I don’t think I can make an evil smile

I can sound evil, but when sounding evil is accompanied by a pleasant grin… yeah, that doesn’t work so well on camera. At least that’s what I was told this afternoon.

This little saga started a couple weeks ago when Walden Entertainment sent out a notice that on May 15th, they would be holding a mass audition for people who wanted to take part in the upcoming 48 Hour Film Project. It’s a fairly simple process, really.

Friday, June 10th: teams are given a name, prop, line of dialogue and genre for their movie.
Sunday, June 12th: 48 hours later, teams submit their movie.

Okay, so maybe it’s not that simple. The teams can’t do any writing, filming, sound work, etc. before June 10th, but they can do things like put together teams and find people they want to cast. Thus, Walden’s mass audition. I decided to throw my hat into the mix this year, so I was told to show up at 2:03pm. (It turned out that just over half the people who replied to the notice actually showed up, so I had some leeway there.)

When it was my turn to audition, I walked into a conference room that had about ten people sitting at tables and two cameras pointed right at me. I was supposed to give a one-minute monologue, so I trimmed down a section of something I did back in high school for Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? Basically, it’s a priest telling grade school kids about the dangers of keeping dirty pictures in their wallets. (I could write out the monologue, but without the vocal inflections and actions to go with it, it’s just not the same. Especially the part about getting run over by a truck.)

They liked it (yay, me!), then some of them proceeded to ask me questions about my acting experience (stage and screen), am I comfortable in front of a camera… that’s when I chuckled and told them about being on Beauty and the Geek with cameras in my face all the time. During the course of that questioning, I was immensely thankful that I was wearing jeans so they couldn’t see that my legs were shaking.

Why? I wish I knew. I felt comfortable and confident in front of everyone—not like when I was being interviewed by a group of 20 people that included Ashton Kutcher—but my muscles apparently didn’t believe what my brain was telling them. ‘Tis passing strange.

Anyway, once they were done asking questions, I left the room and went out into the lobby of the building where they were checking people in. I knew some of the guys there, so I sat down and chatted for a while until one of the women from the conference room walked up to me. As soon as she got there, my phone buzzed to tell me I got a text message… from her.

She didn’t know I was still around, so she had written me a message asking if I’d like to join their team and they’d love to write for me. Sweeeeet… It turned out that she and the team’s director had seen my picture in the audition list and were already considering me. Once I walked into the conference room with such energy or swagger or whatever she called it, they didn’t really care about the monologue. Sweeeeet…

I gave her my contact info, she told me she’d send out an email soon with more information and my afternoon was complete. Life was spiffy.