Reflections on Green Screen

Green screen (sometimes blue screen or yellow screen) acting is something actors of the distant past would have excelled at, as it demands of the performer the same kind of disciplined imagination that turned the stage of a Greek amphitheatre into a heavenly kingdom, or the "wooden O" of the old Globe into the battlefield of Agincourt. The bare stage and the green screen studio share the wonderful, exhilarating vastness of creative possibility.

One is presented with a blank canvas on which to paint. The background will be determined by the script, and designed or generated on a computer. It is the actor's task to create a believable performance in the imagined setting. The possibilities are endless, determined by the requirements of the text of course, but with very few limitations of any kind. One can be inside or outside, in a huge castle or a tiny room, or swim in space or fly through the sea and not get wet. Usually it will just be you, your co-performers and the screen –so you have to create the dimensions, the feeling and the atmosphere of your surroundings. Some actors dislike this, preferring the firm realism of objects and surroundings that are actually there. I myself find the challenge of green screen acting to be hugely liberating. Your imagination is fired up and sharpened; you go back to using the inner eye of a child. You are told the vague limits of the space –there is a door here, in the background there will be a window etc– but you yourself have to create the sense of being in that space. You may have to react to something that isn't there –that will be generated on a computer afterwards, so you need to be disciplined and focused, and see the height, colour, texture of everything around you that isn't there. Your creation of the imaginary world around you is what will (hopefully) make the setting believable. Though technical wizards can do wonders with the backgrounds, your performance has to be utterly believable for the thing to work –and the hardest thing is: you just don't know if it's working. You just have to trust your instincts and your imagination. And THAT is really what makes acting exciting.

Heated over Climate Change

I have started the new decade by taking on the task of recording as an audiobook a new, and rather obscure and heavy academic volume about anthropology and climate change, and once again I have found myself fuming heatedly over the whole business of names (see my blog post on Romans further down). This time it is not only the challenge of finding the correct pronunciations of out-of-the-way villages in the Andes or Tanzania, but the simple realization that very few academics seem to have straightforward, ordinary names. I am sure each of them individually has no problem whatsoever with her or his name, but my renderings of them have often meant resorting to great creativity and even close editing individual syllables to get the name...correct?

Well, who knows? So apologies in advance to messrs. Rwamugira, Majugu, Ouattara and Xurong to mention but a few –I am sure your academic work is sterling, no matter how garbled I may have pronounced your names.

This Week’s Flashback -Player in "Hamlet" 1992/1993

"The players are come hither my lord..." and what a collection of ancient-looking ghostly figures we were. Almost like anaemic zombies in Renaissance garb, including the pictured ruff, which I remember itched constantly, as did the straggling (or struggling) moustache. In some of the scenes in which I appeared it was important to remain absolutely still, but the urge to scratch or sneeze made this a task of Hercules. I had a cold at one stage, and a runny nose, which was an absolute nightmare to try and contain –the moustache (and probably the audience) suffered as a consequence. Also all our costumes were covered with powder, adding to the impression of a dusty troupe of traveling players, and every move or gesture was accompanied by a little cloud. Despite all this it was a very successful production, running for over 100 performances, with a revival the following year, and it taught me a great deal about Shakespeare... and moustaches!

Post-project burden!

Well -it has happened again, as it always does: Upon completion of a project –in this case the recording of the audiobook mentioned in my last post– I have come down with something, namely the flu. It is really quite amazing how the body manages to postpone a bout of sickness until the time is right –when one’s days are no longer filled with the focus of the project. Even as I recorded the last lines of the looooooooooong book (it clocked in at 29 hours) I could feel the little bug in the back of my nose rearing up self-importantly, ready to pronounce itself, blossom and multiply. I suppose I should be grateful for it having stayed at bay so considerately until the moment I read "the end" –or perhaps it is a matter of subconscious will-power, if there is such a thing. I had looked forward to a few days of calm and peace –instead I have be granted a fever, sneezing fits and bleary eyes. Perhaps the wisest thing would be to defy the bug by throwing myself straight into a new project -now that’s a cunning scheme!

Speaking about Rome

As most of this summer has been exceptionally wet and dull, I have had no real qualms about spending a good part of it inside a small recording studio reading –and getting paid for doing so. The current volume I am recording as an audiobook is "Roman Sculpture" –which contains over 450 pages of text in two columns, and is quite a trial because it contains a multitude of Roman and Greek names –some quite obscure– that need to be researched for pronunciation purposes. Juicy names like Flamininus, Epaminonades and Zeuxis. Nobody in Rome seemed to have simple names, like Fred or Bob, no, they had to have long double and triple names that rolled about one’s mouth like marbles, with little regard or thought for the future recorder of audiobooks... Try saying Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces or Domitius Ahenobarbus a couple of times in the middle of a sentence and you realize that Romans must have had pretty good diction. My reasoning is that reading and recording this book is going to improve my diction too!

This Week’s Flashback -Admiral von Schreiber in "Sound of Music" 2008

A recent flashback this time. I was amazed to discover that it is now exactly a year since I started work on "The Sound of Music" at Edderkoppen Theatre in Oslo. Can it really be a whole year? It seems like yesterday. Perhaps because the memories of this production were mostly extremely good and happy, except for the production company going bankrupt on New Year’s Eve and us not getting paid. (This might explain the severe expression on the picture, though I was playing a German nazi admiral). However, all musicals must have happy endings, especially Rodgers & Hammerstein ones, and just a week ago we finally recouped the pay we were owed. So the hills are once again full of the sound of music, and the prospect of holidays. We did 124 performances in all, and I loved every single one of them –except the time my trousers fell down on stage in the middle of my important little scene ...but that’s a whole story on its own!

