Working for money? That's new!

Greetings one and all, and welcome back to the ramblings of my mind and my fascinating week in the world of acting. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Monday: This Monday took me back to Bedford to work with some delightful boys at Bedford Prep School. Myself, and 2 others from the Wild Things team went in to deliver 2 workshops based on our fabulous show, each earning ourselves a few pennies, and hopefully getting a few more ticket sales out of the bargain!
I had grumpily set my alarm for 6.30am, but woke up surprisingly cheerful despite the lack of daylight coming in at my window. I hitched a ride to the train station with my mother on her way to work, hopped on the train with the daily commuters and weaved my way through the streets of Bedford to find the school. On reaching reception I felt like I had gone backwards in my career. I thought my days of going into schools to perform at atrocious hours of the morning were long behind me, but I settled in nicely in the staffroom, where biscuits were offered! I declined, I should still be sleeping! Another perk that I had forgotten about was finding very handsome male teachers to look at while waiting for the others to arrive. Oh how I miss that!

We got started on the workshops, and they went quite well. The kids knew the story and some of them were performing their own version too, so they were very eager to join in. I even put on costumes for them so they could see what our interpretation would look like. They, and I had enormous fun! We retired to a local cake shop to reward ourselves, and after a quick chocolate brownie, I headed back home in the rain, slightly richer and extremely tired. On reaching home, I switched on my TV for my daily viewing of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and promptly fell asleep for two whole hours, waking up just in time for dinner! Oops!

I logged on to my usual casting website that night to see if anything excited me and inspired me to apply, and my eye was immediately drawn to a theatre-in-education tour, I think I still had the mornings work on my brain. I clicked the casting for it to reveal more information about the job and my heart stopped beating for a good few seconds. I won’t say who it was, for fear of getting into trouble, but it was a company that I have worked for previously, who I had a very bad experience of touring with. As have some of my friends. Needless to say, I won’t be applying to go back. Swines. That was enough to halt my search for the evening.

Tuesday: Tuesday was a very lazy day for me. I had every intention of getting up and learning my script, but did I? Of course not! Monday had completely zapped me of energy and I couldn’t find any motivation anywhere. I picked up my script, only to put it down again 5 minutes later, I didn’t even learn one page. Shocking. I even found it difficult to get motivated for Fame singing rehearsal that night, and that always cheers me up. Not on Tuesday though. I quickly visited my brother after rehearsal, and was appalled to see that he has already put his Christmas tree up! 13th November! No! Christmas decorations should go up on December 1st at the very earliest! That boy!!

I stumbled home and opened up my emails to find one new email in my party inbox. There was going to be an extra guest at this weekend’s party. This was fine for me, more money headed my way, but one problem showed its angry head… I didn’t have enough party bags! Last week I had counted out just enough for everyone and was feeling incredibly smug, but now that had come back to bit me on the behind. I had to come up with a plan. I could cobble together half a party bag, and buy something a little bit extra for the birthday girl for her bag! Sorted! Crisis averted.
My work email also had an email waiting for me… We finally had our final cast member to play Max! Huzzah! Now I really had to do some work!

Wednesday: Also known as shoot day! I was off to Birmingham to be a rabbit! I wasn’t due on set until 3, so I had a lazy morning just packing my bag, which didn’t happen on lazy Tuesday! 2 not so fragrant trains and a short taxi ride later, I arrived at the house where we would be shooting. It was a lovely little holiday home in the centre of Birmingham, but it looked like it should belong in the middle of the countryside. (Which was what was desired, as it was our rabbit house!) The crew had decorated the set by the time I had arrived, and everywhere had leaves and twigs and little touches that made it look like a proper rabbit home! I made my way up to the top floor of the house where the make-up lady, director, and the man playing my rabbit husband were located. After a quick hello, I was straight into the make-up chair being transformed! I had a mask stuck to my face, latex added so it looked like it blended in with my face, and lashings of face paint. There was no mirror in front of me, so I had no idea what I looked like, but people kept popping into the room and saying how good it looked. Once I was finished, I took a photo of myself and was quite startled, I wasn’t as cute as I thought I would be, but that’s not what was needed. Once I had put my rabbit ears and my costume on, it looked pretty amazing!

