Learning the Difficulties of Acting on Film

Before continuing I need to provide a disclaimer. As a credited cast member of the following films I have a financial stake in their performance. In the summer of 2009 I was cast in a film produced by Black Snow Productions called Second World: Blood, Fire and Smoke. It is the sequel to Second World and will be followed by Nightfall: Second World 3. The premise of the entire series is that there has been an ongoing invisible war for millennia between the followers of God (angels) and the followers of Satan (demons). In recent years humans have invented technology that allows them to transport themselves onto the spiritual plane this war is being fought on, and humans have joined the fight.

The character I played is named Floyd Poot, a lonely, pitiful man who has just been laid off. He is targeted by a splinter group of demons to serve as a container which they can pour themselves into and then control and harness the energy to lead an uprising against Satan. It is a humongous web of angels, demons and humans with various factions and ulterior motives within each group.

The whole process was very interesting. I found the opportunity through craigslist in their talent gigs section and was simply looking for something to do over the summer on top of the internship I was completing at a children’s theatre summer camp. I arrived at the audition and quickly realized that if cast, I would be signing a contract worth 2% of the film’s profit. I had experience as an actor on stage, but barely any on film — nothing of this level before. I was offered the part on the spot, which was surprising, but accepted telling them with full disclosure that I had to leave at the end of the summer to go back to school.

So we started filming. I had never considered what film was like as opposed to performing live on stage before, and it was a real eye opener. Every single shot requires pre-planning and multiple takes, and you have to make sure to do pretty much the same thing on every take, especially when they are filming from different angles in order to splice different views together in editing. Now whenever I watch a movie, I pay attention to every time they cut to another shot and think to myself, “they probably filmed that same shot six or seven times.”

If nothing else the whole thing taught me how different acting on camera is from acting on stage. It is popular nowadays to disparage film actors because they tend to be divas, the crossover from film to stage is often hit or miss and their methods make the news for the wrong reasons. But the reality is, good acting is difficult, no matter how you slice it. And this experience showed me that acting on film is difficult in its own right and requires a wholly different set of skills. It is hard to fault Orlando Bloom for just being a pretty face when you know what it’s like on that side of the camera lens.


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