Scene, script, school stuff.

We started the acting thing at school, a guest teacher coming in, an actress and theatre director, and doing acting and directing exercises with us so that we get to try communicating and directing actors hands on kind of thing, and we've done this one day (Friday) and it was amazing, I mean, it wasn't really anything spectacular, no big revelations or anything, having done acting myself, I knew most of it from previous experiences or from knowing myself, but she's brilliant. She's quick-witted, sharp, clear, she'll get the point across, throw you a curve ball you didn't think you were ready for, make a joke, demonstrate, challenge--and all in one breath! it was exhilarating just listening to her at first, and then we got to get onto our feet and try it out, groups of three, two acting one directing, then we went round and then a couple of people got to direct their "actors" in front of everyone else, and it was so useful, I learned so much, and the great thing was we all had the same script, just a short scene, then we switched to one of ours (we were supposed to write a short scene and bring to this) and we worked on that, and then we had time for one more scene before the end of the day and I offered mine, and so I also got to direct and it was really hard, it was a lot harder than I expected it to be! Well, could be because my "actors" were both male and the scene had some romantic implications and they couldn't look each other in the eye without giggling, but that's okay... I made some huge mistakes, and we all did the same one, we would get into these long monologues with the actors, describing the scene and what we thought of the characters and what we wanted out of the script and blah blah blah, and she came up to me and said, "Be specific. Make up your mind and tell them what you want them to do." Sounds easy, I know... It's not.

Anyways. As a writer, it was a really useful exercise as well. Because depending on the director and the actors, the scene became completely different. But the funny thing was that the other three versions of my scene were similar of course (cause I wrote a really specific and condenced scene) but still completely different from each other, but each three conveyed an aspect of what I wanted to show with the scene or what I wanted to bring into it, so taking all three and combining them somehow and that would have been the scene as I picture it in my head, if that makes any sense...

I think everyone where impressed by it too, and I'm not bragging here. But the teacher gave me this look after she read it and everyone else were oddly quiet and when the groups "performed" their scenes (except for the couple of instances with boy giggles, both in my group and the other male + male pairing) there was this intense feeling in the room, like this awe surrounding us, and not because it was brilliantly written or anything, I haven't worked on it at all, I handed it in first draft, but because I think people related to the feeling of the scene for whatever reasons, but you could feel it in the energy in the room, and it felt amazing. And then several people told me they loved it as well afterward, but compliments are kind of meak in comparison to that feeling of having your work worked on I guess with such respect and reverence, that was the best compliment of all, especially one group, Bam Bam directed it and Katta and Arsen played the characters, and there was such tenderness and warmth between them, it made my heart all... well, you know, swollen and warmish.

So this is the scene that popped into my head like a lightening bolt from a clear sky about a person sitting fully dressed in a bathtub (an empty one) and then I linked it with a story idea I have in my head and on Friday night and sat down with a whole bunch of new ideas and inspiration and wrote an outline for a movie. It's almost done. There's just a couple of things still unclear. But it's kind of difficult for me to make outlines and stories in general cause I have a hard time seeing the big picture, I see single images, and I get snippets of dialogue in my head, or I think of a character, and so on, and then when I have enough material I try to put all the different pieces together and hopefully it turns into some kind of puzzle. Like with this one, all I had from the start was a bathtub, jeans and a black eye. And then a second character and a lot of tension after a fight. Frozen peas. And I didn't even know if they were siblings or a couple, I just knew they lived together and person B had hit person A and stormed out, and then returned to find person A sitting in the bathtub, hesitated, then climbed in with them and then the whole conversation taking place, trying to apologize to each other, get past it but something had been shattered and it's too late, and also didn't know the genders of the characters, so I had to go online to look for gender neutral names (cause I didn't want to go with A and B -- so I went with In and Key -- they're names, I checked. And in Swedish they're not words, so they're more neutral than they are in English...) anyways, they're a couple now, since Friday, definitely, sort of hetero, but with the gender roles reversed, I've developed this relationship drama about role playing, it makes sense in my head, but for you reading it like this I probably sound crazy more than anything...

Oh, Ces, if you're readin this, remember the Swedish family movie I showed you, "Patrik, age 1,5"? There's an actress in that movie, she's one of the neighbours, comes and sits down next to the main character and says it's a pity he's gay for being so handsome or whatever... well, that actress was at the seminar I was at all day today. I didn't talk to her though. I did my best to mingle, but things didn't go so well, but that's another story for maybe tomorrow... I'm still too frustrated to talk about it.