#my friend and I are trying to get our tv scripts picked up by networks so I gotta be careful how I share my fics | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

calzona-ga · 4 years ago

Link

She might change her mind; she certainly has before. But midway through an interview, Ellen Pompeo casually drops the bomb that after more than 360 episodes, the upcoming 17th season of “Grey’s Anatomy” may be its last.

“We don’t know when the show is really ending yet,” Pompeo says, answering a question that was not at all about when the show might end. “But the truth is, this year could be it.”

Pompeo has played Meredith Grey — the superstar surgeon around whom “Grey’s Anatomy” revolves — since its start. The show, created by Shonda Rhimes, premiered on ABC on March 27, 2005, and became an immediate, noisy hit. Since then, for a remarkably long time in Hollywood years, the drama has been among the most popular series on TV, even as the landscape of television has changed seismically. At its Season 2 ratings height, the program drew an average audience of 20 million viewers. And all these years later — in a TV universe now divided by more than 500 scripted shows —“Grey’s” ranks as the No. 1 drama among 18- to 34- year-olds and No. 2 among adults 18 to 49. In delayed, multiplatform viewing, Season 16 averaged 15 million viewers.

Strikingly, technology is such that teenagers who were born when the show premiered, and later binged “Grey’s” on Netflix, watch new episodes live with their parents. The series has spawned two successful spinoffs for ABC, “Private Practice” (which ran from 2007 to 2013) and “Station 19” (which enters its fourth season this fall). “Grey’s Anatomy” has been licensed in more than 200 territories across the world, translated into more than 60 languages, and catapulted the careers of music artists — from Ingrid Michaelson and Snow Patrol to Tegan and Sara and the Fray — whose songs have played during key emotional sequences.

In its explosive initial success, “Grey’s Anatomy” was an insurgent force in popular culture. The Season 1 cast featured three Black actors — Chandra Wilson, James Pickens Jr. and Isaiah Washington — as doctors in positions of power at the Seattle hospital where the show is set, and Sandra Oh played the ambitious intern Cristina Yang, who would become Meredith’s best friend. For the women characters, the “Grey’s” approach to sex was defiant and joyful, starting in the pilot with Meredith’s one-night stand with Derek (Patrick Dempsey), who turned out to be one of her bosses at the hospital.

Rhimes presented these images to the world like they were no big deal, when in fact, nothing like “Grey’s” had ever been seen on network television. Krista Vernoff has been the “Grey’s Anatomy” showrunner since Season 14, as anointed by Rhimes, and was the head writer for the first seven seasons. She remembers the moment she realized how radical “Grey’s” was — a medical show driven entirely by its characters instead of their surgeries — as she watched an episode early in Season 1. “My whole body was covered in chills,” Vernoff recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, we thought we were making a sweet little medical show — and we’re making a revolution.’”

Still, no one expected “Grey’s Anatomy” to become the longest-running primetime medical drama in TV history, outlasting “MASH” and “ER,” the previous record-holder. Since 2005, “Grey’s” has inspired countless women to become doctors, and along the way, its depiction of illness has even saved a few lives. The show has remained popular through three presidential administrations, the Great Recession, tectonic shifts in how people watch TV and two cultural reckonings — one feminist, one anti-racist — that demonstrate how ahead of its time “Grey’s Anatomy” has always been.

And they’re not done yet. When Season 17 premieres on Nov. 12, “Grey’s Anatomy” will tackle the subject of the coronavirus as experienced by the doctors at Grey Sloan Memorial, all while filming under strict COVID-19 protocols. The season is dedicated to frontline workers. And Pompeo, a producer on “Grey’s” — whose Meredith has removed a live bomb from a patient’s body, was in a plane crash, was widowed after Derek died in a car accident, was beaten nearly to death by a patient and, in a separate incident, actually did die briefly after a ferry accident — is intent on making the show top itself once again.

“I’m constantly fighting for the show as a whole to be as good as it can be. As a producer, I feel like I have permission to be able to do that,” Pompeo says. “I mean, this is the last year of my contract right now. I don’t know that this is the last year? But it could very well could be.”

Pompeo has been refreshingly transparent about her fight to become the highest-paid female actor on television, having detailed a few years ago how she negotiated a paycheck for more than $20 million a year. She clearly knows what she’s doing with these frank pronouncements as well.

As Pompeo laughs over the phone from her car, she says in a near shout: “There’s your sound bite! There’s your clickbait! ABC’s on the phone!”

