Tuesday, 18 January 2005
6:20pm
| A |
Yesterday was my first day on the job as an "extra" or "background artist" as they like to call it. There is a fairly small TV/film production company here in San Diego and they happen to be producing a couple of nationally televised TV series, one of which happens to be about high schoolers. They were looking for some extras to play high school students, and I figured I could put my youngish looks to good use, so I signed up, mainly taking it as an opportunity to see how a real, professional film set (with some decent budget behind it!) runs. And I figure this was the easiest (and likely, only) way to get on set without having to have any kind of connections. Plus they pay money, and though it may be a fairly modest paycheck, it's more than I would have made sitting around at home watching TV, that's for sure.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for me was making the 5:30AM call time. Getting up at 4:30AM with enough sleep to last through what I figured would be a 12+ hour workday is a pretty tall order for a guy who is used to getting into bed at 4:30! I actually spent last weekend gradually adjusting my sleep schedule, and surprisingly I was able to get into bed by 10:30PM on Sunday night! The overall experience was long and tedious which was as I expected from reading online about other people's experience as an extra, so I was sufficiently prepared when I got there. I also had quite a bit of fun, and will likely do this again if they call me back. So... to sum up the experience I will now list:
10 things Bryan learned on his first day on the job as an "extra"
1. Most people, even those who aspire to become screen actors, have absolutely no concept of just how tedious a process filmmaking is. It was funny listening to the moaning and groaning starting 4 or 5 hours into it when I knew we would be going for 12+ hours. A lot of them have never even thought about the fact that there are multiple camera angles to each scene, and that generally each scene must be played out again for each camera angle. And of course, each shot may take several takes to get right. Yes, you will be doing the same thing over, and over, and over again.
2. 18 year old hotties love talking to me when they don't know I'm almost 10 years older than them.
3. 18 year old hotties stop talking to me after they find I'm almost 10 years older than them. Most of them put me at 20-22 years old.
4. Going to work when it's dark and coming home from work when its dark sucks, but it doesn't suck as much when you're cruising home with the top down on a summer-like night in January.
5. After portraying a high school student for the better part of a day, I am once again reminded of how great it is that I am not in high school.
6. Background artists that do it because they really enjoy it are cool. Even ones that do it just for the money are pretty cool. Background artists that do it because they think it will help launch their acting careers are scary. Especially ones that have been doing it for a long time and have to continually the drop names of all the famous people they've "worked with" all day long from 6AM to 6PM. I'm sorry but being in the crowd while what's-her-face was performing on stage for the camera does not constitute "working with" them.
7. I now know why you never see anybody really eating anything in high school cafeteria scenes on TV. In the first shot of the day I sat down with a tray that had a hot dog bun with an uncooked hot dog in it... wilted salad that looked like it was from the day before... and a tub of french fries that looked like they were from the day before that. And of course everything looked a whole lot worse 13 or 14 hours later! I suppose it's better that the food be unappetizing as it would kinda suck to have to constantly replenish the prop food as the extras spend all day eating it.
8. You can't really tell what time it is by looking out the window when they have 6 or 8 gigantic HMI's blasting light in there to make it look like it's daylight outside.
9. Wireless remote control follow focus is pretty pimptiteawesomeradical.
10. I am a terrible screen actor and should never be the star of any movie or TV show. I shudder to think about just how bad all of my overreactions would have looked if I wasn't somewhere in the back of the shot haha. If I ever do anything exciting enough to warrant making a movie about my life, I will try to hire John Cho to play me.
And that's about all I have to say about that for now.
Thursday, 20 January 2005
11:59pm
| I |
Tonight, I did what I do on many thursday nights after watching C.S.I. (and sometimes Without a Trace). I went around the corner (It's literally like 500 feet from the gate of my building) to Buster Daly's, a bar where most thursday nights you can find a man who calls himself DJ Still Life spinning all kinds of hip hop all night long. He seems to bring a good amount of college chicks with him, and well, it's just an overall good time. I've actually played a DJ Still Life track a few times on my weekly Internet radio show, K-RiCE which airs most Wednesday nights at 9PM Pacific. But yeah, good music, dancing, and good drinks just around the corner? How can I lose?
My main Windows PC hasn't been doing to well lately. It looks like I'm going to have to spend the money I had hoped to spend on two new monitors to replace the aging ones I have on my mac on replacement parts for the windows guy. Argh. I'm not one of those super mac zealots, but I do have to mention that I've never had to open up the case of my mac for anything other than making upgrades (a second hard drive, more RAM and a DVD-RW), ever, and this thing is 5 years old! I've also never had to format the hard drive and reinstall the operating system, something that many people consider a fact of life and a part of routine maintenance for Windows computers. And this despite the fact that it originally shipped with MacOS 9, which was upgraded to OSX 10.1... then again to 10.2 and again to 10.3. This is like the equivalent of taking a PC that originally had Windows 95 on it and then installing 2000 on top of that, and then XP on top of that. Believe me, most PC's wouldn't be operating anywhere remotely near peak efficiency.
But the fact of the matter is that there is a good reason why I keep a Mac and a Windows PC on the same desk and use them simultaneously all the time. Sorry to disappoint the operating system zealots, but when it comes down to it, OSX is a lot better at a lot of things than Windows, and Windows is a lot better at some other things than OSX. There's no "best", both have their merits and drawbacks. But then again, a lot of the merits of Windows has mostly to do with the fact that it is already on the overwhelming majority of personal computers.
Welp, I guess I should go to bed. It's after 2am and I don't want to get back into my old routine of going to bed after 4AM. Especially since I think I might have to be getting up real early again on Tuesday!