THAT'S A WRAP. (Patreon)

Salve, my strange & wonderful patrons!

(who here took Grade 10 Latin? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?)

A small work and life update for you! (More to the tune of "film & TV things" than the tune of "circus things" today,  FYI, for reasons that will shortly become clear*. I promise today's post ends in some sober takeaways – but you'll have to read through some wailing, first.)

(* Fear not, if you were enjoying the 'Creation Realizations' posts, I've got another that chews on originality vs. authenticity waiting in the wings to be edited once I have two spare brain cells to rub together)

Some of you may recall me mentioning that I'd be taking on a little indie action movie in the month of July. In the past 6 weeks, I have spent more hours ...

(1) sitting in my black, boiling-hot (broken/unfixable air conditioning) Ford Crown Vic with rivulets of sweat running down my shins (I didn't know my shins were capable of sweating until now) driving up and down various Ontario and Quebec highways with jittery eyeballs and knuckles white upon the steering wheel as I try to spot any massive herbivores laying in wait to ambush my vehicle during dawn and dusk (deer and moose);  

(moose for scale; don't wanna have a vehicular tussle with one of these, you and your car WILL lose)

(2) being eaten alive by ravenous mosquitoes the size of F-18s in the humid, damp treelines of Northern Ontario; and   

(3) watching the sun go down at work . . . and then come up again . . . and then attempt to fall asleep at 9am for a few restless hours,  . . . than I would ever care to repeat in the conceivably near future.

The first half of my July was spent dashing back and forth between Montréal and Toronto for the first half of July to juggle the fight build and fight rehearsals for the project while attempting to minimally disrupt my Barbette work.

'Principal photography' (aka, the part where we actually film the dang thing) got underway in the middle of the month.

And two short days ago –starting Wednesday night but finishing at a horrific  time of 9:16am Thursday– I concluded my final night (day? night?) of performance on the project.

Woof.

I did, however, just miss peak shadfly season in the area where we were filming, which apparently looks something like this (and smells terribly like fish):

Yes, those are all bugs. *shudder*

I'm now finishing writing this post to you from the slightly lumpy seat of one of the Economy cars on Train 64 from Toronto to Montréal because I am OFFICIALLY WRAPPED, BAYBEEEE.

It was a challenging project ... less in the "wow I feel so fulfilled by this work!" kind of way, and more in the Dad-from-Calvin-and-Hobbes "this builds character" kind of way:

The behind-the-scenes of the last month have involved a lot of crying: stress-crying, frustration-crying, disappointment-crying, exhaustion-crying, overstimulation-crying, etc.  

A large portion of these different flavours of saltwater-waterworks can be attributed to the fact that I was not aware that this project was (non-hyperbolically) 100% night shoots.

(DISCLAIMER: there's quite a few paragraphs of self-flagellating bemoaning to follow; I've written and deleted all of this several times and have exasperatedly decided to just let it exist in the world so that I can read it three days from now with a level, unblinking gaze and go, There. Did you get that out of your system? Good. Let's carry on. It's not pleasant, perhaps, but it's an honest reflection of where I've been at. Don't worry – there's a constructive ending to all this, afterwards.)

Friends, I was not prepared. 

Turns out there is a big difference between accidentally watching YouTube and TikTok videos until 2am when you were supposed to go to sleep at 11pm and feeling distantly guilty at your inability to maintain a healthy sleep schedule ... And needing to stay up so that you turn into a fully nocturnal creature. 

All I did –all I could do– was wake up, play Frogger (run across the little 2-lane highway / between the 18-wheelers) to get to the Tim Hortons and have 'breakfast' at 4pm; head to set; drag my ass back to the weird-smelling hotel* between 6am and 8am; and take 2 Benadryl in the hopes of sleeping straight through until 4pm again. 

(*so many weird smells, so many cloying, artificial scents deployed in a futile effort to disguise the former but only resulting in low-grade chemical warfare that changed from hallway to hallway in the building)

But in truth, many of the tears I wept into the moldy, questionably-stained hotel room carpet over the course of this indie movie were a combo-breaker of fear and disappointment:

How could I let this happen? was on a near-constant loop in my head for the middle part of July.