The “Grey’s Anatomy” team — led by Rhimes and executive producer Betsy Beers — created the first season in a vacuum, because the show did not have an airdate. The 2004-05 season was a comeback year for ABC because “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost,” both of which debuted that fall, became phenomena — not only ratings successes but also watercooler events.

But at “Grey’s,” Rhimes was getting noted to death by network president Steve McPherson. According to Vernoff, McPherson — who resigned in 2010 under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations — stonewalled with “pushback every step of the way,” as ABC’s then- head of drama, Suzanne Patmore Gibbs, fought for the show. Vernoff was close with Patmore Gibbs, who died in 2018, and recalls her talking about her clashes with McPherson.

“He just didn’t get it; he didn’t like it,” Vernoff continues. “Honestly, I’m going to say, I don’t think he liked the ambitious women having sex unapologetically.”

Wilson, when she was cast as Miranda Bailey on “Grey’s,” was a New York theater actor (“Caroline, or Change”) relatively new to series television. But she was well aware of the network’s issues. “We took a creative break around the Christmas holiday, which to me meant ‘Oh, we’re out of a job.’”

Pompeo was frustrated: “Once we finally got an airdate, two weeks before that airdate they wanted to change the title of the show to ‘Complications.’”

In an email to Variety, McPherson disputed these assertions, saying, “I made the original deal with Shonda. I developed ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ at the studio. I picked it up at ABC.” He praised Patmore Gibbs, and added, “As for defaming me again and again, I don’t know what to say other than it’s sad that anyone feels the need to spread lies about me.”

Yet there was so little faith in the show that the writers were asked to clear out their offices when they finished the season. But to Vernoff, who had clicked right away with Rhimes, the early episodes had “felt like a labor of love.”

And it was worth the battle. “We fought for the right for Meredith and Bailey to be whole human beings, with whole sex lives, and not a network TV idea of likable,” Vernoff says. “You might not have been likable, but now you’re iconic.”

As far as the medicine went, the cases were often ostentatious. “Every kind of crazy accident that had ever caused terrible harm to any human ever, that was our homework at night,” Vernoff says. It was up to Zoanne Clack, an emergency room doctor-turned-writer, to be a sounding board in the writers’ room. She began as the only doctor on staff during the first season, and is now an executive producer. “What was interesting was that the writers don’t have those boundaries because they don’t know the rules, so they would come up with all of these scenarios, and my immediate thought was like, ‘No way!’” Clack says. “Then I’d have to think about it and go, ‘But could it?’”

When the program finally premiered — on a Sunday night after “Desperate Housewives” — to massive ratings, it was a shock to the cast and crew, given that they had shot the first season under a cloud, Pompeo says, adding, “So the fact that the numbers were that huge the first time we aired was a big f–k-you to McPherson!”

With Season 2 now a given, everything changed, Vernoff says: “It was like a hurricane-force gale, and everyone was just trying to hold on.” They had made 13 episodes for Season 1, airing nine of them and holding the final four for Season 2 — Meredith finding out that Derek was actually married (to Addison, played by Kate Walsh) had felt like the perfect finale. But upon the writers’ return, Vernoff says, the feeling was “Holy s—. We have to make 22.”

The entire cast — mostly unknown actors like Katherine Heigl as the sunny Izzie Stevens, T.R. Knight as the chummy neurotic George O’Malley, and Justin Chambers as the troubled, secretly vulnerable Alex Karev — had become famous overnight. For Wilson, whose Bailey was the stern teacher the interns called “the Nazi,” it was a new experience. “Folks were scared to talk to me, like in the store or in the Target — people would just kind of leave me alone,” she says. “It was like, ‘What’s going on?’”

According to Vernoff, “Paparazzi were following the cast to work — it was wild.”

The mid- to late-2000s were the height of glossy gossip magazines such as Us Weekly (and its copycats), as well as the inception of TMZ and Perez Hilton as celebrity-hounding, news-breaking forces that fueled (and soiled) the fame-industrial complex. The cast of “Grey’s Anatomy” was firmly in the sights of these new, often toxic forces in media.

Pompeo says the cast was so talented that it “was all worth it” — but yes, the transition to stardom was hard for the group: “At the time, it was just a real combination of exhaustion and stress and drama. Actors competing with each other — and envious.”

Heigl, Knight and Isaiah Washington all went through press cycles that made the show seem scandal-prone. To rehash it all now seems pointless; you can look it up. Washington was fired in June 2007. Knight and Heigl asked to be written out of the show preemptively, in Seasons 5 and 6, respectively.

Vernoff and the other writers were watching the internal messes unfold. They had to deal with how the fallout affected the show’s plot, as when Washington was fired just as Burke, his character, was about to marry Cristina. “When word comes down that an actor is leaving the show, and what you’ve got scripted is a wedding …” Vernoff trails off, laughing.

