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Self-Watching

8/11/2013

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I am like most people, I find it hard to watch myself on video. I used to turn away from photos of myself also but, as a photographer, I soon got over that. It is just videos now, including home videos, that make me want to hide my eyes. I think it is due to the fact that you have this imaginary version of how you look when you do and say things. You want to imagine you look composed, cool, "normal" if you know what I mean. So when you are confronted by how you really look, it presents too much of a challenge to your reality that you instinctually try to reject it.

"Seriously? I don't look like that! Please tell me the lens is warped, or something. Anything!"

So, with some trepidation, I took my girls (that is my wife and daughter) to see a special trailer screening of The Silent City, the movie in which I play a rather nasty little Irishman.

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I think I may have mentioned it before, that I was not expecting much when the director, Matt, asked me if I would like to audition for his movie. I thought that it would be a rather simple affair, maybe a tudent film. Yet from the day I walked in to the auditions, and each and everyday thereafter, it became larger and more serious for me. More real!

I'll be honest, I didn't know what to expect with the teaser, even though I had been allowed to see a small snippet of one of my scenes previously. Seeing yourself, larger than life, on a big screen is peculiar. Now that I think about, maybe that helped a little, it seemed a little unreal and quite unlike watching yourself on YouTube or the home TV. It made distancing myself easier.

Now I have heard others say, and even said to others myself, that if you can watch yourself on screen and see the character, not yourself, then you're doing something right. Until last night, I never had been able to do that. I either saw me being a comedian, or the director in me started evaluating the technique of my performance.

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Last night, I watched and saw Jack. He looked a little like me but he sounded and acted nothing like me. There was one scene where I wasn't really doing anything much, just standing there, and it creeped me out. There I was giving a death stare to another cast member and nothing else. I had shivers go up y spine and the hairs on my neck prickled, I kid you not.

But wait, there's more. The whole thing had this sense of grandness to it. The other cast members, the quality of the video, it just felt big. Personally, I would attribute much of the awe factor to our cinematographer. It is thanks to power houses like Ross Metcalf, that this movie looks so incredible. We also have
Sabrina Gortz editing the whole package and from what we saw of the teaser, it'll be great.

So now it is the hands of the editors, and production crew, while us actors go back to our other lives. I do know that most of them have found themselves very busy for the rest of the year, and in to next year. The general feeling is that this may escalate once this film is released, and wouldn't that be nice?

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