The honest, unpleasant reality of the last 6 weeks of work is that I spent at least one day each week weeping on the phone to someone that I was scared I'd ruined all the work I'd put into the Barbette project since May.

William had emphasized before I left for the film that I was at a crucial point in my training: if I continued on training hard and conditioning, I'd be able to lock in the technical gains we'd been working so hard on; but if I stopped completely it would likely result in a significant slow-down or set-back in our goals.

It was one thing to be on a two-week pause. Three weeks? Maybe. But five . . . AGH.

All the deadlines and goals I had set for myself earlier this summer had to, have to, change; and all the progress I'd made from end of April until early July with my coach, William, felt precarious and threatened: 

I was supposed to have a rough draft of the act done by mid-to-end of August.  

I was supposed to be working with my costume designer already.  

I was supposed to have been working with the conseil artistique.

I knew that this indie production mutating and metastasized was a thing far beyond my control, but this was little comfort. The production schedule of the film changed constantly. It was a shifting, inconstant beast that was supposed to see me back in Montréal & back working on circus things by the end of July.

I learned to dread the ping! of each new email in my inbox because it invariably brought new notification of a schedule change that pushed me further and further away from returning to the training and act creation that I'd left hanging in such a delicate balance.

The production schedule pushed as late as it could push (to mid-August) and with that came a kind of comforting resignation: there would be no more changes. I would just have to ride it out, and do my best to pick up the pieces. I ended up with a wrap date of August 9th.

Even if I couldn't kick myself for 'knowing better' (because there was no way of knowing it would turn out the way it did), I felt helpless and trapped in the grinding, unpredictable cogs and gears of a production that was doing it's best to not fall apart in the face various issues.

Exhaustion from the night shoot schedule crept in and muted the tight, frantic loop of my thoughts into a disquieting mumble that buzzed in the back of my mind and behind my sternum.

Eventually, July dragged into August, and August limped along.

* * * * * * * *

I've felt like I have little to no control over my life for the last month.

This leads to a fairly swift decline in the mental health department for me. 

In the past, I used to struggle through the thick of these moments, gracefully and gracelessly.  When I would emerge, exhausted, I'd gather my mental, emotional, and physical resources for the next project and tell myself that I was more prepared for the next one; that I'd do better on the next one; that the next one wouldn't be as hard as the last one.

But that's not what happens.

There's a small, slightly bitter comfort in realizing that the level of dysfunction and distress I feel from these experiences, from working this way, from making a living this way, are inseparably linked to me being autistic. I didn't have the words for that before last year. I just suffered through it, and beat myself up, or stressed-out or ruined the relationships around me, until I was through it. 

So, one of the things I've tried to do over the last 6 months is build better awareness around which aspects of my autism are more flexible and more inflexible. Scheduling, and last-minute changes to scheduling & routines, are one of the things that I have a very hard time with.   

"Ess, you're in the wrong line of work, then," I can hear you all chanting.   

I KNOW, I KNOW. 

But I've ... "managed" (😬) ... thus far by maintaining (rather rigid) rules and routines for myself that more or less can travel with me. For example: 

• I have a ridiculous skincare routine that I cherish and rarely stray from;
• I watch my 'comfort shows' repeatedly, to a dissociative degree (I didn't say all of these were healthy coping mechanisms, ok);
• I'm rigid about getting training in (even if I've learned to adapt to what kind of training I can accomplish in a given environment or time frame);
• I eat the same staple foods day in and day out to supplement less-predictable meal times and meal options, and most of them can survive in a hotel mini-fridge (shout out to my Greek yogurt & banana protein shakes).   

When I came onto this indie project that just wrapped, I'd been told it'd likely be a 2-week commitment. Maybe three.

It turned into something closer to five.

I was also told it would film in Toronto.

But it ended up filming in North Bay.

These are understandable changes in the grand scheme of film industry work (and especially so in the context of indie films, as I've learned). But they're nonetheless disturbing changes to me in terms of the "maintain a basic level of physical fitness and find somewhere to train straps once or twice a week so you're not completely tanking all the work you've put into your other art career, the circus one, so far this summer" scheme of things.