“There was a lot of drama on-screen and drama off-screen, and young people navigating intense stardom for the first time in their lives,” she continues. “I think that a lot of those actors, if they could go back in time and talk to their younger selves, it would be a different thing. Everybody’s grown and changed and evolved — but it was an intense time.”

Pompeo doesn’t want to talk about what happened with individual actors from the show, because when she has in the past, “it doesn’t get received in the way in which I intend it to be.” But she does make a point about the way television is produced. “Nobody should be working 16 hours a day, 10 months a year — nobody,” she says. “And it’s just causing people to be exhausted, pissed, sad, depressed. It’s a really, really unhealthy model. And I hope post-COVID nobody ever goes back to 24 or 22 episodes a season.

“It’s why people get sick. It’s why people have breakdowns. It’s why actors fight! You want to get rid of a lot of bad behavior? Let people go home and sleep.”

Debbie Allen would eventually be Pompeo’s savior in that regard, but that was years away. Allen — an actor and a dancer — began her directing career when she was on the 1980s TV series “Fame” as a “natural progression” because, she says, “I was in charge of the musical numbers, and so many directors didn’t really know how to shoot them.” She went on to be a prolific director and producer, most notably overhauling NBC’s “A Different World” after a tumultuous first season. As a fan of “Grey’s Anatomy,” Allen wanted to work on the show, and in Season 6, she was hired to direct. To prepare for it, Allen shadowed Wilson, who had been tapped to direct by executive producer-director Rob Corn. (“He came to me and said, ‘You should direct,’” says Wilson, who has now helmed 21 episodes. “And I said, ‘OK.’ Because I didn’t know what else to say.”)

Directing that sixth-season episode led to Allen’s fruitful relationship with “Grey’s.” In Season 8, Rhimes wrote Allen into the show to play Catherine, a star surgeon, a love interest for Richard Webber (Pickens) and the mother of Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams). Ahead of Season 12 in 2015, Allen became the show’s EP/director. Her duties included hiring all of the directors, weighing in on scripts and casting, and, as Allen puts it, “minding that people feel good about themselves.” Several years before the revived #MeToo movement would lead to calls for systemic changes behind the camera in Hollywood, Allen set a goal of hiring 50% women directors. She also increased the number of Black men who directed “Grey’s” during her first season as executive producer, among them Denzel Washington. (When she sold him on it, she recounts, he said to her, “I’m going to say yes, Debbie Allen.”)

Pompeo and Allen are close. Allen began her new role the year after Dempsey left, “at a time when we were really broken,” Pompeo says. “And so much of our problems were perpetuated by bad male management. Debbie came in at a time when we really, really needed a breath of fresh air, and some new positive energy.”

Pompeo continues with a laugh: “Debbie really brought in a spirit to the show that we had never seen — we had never seen optimism! We had never seen celebration. We had never seen joy!”

According to Pompeo, Allen began advocating for her to have more humane hours — Fridays off (Pompeo: “And I was like, ‘What? What? Fridays off?’”) — and for the show to shoot 12-hour days maximum, and ideally no more than 10 hours (Pompeo: “And I was like, I love this woman.”).

Allen speaks affectionately about her bond with Pompeo. “Coming out of Boston, she’s so earthy and real in a way that you might not know,” Allen says. “There’s a sisterhood between us — I guess you would say it’s almost a Blackness that exists between us. And she’s part of our tribe.”

Allen has been a key member of the “Grey’s Anatomy” brain trust since Season 12, and two seasons later, Vernoff returned to run the show. She’d left at the end of Season 7, consulted on “Private Practice” for a few years, and then went to Showtime’s “Shameless” for five seasons. As her contract was set to expire, Rhimes asked Vernoff to lunch, and told her she wanted her to take over. “It felt like she was saying, ‘Hey, our kid needs you,’” Vernoff says.

Before accepting the offer, Vernoff had to catch up on the show. She had always written “Grey’s” as a romantic comedy, and what she saw on-screen during her binge was dark as hell — especially after Derek’s death. “If this show that you are currently making is the show that you want ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ to be,” she recalls telling Rhimes, “I am, in fact, not the right writer for it.” But Rhimes was insistent, saying it was time for a change after the mourning period for Derek.

Vanessa Delgado, who started as a production intern during the seventh season and has worked her way up to being lead editor and co-producer, says the show’s trajectory shifted when Vernoff came back — it was a return to the original, saucier tone of “Grey’s.” “We changed the music completely,” Delgado says. “The dialogue felt lighter and more fun, and wewere having fun again.”