While Father rabbit was having his mask applied, I was taken downstairs (making my way down on my bottom as the ceilings were too small to accommodate my rabbit ears!) into the kitchen to do a few shots by myself. This involved chopping carrots. I’m not the best person in the world at chopping food up anyway, but for the camera angles they wanted, I had to chop them left handed. I am not left handed! I went through several carrots and a few takes before I managed to chop sufficiently without pieces of carrot flying all over the kitchen. I hoped this was as stressful as it would get.

Matt came down after being bunny-fied and we were able to get on with the main shot. We had a sequence of events set around the breakfast table, going along in our happy rabbit ways, until something startles us. There were no lines so it was pretty simple to remember and get on with. Take one went a treat. Unfortunately, during the rest of the takes, a protest march was going on over the road, and various people were hurling abuse at each other in the streets and making a lot of noise. We had to carry on, but it was quite distracting working against it. I think we coped well enough.

We had a break for some food, which turned out to be a more difficult task than anticipated, With my mask on, I had to constantly lift it up to get my food anywhere near my mouth,, while trying not to rip it off my face! Food done, we headed back down to do the same thing again from different angles. And then it was death time! This was pretty easy for me, all I had to do was lie down on the floor and pretend to be dead! We did the scene in 2 takes, job done. While we de-bunnied, the crew packed up their kit and moved out of the house. I was staying there for the night, and as soon as everyone left, I had the feeling that I didn’t really want to be there on my own after all. It was quite creepy, so I put a film on and decided to watch it until I could keep my eyes open no longer, before running to the bedroom and falling straight to sleep. It had been a good day, I was exhausted again.

Thursday: I woke up on Thursday bright and early so that I could hand the house keys back and catch my train home. As I approached the train station I chuckled to myself. I spotted a poster that stated “Crime is going down in Birmingham”. It hadn’t looked like it the day before when upon exiting the station, there were two people being arrested right in front of my eyes! I bought myself a magazine and made my way to the appropriate platform, after noting the extortionate price of 30p to use the toilet, and began watching a fat pigeon waddle as if he were dancing. He seemed to be having a good day. It took me the whole of my journey home to get through my magazine, and despite it making the journey much more enjoyable, I was annoyed at myself for neglecting my script again. I had packed it specifically so that I could learn lines on the train. Did I? Again the answer is no. Fool. I’m going to be sacked!
A quick sandwich later, and I was back out of the house again, and on my way to watch two of my lovely friends in a college performance of the play ‘Two’. They also had a physical theatre piece after this that I stayed to watch too. I’m normally not a fan of college shows, but I was really swept up in it, and not just because of the people that I knew in it, some of them that I didn’t know were fantastic! As much as I enjoyed ‘Two’, their physical theatre section was phenomenal. There were perhaps about 30 words spoken and the rest was done to music. I almost cried at one point because it was so emotional! Good job guys! Fantastic!
I spent the evening with the other half watching the new episode of ‘Elementary’. It really Is growing on me!

Friday: Friday rolled around quicker than I thought and brought with it a great deal of stress. I had lots of things to do, including sorting out the rogue party bag for Saturday. Of course with this being my life, I decided to stay in bed and watch the latest episodes of ‘Glee’ and ‘New Girl’ before getting angry at the world. My parents were also going away that day so I waited until they had left and got to work. I received a new script for ‘The Wild Things’ so I furiously printed that out, as well as some more treats, to be revealed at a later date. After jumping in the shower to remove the final pieces of rabbit from my face, I stupidly decided to use a hairdryer and gave myself an afro. Not my finest look. I sped to Tesco to buy something for the birthday girl, and picked myself up a cheeky alcoholic beverage for the weekend. I sensed I’d need it. After Tesco came a quick trip into town to pop a cheque in the bank, I also managed to grab another Christmas present off my list! I’m almost finished! Huzzah! After racing around like a mad woman, I had one hour to learn my lines for my ‘Fame’ rehearsal. They didn’t go in. As soon as it came to the troublesome scene that just won’t stay in my head, they were gone. But rehearsal flew by, and I could finally relax with a glass of bubbly alcohol. Before I went to bed I gathered together all of what I would need for the princess party. What did I find? A spare party bag! Grrr!!

