Yours truly on primetime television
Hello true believers! I’m exhausted. Today is my day off from rehearsals on my new show. To celebrate I got up at 3:45am to make it to a 6:30am call to shoot two groovy scenes for one of New York City’s hit primetime television series.
So much goes into a location primetime television shoot that I could probably fill up several blog posts about it and I have a feeling that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Right now today, while I can still move my fingers, I want to concentrate on just on the on-set experience.
If you’ve never had the pleasure let me assure you– a shooting set is the absolute furthest thing from an ideal place in which to practice the art of acting. It’s noisy, crowded, and everything happens at warp speed. While the makeup professional dabs your face the director is changing your big line and the cinematographer asks you to turn your face into the light and the cameraman nudges your leg over. The A.D. is ripping up your old spike mark and putting down a new one. The producer wants to know what’s taking so long and the last two takes were ruined because a helicopter flew over or a Coast Guard boat flew by in the background and ruined the continuity. The stuntwoman in the water playing the dead body can’t hold her breath any longer and the sun is going to come out from behind that cloud in 30 seconds and ruin the lighting so this is the absolute last take. If you screw it up, you won’t be back again.
Ready?
Folks, this stuff is really, really hard! You have to be on your game to succeed in this kind of environment. I envy the series regulars. When the environment I just described is your daily workplace I imagine you adjust to it. For the rest of us, our only hope is to just flat out be the best we can be. The necessary level of skill and confidence only comes through training– lots and lots of training.
To do less is to not take the profession seriously.