And Then I Saw This Bright Light
Yesterday I had a great acting experience. Myself and three others were being filmed for a reconstruction scene for one of those tales on an English Version of Celebrity Ghost Stories. A title which pretty much explains the premise; Celebrities sit and tell the viewers at home a ghostly or spooky thing that happened to them and the tale is intercut with scenes reconstructing what happened.
The celebrity whose story we were doing was Jan Leeming's (70s/80s new reporter. She was also on I'm a Celebrity Get me Out of Here a few years ago)
.
I was playing a young Jan, Jess (who funnily enough I knew from my singing classes!) and Sean were playing the owners of the house Sue and.....damn, I've forgotten Sean's character's name, how awful is that? And Gemma, who is really an artist (and has an awesome site and work which you can find at gemmaparker.co.uk) was called in at the last moment because someone else dropped out, played Sue's sister Audrey.
The scenes were a bit at the bar where we were all chatting and laughing and drinking (all this wine which was really nice. But maybe we shouldn't have drank much at 11am after very little breakfast) and then I went off to bed. We had to improvise that entire scene, but even though we'd only know each other an hour we had all really clicked which is great (but inevitable since we're all amazing and lovely people) so it was really easy to do and we were soon laughing and joking. So much so that Karl let it run longer than it was intended to.
Then we all seperate scenes in bed (except for Jess and Sean who would be sharing a bed since they were meant to be a couple) where something spooky happened to us. I had a light appear at the end of the bed and wake me up (and causing me promptly to dive under the covers), Gemma had the covers pulled tight over her and Sean got out of bed to see the same light Idid (which incidentally was just an orb being held by one of the crew and making him look slightly like E.T)
Then the final scene was us all sat around the kitchen table talking about the things we had scene. This was entirely improvised but since the topic was so bizarre that w just kept laughing. Well we didn't properly start laughing until it was Sean's turn to speak and he just completely broke and then it was really hard to keep a straight face whenever we got to his point again. It was even worse trying to stay serious when they did the seperate close-up shots.
I had then one final scene where I had to walk up to the front door and knock.
It was a great day and experience and the crew were so lovely and put us totally at ease. And whenever we weren't filming we had the best dogs in the world Arthur, a black lab, and Olive, a long haired Jack Russell to entertain us. Arthur was so relaxed and laif back and Olive was just the most excitable little thing. She got on my knee and curled up and fell asleep for ages at one point....and then farted. Lovely.
But a great day all round with great people.
Can't wait to see the finished product. It's meant to air in February on the Bio channel, but we're getting our own copies sent to us which is great. Both personally and for adding to a show reel, haha