Cutting It Short

So, following on from yesterday's entry, I finally heard back from the hapless students to say that they'd like to see me for an audition today. I mean, they wanted to see me tomorrow when they contacted me but now it's today and today is the day I saw them...you understand, right? If not, the short answer is that I saw them today. Anyway, it seemed that someone was listening to all my bitching and moaning about waiting as they said they wanted to see me at 8am. Yep. AM. Not pm, the time when most people are out and about and functioning but AM. The time when all the good people of the world are still, at the very most, lounging around in their pyjamas and wondering what they're going to do with their day. They're not racing into town to audition for an unpaid student film.

I realise this sounds massively lazy and diva-like of me to say this but is anyone really at their best at 8am? When I used to work, my shift started at 8am so I'm perfectly capable of dragging myself out of my cosy little bed when it's still dark and forcing myself to face the world at a time when it really shouldn't be seen. However, that job just required me to hide behind a computer, play around with Excel spreadsheets and be shouted at by customers with a job lot of both time and money on their hands. No one there would be offended by my bleary-eyed, wild-haired early morning look. A camera, on the other hand, does not need to see me in pre-breakfast fashion. It causes lenses to crack and microphones to shudder. So I asked for another time slot and, god bless their little student loan funded socks, they gave me one a few hours later.

So off I went this morning. Note to self: if you're going to ask for a later time slot, don't then turn up late. Yes, it was the fault of the ever-faithful Northern line which, very much like my laptop, manages to run at its slowest when I really need to it be running at its quickest.  Thankfully, I was greeted by the most lovely group of students you could probably ever hope to meet. Despite the nagging feeling in the back of my head that I was probably old enough to be their great grandmother, I had a grand ol' time chatting away to them and working on the script. They were friendly, intelligent and a lot of fun. They seemed to like what I was doing with the script but for some reason my brain wasn't quite grasping what they were asking me to do. We ran through one of the sections of dialogue, they then directed me a bit and asked me to do it again. One of the directions they gave me was to add a bit more sarcasm to one of the lines. Surely that should be easy. When no one wants sarcasm, I bring it to the yard in a flash like an uninvited flasher. So when someone asks for it, why are both my brain and mouth both refusing to co-operate? Why are they similarly struggling with the terms 'confident', 'hesitant' and 'dismissive?' These are all terms that I understand and practice on a daily basis so why isn't it quite working? . We did a few more sections from the script and although it all felt 'OK', there was a horrible feeling that it all wasn't just quite good enough. Sadly, I just think there are days when your body just has other plans for the day and god help anyone who tries to add an amendment to their itinerary

And the battle for work continues. Or it would if I'd actually applied for anything today. Maybe I should just hire myself out to students who fancy practicing barking simple orders at weak and feeble actors and watching them squirm under the very little pressure put upon them. Could be quite the little money-making scheme. Or at the very least it might bring me up to speed with the rest of the world and finally teach me how to deal with the most basic of commands.