Saturday: Saturday went a lot smoother than I had anticipated. As I had already prepared everything in advance, I was ready in plenty of time and could chill out before the madness of the rest of the day. I arrived at the birthday girls house at 1.30, ready for a 2pm start. She was very excited and was running around the house like a complete loon! Her guests took a while to arrive, but once they were all there, we played games and everyone had fun. After they had eaten, her dad brought out her birthday cake. As everyone sang to her, she suddenly screamed “I don’t like singing!” and burst into tears! I was trying so hard not to laugh at her! It was her party and she’d cry if she wanted to!!
Party done, and I had a quick pit stop at home before on to my next job of the day. The murder mystery! It was the same story and character that I had played in the last two that I’ve done so I knew what to expect. I didn’t know the other two actors, but they were lovely and we all had a good night, despite finishing 45 minutes later than planned. The hotel never gets it right!! I didn’t get too many difficult questions asked of me, and only 1 out of the 5 tables guessed correctly that I was the murderer. I successfully put the rest of them onto the other female characters trail!
I was absolutely shattered when I got home, and happily climbed into bed to watch ‘Merlin’ with my second alcoholic beverage of the weekend, careful!!

Sunday: And so we come to Sunday. I awoke at the hour of ten, had breakfast and cleaned the whole house before my parents got back from their weekend away. I didn’t have too much time in the house on my own to enjoy it, but it was nice to not have to creep around the house like a mouse with everyone’s different sleeping patterns. They made my cleaning worth my while by bringing me back some Bakewell tarts from the real Bakewell(!) and a lovely candle. Aaw! There was a small time frame for me to look at their photos before I had to leave to have my headshot taken for the ‘Fame’ programme as well as a small rehearsal while we were waiting. I was hoping that my headshot would be good enough to use as my professional headshot for a while, but my face wasn’t playing!
And here we are now! Blog writing! I’ve been back for almost 2 hours and I still haven’t looked at that pesky script! There are 17 hours to go before rehearsals start, take away my sleeping and travel time, plus time to watch the Strictly Come Dancing results and I probably have about an hour to cram all of my lines in! I suppose I should take a little bit of time out to prepare for being told off too!! Haha!
Next week, prepare for a wild read, we begin tomorrow at ten! See ya!

Nxxx

Where have all the jobs gone?

Hello again dear readers! I do hope you are all well.
It’s been a mixed week in my life. Unfortunately with my severe lack of funding, I’ve still only been able to apply for unpaid work, but I did end up doing things that I’d been putting off or had forgotten about, as well as having time for playing too! Marvellous!

So, Monday’s offering of jobs was poor, very poor. I had decided that with rehearsals for ‘The Wild Things beginning very soon, that I would try to start waking up early so that my body didn’t have too much of a shock when I could no longer sleep til noon. So on Monday I woke up early. Ish. 9am. Therefore I was checking my casting website of choice regularly throughout the day. Nothing, not even a celebrity lookalike job. Not that I look like any celebrity, the only thing I’ve ever been compared to is a spaniel. But I dragged myself downstairs and began to choreograph a routine for the show. And I finished it! Being the lazy girl that I am, I set myself the challenge of completing it in an hour, and that’s exactly what I did! I was proud! I also received emails from Beth, who is directing the film I’m doing next week, and she arranged all of my travelling for me, all I have to do is turn up! Brilliant! Such organisation!

On Tuesday, I found a casting for a short film that I applied to. It was a student film in Stoke. I had shot a film there earlier this year, and it was fantastic, so I thought I’d give it a go. It featured a couple who were in a car crash, and flashed back to moments of their relationship. I liked the sound of it so off went my application. It was only after I’d sent it that I realised I couldn’t make one of the shooting dates as I was scheduled to do a schools workshop in Bedford. Oops. Thankfully they never got back to me. Phew. I followed the day up with an evening of singing rehearsal for ‘Fame’. We sounded good and it put me in a very good mood. I went to bed happy.

