday, we met at a farm about an hour North of Montreal, where I roasted coffee beans, climbed a tree and filmed some scenes. We had a general idea of what we needed for each shot, but the dialogue was completely improvised. The story was a living thing, changing and growing as the day went on. I also had to repeatedly drive into the shot, which is definitely not on my list of things I love to…
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Ups and Downs
I am best at learning lines when I get to run them with another person. I can read them on the paper, write them out…doing vocal warm ups with them would probably be the next best thing, but absolutely nothing beats going over the scene with a scene partner. It gives you someone to play off of, and you feel like you’re not just learning lines, you’re having a conversation. Which is why I was kind of worried when I found out my scene partner wasn’t able to make it to class on Tuesday. We had both missed the first week, so that night we were supposed to run it…
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All Kinds of Reading
I have a week’s worth of fun acting things to share with you 🙂 First off, I filmed a few scenes for a horror movie last weekend. It’s the one where we have no script, so the director basically tells us what has to happen in the scene, and then we improvise. What makes it even more interesting is that it is being filmed on a gopro, and my costar is the one filming, in character, so I have no idea what I look like, or even when the camera will be on me. This is a project I really cannot wait to see the finished product of, because it…
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Begin Again :)
Yesterday I felt like an actor. And a writer. It was wonderful 😉 My workday officially started with an audition for a horror movie, without a script, where we are filming ourselves, sort of like The Blair Witch project. We will have characters, and a storyline, but the dialogue will come from our own reactions, in the moment. This is what he explained when I got there, then had me audition with some sides he had sent. I used to always learn my lines without really paying much attention to my scene partner’s lines, which you can get away with most of the time, but unless you are doing it…
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Back, with Knaps
After two weeks off, it was nice to get back to Stage Combat on Saturday. We learnt strikes (punches made to look fake for the stage), as well as a few combinations of the 5 of them (jab, straight, cross, hook and upper cut). It was a lot of fun, especially when we were doing them with a partner (as opposed to just striking into thin air). Does that make me a terrible person? It’s just a lot easier when you have someone to interact with and play off of. Unfortunately, my upper chest is not so pleased with being back. In stage combat, the noise you create to make…
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Another CD Audition
My plan for last Friday was to go work at McGill, with one of my favorite scenarios, then go to the Forum to see Keep Calm and Make Art at 4:30, as part of the Montreal World Film Festival. Instead, on Thursday night, I got a call from my agent, for an audition on Friday at 5. It was for not only a real Casting Director, which had been one of my goals, but one of the best here in Montreal. It was for the type of character that terrifies me, and I probably would not have submitted myself for, but since they were asking, I accepted. More than anything,…
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Nanos, Auditions and Combat
I have completed another Camp Nanowrimo, although my word counts keep being less than what I need to actually finish the stories. This means I will have to up my target word count and write more come November 😉 I also ended up writing a completely different story than the one I had originally intended to. I might need to work on writing what I need to rather than what I am inspired to. Or perhaps just find a way to reconcile the two. In addition to a lot of time spent writing, I worked on my demo reel, caught up on shows, got inspired by a multitude of acting…
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Ron Leach Workshop
I have been trying to take part in this workshop with Ron Leach for years, but the dates have never worked out, or the workshop got cancelled. Which is why I was so excited to finally be able to learn from him last weekend! I had the schedule for the weekend, and I saw we would be watching Shurtleff on Friday night, so I was ready. Having read Audition, and taken multiple workshops with Tom Todoroff, I know all my guideposts, in numerical order, and was fully prepared to list them off. I even reread Audition, so it would be fresh. This is not what happened. It started off with…
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A 40 hour week :)
A while ago I was talking to my brother about my acting career, and he told me that since acting is my career, it isn’t enough to be working a few hours every day at it, I need to be putting in at least 40 hours a week. I needed to make it my full time job to get jobs. I recently started to tally my hours spent acting, and this week I got my 40 hours. For the first time since I started keeping track of them. The theory is that by counting the hours, I will treat it like more of a job and actually spend at least…