Going in Blind!
Today I’m back on guard duty with one other gent and the day is typical: gone through costume/makeup and now sat in the green room awaiting to be called. What I particularly like about this job is that we have access to the wi-fi which only ever happens on Casualty normally so as there was only the two of us I was certain I wasn’t hindering or being selfish hogging the bandwidth as I played Guild Wars 2 for a good few hours. Which was pretty awesome.
Then all of a sudden, a wild 3rd AD appeared.
We were told to rush to set as they were in a hurry to get us on to do the blocking for the scene. ‘Blocking’ is more-or-less a stop/start rehearsal where the scene is set but all the placements and movements is decided of the characters and where the cameras would be best positioned before showing the crew rehearsal.
So, as we were whisked into the principals’ car to escort us to set that bit quicker, we were rushed on and told:
“On action, just walk out the door and down the corridor.”
Sounds simple enough, right?
Well, on action we walked out the door and had two principle actors blocking our path, reciting their lines to us and we just stood there.
Like complete idiots.
At that point I turned to the director and apologised profusely as we’d been given no direction. Apparently the scene involves the two actors being suspicious and trying to blend in with their hasty lines, but OUR characters don’t care, give them a look to acknowledge them but keep on walking past.
Just goes to show how little we’re told as an SA but how much it does help giving that brief of the scene so we’d know how to react and what context out ‘looks’ were meant to be in.
The filming of the scenes went without a hitch bar some ADR issues with a noisy, clanky door and squeezing past people in the narrow corridors but overall a job well done. Or at least I hope so. They’ve just started airing the series in the USA in time of me writing this so we’ll see how things go.