Wednesday was another slow day on the casting front. No applications again. I was feeling creative though, and picked up the script that I had been working on and put to one side a couple of months ago, gave it a read and impressed myself with what I had already got. I picked up my pen, finished the scene off, and added five new pages of dialogue after that. It felt good. I was on a roll, so I turned my laptop on, found the Wild Things music on my iTunes, and choreographed a second routine. Done in another hour, boom! I then realised that I had a princess party coming up next weekend and filled all of the party bags that I needed. I was on fire! If only I was this motivated every day…

Thursday was play day. It was my lovely other half’s day off, and we had a day out in Leicester. Mainly because he had to go to the Apple store to get his broken iPad looked at, but we turned it into a day of wandering around the city centre and eating. The Apple store is a very strange place to be. We had had to postpone our Leicester trip for a week, as he had found out that you have to book your piece of technology in. Yep, you have to make it an appointment. It’s like some sort of surgery for broken toys. We walked up to the store and stood outside for a while, as we were early for iPad’s appointment (and we didn’t want to catch anything from the other poorly technology!). I didn’t like it. To me, Apple try to make things seem all shiny and exciting, but the décor in the shop was anything but. It was grey and miserable, and seemed really dark. I think I even joked that it looked seedy. The brightest things in there were the staff’s blue t-shirts, and the customers faces from the glare of computer screens. After we had checked in (!), we were told to make our way down to the Genius bar, where iPad would see it’s surgeon. I will say that I was more impressed with what actually goes on in the store. Customers were sitting down with Apple staff sorting their problems, people were getting training on how to use things, and next to the genius bar, there was even a little table with iPads on for children to use. There were no children there, so I stood and watched what the little thing could do. After explaining what was wrong with iPad, the Apple ‘genius’ tapped away on what looked like a brick of an iPhone, and decided that he would just replace the whole thing with a brand new one. As far as I could see, he didn’t even touch it. Genius? Schmenius!

We carried on our banter over Apple later on that day while talking about the iPhone. Upgrading to the iPhone5 seemed ridiculous to me. Although the staff were very helpful in the store, I couldn’t help noticing that nearly every customer in the shop were going in with faulty goods and having them replaced with shiny new ones. Surely you might as well buy something that won’t break after a couple of months, say a Samsung Galaxy s2…? ;) I think I won the argument!
We stumbled home and rounded off our evening by watching the new Sherlock Holmes series from the US of A, ‘Elementary’. I love the Robert Downey Jr films, and absolutely cannot fault our British series ‘Sherlock’. I’m slowly warming to ‘Elementary’, but I’m still not won over by having a female Watson. We’ll see how I feel at the end of the series.

Friday had some truly marvellous castings on offer. They all sounded too good to be true. It turned out that they were. Every role I tried to apply for said that I was either too old or too young. I’m 27, why is this such a difficult age?!? I sighed a heavy sigh and clicked to see if anyone had read my blog this week. And they had! That cheered me up! I had thought that only people in the UK would be reading it, but I was wrong! So before I continue, I would just like to say hello to all readers in the USA, Ukraine, Latvia, Philippines, Russia, Thailand and Uzbekistan! Of course hello to you lovely UK people too!

I continued my day by travelling to the job centre, which was relatively painless due to the loveliness of my favourite member of staff who makes me feel as if he really cares, and then I made my way to the dance studio for Fame rehearsals. I was very early, so I whipped my notebooks out of my bag, and managed to scribble out a few more lines of a scene for my play, and attempted to start my final choreography. Unfortunately, this was more of a challenge than I anticipated. Being in a dance school, there was a lot of noise coming from the other rooms. My monster music was contending with a piano in someone’s singing lesson, tiny little girls ballet and tap lessons, and a boys ballet class where they seemed to be dancing to Celine Dion. Only at Starlight! Fame rehearsals went well, but I was relieved to get home to a nice pizza, watch a bit of Derren Brown, and lay my head down until 11am the next morning!

I’ve had an incredibly lazy weekend, but I think I need it. Tomorrow is the Wild Things school workshop in Bedford, I have a make-up test on Tuesday for the film I’m shooting in Birmingham on Wednesday, I will return on Thursday, before I do a princess party and a murder mystery on Saturday, and have my photo taken for the ‘Fame’ programme on Sunday! I’m exhausted just thinking about it. See you on the other side!

