I call this story MY FIRST PAID ACTING JOB. This happened to me yesterday. Its not impressive, but I thought it was hilarious. So Im teaching until noon, but when I get to work in the morning, a teacher runs up to me and asks, Greg, can you be an actor in a video today for our school? Well pay you 200 RMB (about $35). We will film at noon. I say, Sure, thats fine. Give me the script. She hands me this short script about thirty seconds long, assuring me its for educational purposes and not commercial ones. I have two lines of dialogue. Basically the script goes like this: Two cashiers working in a store are practicing selling each other items. Theyre really good at it. I walk up to them and say, Hello. Im looking for a soda. They get really confused, having no idea how to speak English and only say, Hello. I say Soda! Do you have any soda? They shrug at each other and say Soda? and then I get frustrated and walk away. They have more lines than I do and speak only in Chinese, so I have no idea if its funny. I cant imagine any way anybodys going to learn much English from that, so I assume the educational purposes must be related to a video course or something. I figure Ill just be hanging with the film club for a bit and Im interested to see what kind of equipment theyre working with because its a huge school with thousands of kids and they could afford good stuff if they wanted it. The director in me says we need a master shot, three close ups, and possibly a two shot of them. Maybe some close ups of products and some kind of establishing shot. Somewhere between five and ten set-ups, unless some sixteen-year-old kid is working on a wild visual style and wants to be the Chinese Tony Scott. I figure if theyre shooting the way I did when I was their age, with just a tripod, camera, and onboard mic, its a twenty minute shoot. If they know what theyre doing and theyve got lights and boom and everything, maybe its sixty to ninety minutes. And if theyre really hardcore and trying to do something fancy, its three hours at the absolute most. But Ive got nothing to do all day, so Im up for whatever. When I get to the school store where were filming, its just me and the teacher standing there and she says, The kids are on their way, and a few minutes later these two kids come walking in with no equipment and she says, Okay. Lets go. Next thing I know were standing over by the cashiers table and the teacher has her cell phone, trying to hold it steady with one hand to film them. No microphone, no lights, no real camera. Just some girl with a cell phone filming three of us acting like idiots. Shes moving the camera around frequently throughout the shot with no real plan for how the video should look, and shes laughing during the filming. Five minutes and three takes later, she goes, Okay, weve got it. This is great. She shows me the clip on her phone, which is difficult to hear with the music system in the store still playing and other students having conversations in the background. Really, it just looks like a YouTube video of Check this out. I saw this dumbass American yelling at Chinese people in China because they cant speak English. I have no idea what educational purpose that video could possibly serve, but Im certain it has no commercial value either. Why it was ever made is beyond me. I did get 200 RMB for it though. So what the hell.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 08:27:13 +0000