This past Sunday was my shooting day on Cloudy With a Chance of Sunshine. It’s done – I’m in a feature film. The next day I went to see Spider-Man 2 and caught myself thinking: “My face is going to be THAT BIG“. For someone who doesn’t get cast on looks, that’s disquieting.
While this is a huge step forward for me, it was also surprisingly, satisfyingly incremental. What I mean is that I have worked on feature sets before either as an executive or crew, and so I am familiar with how the day breaks out and have a general idea of what everyone is doing; so I could tell when we were close to rolling and manage my energy/headspace accordingly. I have done quite a bit of acting over the last few years, and while very little of it was on-camera, there has been just enough between the shorts and webisodes that it wasn’t completely new.
And as stepping up to bigger assignments go, this practically came with training wheels. My role consists of four scenes, all of them in the same location, all of them in the same costume, and in every single one of them, I am sitting on an overturned bucket and conversing with the main character. Two person scenes, no movement – it’s like nearly every possible variable was taken out so I could just focus on not blowing this opportunity.
How did I do? That’s even more difficult to say than normal. I am used to connecting with the audience and sensing feedback immediately. Even an audience’s silence can carry an energy that lets me know where they are in terms of attention and emotion. But in this case, the majority of the crew was behind a big black curtain, watching me on monitor and staying as quiet as possible. It changes everything about my feeling of presence in the scene to not have that element, and I don’t think I have adapted comfortably into that mode yet. My role, however, was primarily comic relief without needing to carry the story, and between takes I did get feedback that people were smiling and laughing back there. Who knows if that’s true, but we did wrap 90 minutes early, and if I wasn’t doing something right I have to imagine they would have stuck around and done some tweaking.
The movie has its Facebook page up and running, and the word is that there should be a cut ready to screen privately for cast and crew come September, after which it heads out into the festival world. Inherent to that game is a certain opaqueness about where and when it is going to pop up first. Trust me, as self-conscious as I am about my big, weird head, when I know something, I will share it.
I try not to surrender too much to anxiety, but I admit I was preoccupied about this heading in. I see my life in the creative space as one where very rarely, someone will take a gamble on you and, without sure knowledge, you have to be willing to take them up on that gamble and believe you can prove worthy of it. I didn’t want to let them down, and they seem happy; more importantly, I have done something I had never done before, and now have a better chance of doing again.