Full Act Follow-up! (Patreon)

Ahhhh. Dear patrons, we made it.

It wasn't perfect; it wasn't EXACTLY the way I wanted it.  BUT – we emerged from this 6-week creation gauntlet with a recording of the full act, and a trailer to boot.  

Some fairly insurmountable odds were faced down and triumphed over: costumes came together (and fell apart) (and came together again) in an unlikely period of time from Michael Slack, Marianne Thibeault, and Marika Kutnahorsky; a song reimagined something old and made it new again with breathtaking speed and accuracy from Greg Harrison; a choreography emerged that is beautiful and carries the potential to continue maturing, evolving, and complexifying with the help of Roberto Campanella; Tig Fong lit a challenging space beautifully and conceived of a shooting style that danced in and out of interaction with me and my performance in a way that clearly displays the act while letting us enjoy it from a few angles; and Arlen Aguirro-Stewart (who I'd like to tell you all about more in an upcoming post!) stepped in at the 11th hour to help me on the "day of" as a creative director, general handy-person, and emotional rock to help me keep my confidence and resolve as we powered through the day. 

 I hope you all enjoyed yesterday's viewing. As promised, I wanted to take today to tell you a bit about how the shoot went on Saturday, and explain the technical glitches that unfortunately arose. To begin:  

An act demo is supposed to be an uncut shot of your act – at least, in my experience. As I understand it, a producer wants to know what your act looks like from start to finish, AND wants to know that you can DO the damn thing from start to finish. They don't want to see your act shot from 50 million different angles, with cuts and transitions between every trick. For all they know, you've never run the act from start to finish without stopping!

There's a world where circus demos are shot with cuts and edits and fancier shots than this, but my intention going into Saturday was to TRY to emerge victorious with what we call a "oner" in the film and TV business – as in, a single un-cut take of the act from start to finish.

That is not what you see in yesterday's full-length recording, unfortunately, but I did my best with the cards that were dealt.

The shoot day continued to be cursed in its own ways, just as the days leading up to Saturday presented their own ... challenges. Despite best efforts and no shortage of technical know-how and experience on the part of Tig Fong, who filmed this ... technical glitches happened.

What happened on Saturday went like this:

(1) We managed to get two great runs in of the act in on Saturday.

I always knew that it was going to be a close call to get everything I needed out of the shooting day, with the skeleton crew I had, present. With a limited amount of time in the space (and a high degree of uncertainty as to how long we could have QUIET in the space, given that it was a Saturday and the resident in the neighbouring unit could wake up and start blasting his 'get-ready-to-be-a-bouncer-on-King-Street' workout music at top volume at any moment past 4pm), two runs was on par with my expectations.

It's also incredibly physically demanding to shoot a contortion video – be it an 8-minute solo act like this, or something in the world of film & TV. We warm up our backs and the rest of our bodies for 45-60 minutes usually to perform a 5 to 6 minute act ONCE, not to perform it and perform it again and perform more pieces of it AGAIN for hours and hours on end. It's very physically and mentally taxing, and – in my personal experience, anyways – there is a 'point of no return' where the muscles are getting stiff and tight from overuse and your spine just doesn't have anything left to give you in the 'beautiful and bendy' department. You can't stay at maximum flexibility indefinitely.

Given that the act takes about 10 minutes to run, that the costume re-set takes about 15 to 20 minutes in between each run, that discussions about shots and any lighting adjustments naturally arise in the course of a shoot,  that we needed to do some tighter shots for the trailer, and more – we did real good on the time management front. And my body held out absolutely as long as it could.

BUT . . .

(2) There were major costume malfunctions that happened.

You folks know about the issue about the magnets on the sleeves: they simply wouldn't stay stuck together. There's probably too much movement and tension in the course of a contortion act to ask two small magnets to hold on to each other the way I was, but Marika's solution of doubling up the magnets (as in, stacking 2 magnets on top of each other on each side) unfortunately fulfilled my concerns. They still did not hold. I ended up getting Arlen to tie as tidy a knot in the latex as possible and just altered the choreo so that the gloves stay on the whole time.    The true villain of the day, however, was the pants. The harem pants not only gave me trouble in terms of the magnets popping apart the moment I plié'd the slightest bit, but the locking zippers that hold the tight part of the pants on over my hips just ... stopped locking. This meant that the slightest bit of strain the wrong way started pulling those zippers open. Add in a touch more vigorous movement, and those pants just wanted to fly off of my body.

Even though the first run of the act went REALLY GOOD, the harem pants completely gave up the ghost: I could feel things starting to pull apart and then, sure enough, I stood up out of one trick sequence and they literally fell off my body to the floor. I 'sold' it (because I'm a professional, god damn it) and kept going with the rest of the choreography as unfazed as could be, but I wasn't about to use THAT take to send to my agent and producer. It's not what's supposed to happen in the act!

So I had to go with the second run of the act for this full-length video.

EXCEPT . . .

(3) Technical glitches that have never happened before in Tig's use of the gimble or related app required to use the gimble (a fancy toy that you can use to stabilize a camera and create those beautiful, smooth shots) ... happened.

At first, we thought it was just a couple 'jumps' in the video – tiny little nibbles of time that inexplicably disappeared from the digital record of the act. You can probably spot these 2 or 3 small 'jumps' (glitches) in the video fairly easily. They're not the worst ... but they're obviously not great, or what anyone wants in a video!

That didn't end up being the worst part, though.

We didn't think to scrub through to the end of the video to make sure the entire act had recorded. We had to move on with our day. So we did.

Only when I got back in the door around 10pm Saturday night and began placing the footage in my video editor did I realize "OH CRAP..."

The last 60 seconds of the second run of the act just ... wasn't there.

I was forced to splice in the ending from the first run of the act (the one with the major harem pants malfunction). This is unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly, I greatly preferred the way that Tig shot, and I performed, the ending in the second run. The first run ending (what you see in the video above) was framed way too tightly for my tastes but – well, it is what it is. It's all I had left to work with. And secondly, I broke the cardinal rule of "make a demo of your circus act" – there's cuts in it.

* * * *   

Sigh.

So there you have it.

I can't honestly muster the energy to be that upset about the technical issues of the day, or even the costume malfunctions, because you all know just how close this all came to not happening at all. Thus, I tried my best to smooth out the moments where those cuts exist so that they're less obtrusive to whoever in Europe ends up watching this, and that's that.

* * * * * [ to be continued ] [ Behind-the-scenes photo post coming up tomorrow!]