Nxxx

Savile, Tulisa, and bunnies, oh my!

Hello blog fans!

So, last week threw up a treat for all of the acting job seekers across the lands! Let’s start at the very beginning shall we?
Monday: Logging on to my casting website of choice first thing on a Monday morning, I spy a job that would put the fear up anyone of a certain age who watches the news. ‘Jimmy Savile lookalike’. I don’t know about anyone else, but despite the fact that I’ve always had a weird obsession with wanting to be part of a reconstruction on ‘Crimewatch’, there is no way in the world that I would want to take on that job. And who on earth would want to admit to looking like him now?!? Thank goodness I’m of the wrong gender!
I then stumbled upon a very specific description of a character that was needed. Clearly some university somewhere is making their students re-create a scene from any film of their choosing. This one was for a scene from horror film ‘The Pact’. I haven’t seen this film, but I could tell what sort of girl they had hired to be in it. Let’s see if you can guess too!
‘Long straight blonde hair with roots showing, a decent American accent, English spoken, reasonable bust(!), white, average waist and height. Yep, a bimbo then. The reasonable bust was all I could manage, no applications sent today.

Tuesday: Tuesday was educational for me. I learned a new word. Strangely enough, it was the first time of two that I would read the word in a casting that week. The word was anthropomorphic. The job, to be an anthropomorphic rabbit! It was a short film about a family of rabbits, of which mother rabbit gets killed. It was all about animal rights. It sounded interesting and I noticed the name of the girl who sent out the casting was one that I recognised from another film I did in Stoke earlier this year. Obviously it could have been anyone, so I remained professional in my application but secretly hoped it was her, and that I could wangle my way into the job through knowing her and being Facebook friends! I didn’t hear anything back that day. Rats.

Wednesday: Two jobs caught my eye on Wednesday. The first one was a film about a couple who were at a party, and the male half of the couple slowly noticed the different personalities of his girlfriend. Therefore, the girlfriend would be played by five different girls. Sounded very interesting, application sent. And then it all turned around. Next job advertised: ‘Tulisa lookalike’. I think I’d rather be Jimmy Savile.

Thursday: Anthropomorphic day 2. Today’s anthropomorphic animal; a cat. More specifically, a cat owned by a man, but who gets left by the side of the road by the man’s girlfriend. What a bitch! I wasn’t suitable for any of the roles but it made me smile.

Friday: I found myself in Bedford again on Friday for some more Wild activities. To try and drum up some more ticket sales, we did a small event where children of the town could come and colour in pictures of the Wild Things, make their own Max crown, and participate in our Wild Things quiz. I sat in the cold for 3 hours, lost all feeling in my feet but actually had a very nice time! The kids seemed to enjoy themselves greatly, and eagerly went away clutching flyers and covered in glitter! Result!

Saturday: Another promotional day on Saturday, this time much closer to home. It was Wicksteed Park’s bonfire night, and Starlight were performing before the fireworks hit the sky! The seniors performed an excerpt from ‘Fame’ (happening in January, buy tickets!). The kids performed first and I was slightly apprehensive as I saw the lorry (yes, lorry, not stage!) shaking as they jumped up and down. I was relieved to only perform once out of the two showings. I’m not sure what would have happened if it had collapsed. Gulp! Anyway, performing meant that we got in for free, and I stayed to watch the fireworks which was lovely, but would have been more enjoyable had I not been scared! Oh well, better luck next year!

Sunday: I had a marvellously relaxing Sunday yesterday, I had my lovely friend Christine come over from Leicester and we just sat and talked for about 6 hours. Marvellous. My phone kept buzzing with Facebook messages from a friend who wanted to come and see Fame, but didn’t know what day she should come to, so I was surprised and chuffed when it buzzed later on with a message from the girl about the anthropomorphic rabbit film asking me if I was still interested because she’d love me to be in it! Boom! It proves after all that it’s who you know, not your talent!
So, next week, if you’re in Birmingham and see a girl dressed as a rabbit, come and say hi!

Let’s see what delights are in store this week…
Nxxx