Lights, Camera, Action!

This week has felt very glamorous, simply because I've had a year's worth of film and television pared down to one week.  Thankfully there's been something to cheer up a week made grim by our one of student's falling terribly ill and needing an emergency liver transplant overnight, and the 9/11 anniversary hitting me/others harder than I expected.

I'm working with one of the students, Megan, to shoot a film for a her class Film Production Using Video. This means that I'm her movie star and I do whatever she tells me when we're on set. Her short film is about a girl (that's me!) that finds a coconut in the middle of the city, and when she brings it to her ear she hears the beach. She wanders around the city, trying to crack it open and engage others, and finally ends up inside the coconut, which is the beach. We shot this first scene, which is far more complicated than I could have imagined. No wonder why films take years to produce: you have to get every angle and lighting right, and that's on top of the actors not messing up their lines. Then, rather than a one-dimensional shot, you shoot the same scene over and over again from different angles and points of view.
This is what we did on the street corner down at Broadway and Regent St. First we filmed my feet stepping into the street and jumping back, me approaching and picking up the coconut from different angles, my INCREDIBLE acting skills as I listen to my furry pal and hear the beach (my facial expressions are real winners...)
At the end of all this, Megan will have the mammoth task of  editing all the footage and just using what she needs to create a seamless scene and story line. It was also fun to be standing on a corner and when people see the camera on the other side, they ask, "Excuse me, but what is going on here?!" as if Angelina Jolie were about to walk out on set. Nice try!
I've learned that right down the street from our building is an excellent place to people watch: I saw people of all shapes and sizes, two old hippies in automatic wheelchairs blaring 80s music from their ride, and a car drive the wrong way down a one-way. I may take a lawn chair and just park myself at this street the next time I'm feeling the least bit bored.

Part Two of TV was that same day, one of our professors, Daryl, invited me along with his class to ABC's Q & A, a live TV studio recording, interactive panel that answers the audience's questions and debates them. The beauty of democracy, says silver-fox host Tony Jones, who also happens to be the studio's in-house lawyer in case of [insert big word here that I still don't understand].

Silver-fox Tony Jones

What's great is that ABC studios is just a stone's throw away from our building, we walked down, went through the nonexistent security (that would NEVER happen in America), chilled out with the crowd and waited about 15 minutes before we were on air to be seated. Australians are amazing at live television, everything runs on clockwork for them. So much so, that we were still being prepped 5 minutes before going on air. The guests were introduced before it started, here's the line-up:
Famed writer and feminist Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, and always one to say provocative remarks, right-wing politician and snake-looking Barnaby Joyce (I really don't know how he gains any self-respect with a name like that...), feminist and author of Big Porn Inc. Melinda Tankard Reist, another provocative but brilliant journalist Paul Barry and blogger/journalist Joe Hildebrand. Brilliant journalist, but also quite witty. Here's the biography he submitted for the show:

"Joe is a writer for The Daily Telegraph and The Punch who specialises in speaking on subjects he knows nothing about.
Despite being a hugely skilled journalist and an online sensation, he is still dogged by rumours that he rose to the top due to his good looks alone. "...the nerve!

Once in a while, the camera zooms in and out of the audience's faces; unfortunately they didn't find mine tempting enough to flash on screen-- a couple of our students made it up though! The whole experience was quite fun, being on live television nation-wide, laughing at the sweaty, pathetic remarks made by Barnaby Joyce, and cringing at the uncomfortable and tense dialogue and debate between Greer and Joyce (you couldn't find more opposites and stick them next to each other). Things got real good when the topic of erotica came up and how the ad industry is hyper-sexualized and sending the wrong message to young boys. Barnaby looked realllll uncomfortable during that one. He made me realize that all politicians, or should I say all right-wing politicians are the same. Everywhere. It really doesn't matter to me when country you're from and or what you stand for specifically, a politician is a politician.

Part Three of Glamour Week was the Italian Film Festival with Kerry. Kerry is a powerball, bombshell, dynamite gal who places our interns, found me my internships, and knows how to party. I've never seen anyone network and work the crowd like this girl, she's incredible. We also have the same birthday, which explains why we get along so well. We've been running a few times, in Centennial Park and Bronte Beach, but when she invited me out to the opening night of the Italian Film Festival, I knew I had a golden opportunity to see Kerry at her best. She jokes that when the night falls, she turns into a different person. She can handle the number of martinis that would have me tumbling down the stairs.

We ran up to the Verona cinema in Paddington, and hit cocktail hour hard: Lavazza espresso martinis with cocoa on top and Prosecco champagne. She effortlessly struck up a conversation with these two ladies, Eva and Vanda, both of whom had lived in Italy and were great lovers of its culture. Within minutes, Kerry is taking pictures of me with our new friends, and we're pounding down the free cocktails like they're going out of style. The film, Escort in Love, was fantastic and very typical Italian. By the time the movie had ended, she had the four of us booked at her favorite Italian restaurant in Five Ways Paddo called Christo's. She knew the owner Peter quite well, got us some wine, olives, haloumi and fresh pasta, and made sure we didn't pay when we left. She ran off to another gig at Bondi, and I stayed and chatted with our two new friends. I was laughing to myself that technically we had picked up the ladies, and taken them out to dinner. Well, I'm not complaining cuz it was one hell of a good time. Especially when Eva asked Vanda : "Are you feeling peckish?" I nearly died. She is straight out of Wallace and Gromit. A fabulous, glamorous evening was made only better when I met a French girl Julie at the bus stop and we chit-chatted all the way home from Paddo.