Media Meditations2, #3: Acting for the first Time

Now I've always been a person who lacks co-ordination and direction, how I ended up as the main character in Geoff Klane’s student film I have no idea. I don’t know if it was a sort of process of elimination situation or the drawing of a straw but it still, he choose me. I would have been perfectly satisfied if I was holding a boom mic or a light the whole time but I guess it was time for me to step in front of a camera.

Knowing my lines wasn’t even the hardest part. Knowing how to become this character “Pat” was easily the most difficult; I had to move like this slacker film student, I had to be as unbearable and lethargic as possible like this slacker film student I was playing. All in all I had to be a complete slob with no regard for anyone but myself. Having spent time around people like this it didn’t take long to settle in and really become this character.

As I’m writing this meditation I can’t help but find myself in a mental daze from all the work I’ve put into this film all weekend. On top of all the acting, I’ve been running around with my head chopped off trying to complete the stack of work I have due in the upcoming weeks. It’s been hard trying to do all my stuff while trying to give Geoff the effort of exact performance of this character. I give a lot of these filmmakers credit for their work because in no way is any of it easy. A simple five-minute scene took us over an hour to shoot. All the production had to be perfect; lighting and sound were crucial to any dialogue that was muttered between the characters. Some scenes we had to do over with different camera angles in order to show the emotion and mannerisms that the actors were given. It’s not a good feeling to see the director with his hand in his face to your own poor performance.

Now Geoff is a friend of mine who I met playing guitar at the grind and being at the weekly digital film making screenings but when it came to working on this film, he was the boss. I want to give him exactly what he sees this movie to be in his head…. And that’s hard to do. Given the fact that this is my first time acting it’s hard to find this emotional transfer to put into the character. I try to be a studious person who has a good sense of morals but I’m playing my evil twin. Geoff told me to try and stay in character this whole week until we’re done with all my scenes and I can’t be a prick for a week!

By next weekend the whole film should be finished and then it will go into post-production. This will require hours in front of monitors on Geoff’s behalf while he edits this film on Final Cut Pro. We filmed the whole movie on a Panasonic HVX using a three point lighting system with a different set of colored filters. Now the interesting thing about the three point light filters is that the color filters act as a means of expression within the mood of the set scene. We only used the colors blue, red and orange but what I could gather from the scene that we shot using these colors was that they really helped set any kind of mood or feelings that the specific scene explored. I haven’t seen a whole lot of the scene because Geoff believes that if I see myself on camera it will make me change my performance. I completely understand that due to the fact that I’ve never acted before and I would want to change any kind of attitude I’ve been portraying throughout the film. We’ll see how I do and I’d be happy to post the video on my blog upon its completion!

I look forward to the completion of this movie because I’m eager to see what my performance was like. Acting is something that I defiantly want to try again in the future if this goes well, and who knows what will happen next year. I might want to take an acting class to truly understand these actual characters we try to mask.