Complaining

This week I have been in the recording studio voicing a selection of interviews, news items and discussions to be used for educational purposes in Norwegian schools. Each type of recording required a different mode of voice ..a neutral newscaster voice for the news items, an informal chatty voice for the discussions, and character-voices for the interviews -in one of which I played an eager professor of natural history rattling on about carnivorous plants! However, in addition to these segments, I recorded a whole batch of different "complaints" in the style of people phoning in to a radio station and leaving a message. This was not only the most fun to do, but also strangely therapeutic! I mean -how often does one get the chance to complain loudly about day-to-day trivialities (most of which I agreed with) and get paid handsomely for it? Following the text, but using pure method acting, I voiced my rage on having to get up early,  on cyclists hogging the road, on telephone bills and false advertising and a whole variety of other topics. When I finally emerged from the recording booth I felt cleansed and elated. There is clearly nothing like a good, heartfelt, loud complaint to get the energy flowing -I shall now be using this as a great warm-up exercise!

This Week’s Flashback -Rev. Chasuble in "The Importance of Being Earnest"

Here’s something I just discovered in the archives of my old student-theatre group: The Oslo Players. Though the group itself no longer exists, the web-page is still out there, and an interesting record of the startling amount of activity we had. Goodness knows how any of us managed to study at all! Anyway, I was intrigued to be reminded of the fact that my recent appearance as the priest in "The Sound of Music"  was not the first man of the cloth I have played. As this rather fuzzy photograph shows, that distinction goes to the part of the Reverend Chasuble from Oscar Wilde’s "The Important of Being Earnest" which I seem to recollect was done as a performed reading at the University of Oslo and some schools way back in the nineties. Come to think of it, apart from reading his stories, this marks the only work of Oscar Wilde I have been involved with. Hmmm. Perhaps something should be done about this!

If you are interested in some of the other things The Oslo Players got up to you can always have a look at the webpage:   www.osloplayers.no/

Storytelling

I was recently asked to read or perform a story for children at Oslo’s Theatre Museum as part of a wide cultural event to encourage people to get to know their city better. I was given a free reign when it came to material, which made making a choice of story all the more difficult –there are, after all, so many fabulous children’s stories out there –some of my favourites being those of Hans Christian Anderson, Roald Dahl and Aesop. However, ultimately I wrote and performed a story of my own, which was the tale of "Sebastian the Theatre Cat". This had nothing to do with T.S. Eliot or Andrew Lloyd Webber, but concerned my own particular "mascot" Sebastian, with whom I am pictured here, and who already has many fans, being much more of a superstar than I am! The story is set in an old theatre, and tells of how Sebastian (and his animal friends) saved the theatre from burning down, and it is the first of what I hope is a series of tales about this feline character. 

Storytelling for children is one of the most demanding but enrichening performance experiences imaginable; a combination of mutual imagination and rigid focus on the storyline. It is also one of the fundamental acts of performance –how it all started, long, long ago, before there were theatres or stages or the written word, when tales were told around a fire. I felt very priveleged to get back to the roots of what performing is all about, and learned a lot from the experience, not least of which being to find one person in the audience to whom you direct your storytelling. This does not mean neglecting all the others, but gives you a focus point, a receptor, which you can return to, affirming that what you are saying is getting through. This is an old performance trick, but it works.

The importance of reading instructions

I have just spent two days filming three short instructional films for people on oil rigs –in both English and Norwegian versions, which reminds of those very early days of sound film when several language versions of a film would be made on the same set. I have, for instance, some Laurel & Hardy films which the boys perform in both English and Spanish. Well, the Laurel & Hardy analogy is good for the filming we did over the course of the two days. I was the clumsy one who doesn’t read the instructions, so I guess that makes me Laurel. My screen wife (who is not pictured) was the clever one. We shot one of the films on exotic location Oslo’s main park, and the other two in interiors, where one of my tasks was to assemble an Ikea chest of drawers. This being no easy feat for someone like me,  I used method acting to at least give the illusion that I looked like I knew what I was doing! Much of the actual assembly was however done by the camera man between takes. At the end of the day, the chest of drawers stood there, stubbornly, like the black column in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, and just as foreboding. Nobody wanted to disassemble it, or take it away, so it remains where it was built. However, one gentle push will probably send the whole thing crashing back to its default state of countless bits of wood,  screws and bolts.

Just how this is going to enlighten and enthuse those hardy souls on board oil-rigs in the North Sea is beyond me, but at least it pays next month’s rent.     

This Week’s Flashback -Easter Skiing in "Home Sweet Home"

In Norway everybody seems to head to the mountains at Easter time to go skiing. In my play "Home Sweet Home -The English Familiy" from 2004 I dramatised the experiences of a football-mad English teenager and his eccentric mother when they move to Norway in the early seventies. The play was performed over a period of two years, primarily for school audiences, and one of the most popular scenes was our first day on the ski slopes. The character of the mother claims she has learned how to ski from watching the Beatles film "Help!" dozens of times, and here she is trying to convince me that it’s a piece of cake. Happy Easter!

Recording W. H. Auden

Today I have been in the recording studio, recording a selection of poems and short stories for an audio book for learners of English to be published later this year. Among the material I recorded was a poem by W. H. Auden (pictured) called "Musée des Beaux Arts". Poetry should always be read aloud, so it is is always a great privilege to be able to do so and get paid for it! Some poems are naturally more challenging than others –and I got through the Kipling and Herrick without any worry; but Auden is a tricky customer. His poems are full of pictures, and move from image to image in a word, following seemingly unrhythmic patterns and trails. "Musée des Beaux Arts" is not an easy poem to understand at first, and I spent considerable time trying to get under its surface, but once I started recording it all came together..rather like a jumble of unconnected notes suddenly emerging as music. Yes, Auden knew his beans all right. I hope the listeners think so too!