How it works (part 3)
Before we begin, I am happy to report I booked another commercial that films later this month! It should be pretty cool; there are special effects involved, I have lines, the whole bit. I will keep ya up to date.
This entry might as well be called “What it’s like” because I am going to basically talk about how the shoot went on Friday for the Liberty Mutual spot.
First thing’s first: you wake up really early when you are actually working as an actor. Unless you are doing night shoots, you are doing day shoots...and if you are outside, on location, that means your call time is anywhere between 6:00 and 7:00am. Early. My first job ever was a PA on Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, which was probably not that good of a movie (I never saw it, but I guess my name’s in the credits), but it was a lot of fun. That was an interesting shoot because when I went on it was 6 weeks of night shoots, which means you got to work around 5:30pm and didn’t leave until around 6 the next morning. Hectic.
Back to Friday. I got up around 6am and got to the basecamp around 7:15 up in Tarzana. The drive to the gig is interesting; you spend so much time, so much energy, so much of your life in the hopes of just getting a chance to drive to work as an actor on an actual job. When you are just getting out, you kind of notice the smallest things. Hopefully, this will just eventually be a commute, not a trip, to work.
You arrive on set and it’s a little intimidating. You’ve parked your car in the lot and you see that everyone’s grabbing breakfast from the food truck. This is, by far, one of the coolest parts of working on a set. These meal trucks are just magic...more on this later.
You get to set and look for someone with a radio. This person will be part of the production crew, probably a PA (Production Assistant) or an AD (Assistant Director). When I arrived on Friday, the AD I met already knew my name, and was very nice and helpful. He checked my name off and then I got a breakfast burrito and hung out with Molly, who I worked with during the callbacks and the saw at my fitting. This was actually a fun gig because I knew a lot of people on set: Rachel was a PA on there, Michele was producing it, I had a scene with Michele’s brother Lee, and I had met the director a few times before on other auditions, so it was a pretty fun time. And this is what it’s like, really: the more you work, the more people you meet, obviously, and this town is small when you get down to it. You see a lot of the same people over and over and you spent so much time with them that a crew really does becomes a pretty fun, united group of folks.
Frankly, I love being on set. Aside from being on vacation on the beach with Whit down in Mexico, I really don’t know of any other place I would rather be. I mean, sure, there’s a lot of “hurry up and wait” but if you are at all interested, you can learn a lot about how to get a bunch of people working together on a specific task. It’s really amazing to watch the different groups interact, to see people collaborate to solve a problem while getting over all direction from the director, who is in charge of getting all of these teams to work together to make the shot work. Then you have the producer, who was the one responsible for getting all of this together in the first place! I’ll get back on this later.
After breakfast, depending on the production, you’ll most like jump into the crew van to be taken down to set. This is where things start to heat up a bit. In this particular production, we had three scenes (each having its own setup, with lights, camera track, etc, etc). Once onset, you are given a room in the honeywagon, aka, “your trailer”. Now, I must admit, it’s pretty cool to tell someone you are gonna be in your trailer should they need you later, but honestly? For the most part, unless you are the star or something, your trailer is small. You have a sink, you have a toilet, you have a bench and even a TV, but that’s about it. The cells, er, trailers have retractable walls so you can make the spaces bigger, but suffice to say, my slice of the trailer pie was tiny. Still, it’s nice.
After you get your trailer, you get a chance to review and sign your contract, get your wardrobe and basically wait around for your shot.
(to be continued)
Sunday, March 11, 2007