Friday, May 02, 2014

Finally this freaking video is done!


Oh vey - I was supposed to have this video done by the end of February and here it is May 1st and it's finally online. That is a personal worst for me and the NYCPlaywrights Play of the Month project.

It was a tsunami of ridiculous factors that caused this to take so long - there was all the damn snow, and there was the jury duty, and there was the 2-week long cold and worst of all there was the flaky flaky actors! I'd just about used up all my actor regulars - I try not to have an actor appear more than twice in these videos, although I have broken that rule with a couple of actors. So I was searching outside the usual pool of actors I work with and now I know why I work with the usual group - because they are by and large much more dependable than your typical actors. Liz, who I used several times last year, immediately agreed to do the video, quickly agreed on a date/time and showed up ready to act.

Before I asked Liz I asked:
  • An actor who said she couldn't do it because she was going on a cruise in a couple of weeks. Mind you this is a monologue that takes less than an hour to shoot and the actor doesn't have to be off-book. And yet somehow she couldn't do it until after her week-long cruise.
  • Another actor jerked me around for two weeks, dithering over the time and location (the frequent snowfall didn't help) and finally I gave up on her.
  • Another actor was ready to go, but I was meeting her straight from jury duty and the cops confiscated my camera and when they returned it it was all out of battery power - which I didn't find out until 30 minutes before the actor was supposed to show up at the rehearsal studio in Manhattan and I didn't have the power cord necessary to re-charge the battery. The next time I emailed her to ask if she wanted to try again she didn't bother to respond to my email.
  • Another actor I asked agreed right away, but couldn't be available for two weeks - and then a day before the shoot tried to get me to pay for her babysitter, which would double the amount I had offered to pay her for one hour of work. 
And then there were the actors who just didn't bother to respond to my email from the beginning. This is so annoying - I pay for these video shoots, the least they could do is make up an excuse in a timely fashion and respond to my email right away.

And now I have to shoot the other monologue - if I can find another actor who is not a complete flake.