I'm Learning...

So today turned into a very long day of filming. We started around 11:30 am I guess, and didn't finish until almost 6 pm. But that includes an hour lunch break. And it's not as long as the 12 hour days on a professional set. But long just the same. We filmed two episodes, one with Myra, and one with me. I felt like mine took longer (reasons why in a moment), but when I break down the day, both episodes took about the same amount of time, I guess.

Things we learned today:

1. If you want to do what we dubbed a "Swoosh Shot" (the shots they do on professional sets with those cute little tracks and a dolly), and you're working on a hardwood floor, taping pieces of paper to the bottom of the tripod feet will allow you to slide the tripod and camera smoothly across the floor in any direction. You cannot, however, swoosh-and-zoom or swoosh-and-pan. You can zoom or pan and then swoosh, or vice versa, but you cannot do the zoom or pan while you are swooshing.

The other more important thing I learned today is about myself as an actor. When we are doing incredibly silly, off the wall comedy such as Engrish vs Englisch, I have no problems committing to the character. But when I've got it in my head that something has to be "right", I have a very hard time committing, because invariably, my performances that felt good on the inside don't look anything like I imagined they would on camera. And then I get self-concious, and then we have to do too many takes for me to commit to my character and my action. Because that was the big problem today. When the camera wasn't rolling, I was playful and energetic, but as soon as we turned the camera on, I became too worried about my choreography, and doing it "right", and that sucked all the energy out of my performance.

I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that I didn't rehearse my choreography as much as I could have/should have. But what about those days in my career where I get called into a set the same day and don't have the opportunity to rehearse? (Again, this is why I'm so glad we're doing this YouTube series, I get to learn this stuff now, not on a professional set where they're paying thousands of dollars per minute to film it.)

I also think I need to stop worrying so much about doing it "right." I become self-concious extremely easily, too often, I notice the smallest flaw in my performance and I allow myself to become distracted and discouraged by that.

So that's what I need to work on as we continue with the YouTube series. Also as I work with monologues