My precious routines were up-ended:

I couldn't maintain baseline training.   I couldn't access healthy or nutritious food other than "lunch" at 2am on set.

There was no time or energy for seeking regulation via watching the 4th season of The Office for the 7th time.

And the weird-smelling hotel's mini-fridge was not to be trusted.

Despite my best efforts, there was just ... too much for me to (try to) adapt to. And so, I slipped into the self-loathing anxious amorphous-blob-state that resulted in the above-described mental self-flagellation.

BUT! Like I said, that's not the note I'm ending on today. There are constructive things to pull from this. I've created a short list of rules and reminders to try to follow as guidelines that might help me avoid these experiences in the future:

• NO MORE INDIE PROJECTS

I loved the director/writer for the project, the script was fantastic, and the humans on the show itself were lovely. I'm genuinely excited to see how it turns out when we get to see it early next year (I've been told February is the rough release date). But, if I can help it, I'm not going to put myself in a position again.

Working as a stunt person for the bulk of my TV & film career means that most (if not all) of the projects I've worked on have been what they call in the industry "Tier A" productions (and maybe the occasional Tier B production). This basically translates to: "This production has butt-loads of $$$ to spend". Stunt people, and action in general, are expensive to have in a show. Action is often the first thing cut down, or cut out, when a budget has to be trimmed; but if there's significant amounts of action written into the script, it takes a certain amount of cold hard cash to execute it.

In general, what I’m saying is ALL of my professional experience so far —which is the experiential info I think of and draw on when trying to make career or artistic decisions— has been on productions with LOTS of money. It doesn’t guarantee a more pleasant or positive work experience (by any stretch of the imagination), but I think it MIGHT mean ever-so-slightly more predictability. And that’s … important to me.

An indie is more like in the ballpark of $3 million and lower. In technical industry terms, this is called a tier-D or tier-E production (or lower). These are not details I've ever thought (or cared) much about before, because my job essentially boils down to "Here are your lines, here is the scene direction. Go fall down or cry over there. Good. Now repeat it 12x".

These details, however, become very apparent when working on an indie project – something that's under 5 million or 3 million dollars in terms of budget (which is what this one is).

Not because the quality of the creative material is different; and not because the quality of the creatives on the show are different; but because a certain amount of money simply makes things ... work smoothly. It buys you time. It buys you a certain number of mistakes. It buys you a buffer.

And if I'm going to continue being an artist who maintains even a skeletal version of their other practices while working on a movie or TV show, then I need that buffer. Through random and arbitrary luck, I ended up in the film industry in a way where I have access to auditions and possible work on Tier A productions; so if a production is happening on a lower tier, maybe I pass up on it & figure out how to keep income going through other means.

• AVOID DOUBLE-DUTY WHEREVER POSSIBLE

Okay, I've actually made this promise to myself multiple times in past and broken it several times. But, hey – some lessons are harder to learn than others. I'm writing this one here (again) (**tugs collar**) to try to reinforce it just a little bit more, once again:

If you have ONE major project on the go, thou shalt not embark upon a SECOND major project. The former must be either completed or paused, first.

Secondary and tertiary projects with flexible schedules and deadlines are arguably necessary to the survival of an art-creature, both creatively as well as practically in the context of this hellish late-stage-capitalism dystopia,  and will therefore be tolerated.  

• THERE IS A DIRECT CORRELATION BETWEEN EXHAUSTION & WEEPINESS

You might not be extra f***ed. You might just be extra tired.

Take 3 to 5 days of proper rest and re-evaluate.

If you're actually, in reality, well and truly f***ed then ... hey, at least now you're better rested and therefore better able to attempt to deal with it.

*****

So there we have it. According to the last of those rules I’ve given myself, I shouldn’t take myself —or any of my negative, grumbly thoughts— seriously until at least Wednesday or Thursday.

It's time to rest. 

Time to become a diurnal creature again. 

Time to try to let my brain gently shift into a place where creating in the world of circus vocabulary feels possible again. 

Time to try to pick up where I left off with the Barbette project.

Time to pick myself up & keep trying.

Stay strange & wonderful --

xoxo Ess