As, I dunno, some of you? know by now, I'm an actor.

An award-winning actor, in fact.

And I have a lot a lot of lines to learn over the course of the next week. I keep saying it to remind myself that it's what I need to do as soon as I get off Steemit. Bwah.

But what you may not know, is that no matter how wonderful you are, and I am quite wonderful,

a day on set is a rare and luscious thing.

Most of my time is spent doing live performances and preparing for shoots and working in classes... so that when the glory of a day on set arrives, I have all my tools ready.

And yesterday, I got to have a day on set.

I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I should have, if I had anticipated making a Steemit post about it. So, with my We Make Movies colleague's permission, below you will see Michael Beardsley's photographic skillz. I played Swami Scari-Nanda, the organic juice guru.

This is Vince, our sound fella. He's a delight, and I have worked with him on a few sets. Sound is one of the unsung heroes of any shoot. You don't notice that the sound is good unless it's not. But it's so incredibly difficult to balance the needs of time urgency with the need to listen for clarity, that a good sound recordist is essential to every set. I had to record a few wild lines at the end of the night because I had a scene that goes from whispering to yelling in a matter of seconds, and we had to make sure there were options in case it clipped. Wild lines are lines that you record just the audio for, that you might use as the audio for a shot that the live audio didn't work for. Clipping means that the sound was suddenly so loud that the equipment doesn't properly record it. A bigger set will have a bunch of people working on the sound, but Vince was all of it at once: boom op, recordist and everything!

Also in that picture, you can find our DP, Sam. DP stands for Director of Photography and is essentially the same as a cinematographer. He's the head of the camera department. Again, on a bigger set, you'd probably have a camera op and an assistant camera person, and so on and so on. But Sam does it all. I've also worked with him before, in fact, on that film that I won an acting award for mentioned earlier in the post. You can imagine the warm feelings I have for him. And look at him. Don't you just want to trust that face with your soul?

In this shot you can see our 1st AD at the far left, who also played Jasmine, part of the Swami Scari-Nanda's entourage. Sometimes a low budget set doubles up the duties of personnel, and Verena was incredible in both capacities. An AD (especially a 1st AD) is in charge of keeping the whole set running smoothly. They manage the personnel, and keep everybody on task and on time. It's a huge undertaking, especially when your Production Assistants are very nice, but very inexperienced 15-year-olds.

You can also see a silhouette of Ramona, a fellow actor, looking at the silhouette of our director. I think a director's duties are pretty well understood. And they vary greatly by the desires of the director. Curtis crafted each performance in camera, but otherwise left us to our work, and he presumably spent a lot of time with the crew making sure the shots looked the way he saw them in his head. He also set the tone for the set. It was a very open and creative set. He and the writer together were the final arbiters of which words we said. If I had an idea about something that wasn't in the script, I pitched it to him, and he conferred with the writer, and if they both liked it, I said it. I got a good (bad) pun in there for us.

It was a long day that started at 7:30 for me and ended after midnight (though I was only on set from 10am-11:30pm), so crashing between takes was a delightful luxury. Not pictured here is the sumptuous banquet prepared for us by the writer's boyfriend's mom. It's all in my belly. I recommend grilled chicken, brie, basil, and tomato sandwiches for every palate.

And this is Ramona, me, and our writer, Datgirl. You should listen to her music. She's a DJ who specializes in kinds of music I don't really recognize the genres of, like "trap". But it's fun to dance to, for sure.

There I am in my getup. Costumes by the writer and Zapper, her boyfriend and co-writer and co-producer and co-star.

The big party scene (with Hive account@laurensimon in the foreground!).

And finally, all of us except V, who was taking the picture.

Ramona gave me a ride home, and we talked about our hopes and dreams. None of us is content with our careers at this point, but all of us have great hopes based on our mutual admiration for each other that one of these things will POP (this was a pilot for a comedy webseries/sketch series in the vein of The Catherine Tate Show with recurring characters in individual sketches called Pop & Spin). Man, it's rough not to be able to do what you love and are good at every day, but when you do, it reminds you that it's a life worth pursuing. I love being a part of clever comedy that helps change people's thinking about the stereotypes of the people they interact with daily.

Plus, I love making puns.