That lightness will be difficult to maintain this year, of course, when, as Allen puts it, “COVID is No. 1 on the call sheet right now.”

Vernoff at first wondered whether “Grey’s” should ignore the coronavirus, thinking the audience comes to the show “for relief.” But the doctors in the writers’ room convinced her this wasn’t the time for escapism, saying to her, “This is the biggest medical story of our lifetime, and it is changing medicine permanently.”

When they’ve had doctors and nurses come speak with them this season, Vernoff says, “they were different human beings than the people we’ve been talking to every year. And I want to honor that, tonally. I just want to inspire people to take care of each other.”

Pompeo, who is not shy about offering criticism, sounds positively enthusiastic: “I’ll say the pilot episode to this season — girl, hold on.

“What nobody thinks we can continue to do, we have done. Hold on. That’s all we’re going to say about that!”

Pompeo has a few more months before she decides whether she wants to continue — and as Rhimes and ABC have made clear in recent years, the show will likely end when she leaves. “I don’t take the decision lightly,” Pompeo says. “We employ a lot of people, and we have a huge platform. And I’m very grateful for it.”

“You know, I’m just weighing out creatively what can we do,” she says. “I’m really, really, really excited about this season. It’s probably going to be one of our best seasons ever. And I know that sounds nuts to say, but it’s really true.”

Vernoff doesn’t worry about the creative well drying up. “We’ve blown past so many potential endings to ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ that I always assume it can go on forever,” she says.

And Wilson knows how important “Grey’s” is to its audience, in that the characters have essentially become people who “live in their house.” As one of only three actors who’ve been on “Grey’s” since the beginning — the other is James Pickens Jr. — Wilson is in it until the end: “In my mind, Bailey is there until the doors close, until the hospital burns down, until the last thing happens on ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ That is her entire arc.”

Whenever the show does conclude, part of its legacy will be about the talent it launched into the world, beginning with Rhimes, who will soon release her first shows for Netflix, after her company, Shondaland, made a lucrative deal with the streamer in 2017.

But it will also be about the characters of “Grey’s Anatomy”— mostly women and people of color — who are trying to make the world a better place as they find friendship, love and community.

“The show, at its core, brings people together,” Pompeo says. “And the fact that people can come together and watch the show, and think about things they may not have ordinarily thought about, or see things normalized and humanized in a way that a lot of people really need to see — it helps you become a better human being. If this show has helped anybody become a better human being, then that’s the legacy I’d love to sit with.”

#grey's anatomy #Ellen Pompeo #chandra wilson #Debbie Allen #krista vernoff #season 17 #variety #news

56 notes · View notes

bookcoversalt · 4 years ago

Note

A+ youtube video! I feel like this is a dumb question, but what other sources, exercises, etc would you suggest for a writer wanting to get better at, like, everything you do in that video? I feel like I'm just not intelligent when it comes to writing and reading. I slap down whatever seems fun and I'm sure it makes for a bland story full of stupid plot holes and everything you talked about, so how does one get better at dissecting this stuff and...writing/reading intelligently?

Thank you so much!! There’s a tendency to consider analytical people just “smart”, as if the observations they make come naturally to them. But that super isn’t true: being thoughtful and critical about media, like drawing or writing or playing a sport or learning an instrument, is a skill that you pick up by absorbing reference, learning the language of the art form, and then practicing replicating it through your own perspective.

ABSORBING REFERENCE

My two biggest critical inspirations are Lindsay Ellis, a video essayist who covers film and culture, and Film Crit Hulk, a screenwriter and movie critic, and I’ve been consuming their work since I was 15. (I’m 25 now! that’s a wholeass decade.) I've picked up many, may other sources along the way: other video essayists, pop culture commentators, TV critics, spirited roasts of 50 shades of gray, actual “writing craft” books and blog articles, long goodreads reviews of books I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the flaws on, funny booktube reviews, even “anti” posts. I read “how the last season of game of thrones went the fuck off the rails” articles til my eyes bled, not because I cared about game of thrones, but because there was so much good, insightful reporting being done on How And Why A Story Fell Apart.

LEARNING THE LANGUAGE

Not all of this is good or useful. There’s a lot of bad faith or shallow criticism out there. The cinemasins clickbaity style of nitpicking “plot holes” or penalizing a work for the mere presence of tropes without regard for broader artistic intent and cultural context is particularly insidious and should die. The people who think twilight is stupid because it has sparkly vampires are missing the point. A LOT of people critique YA in particular from a place of bitterness or bias or misplaced expectations (and so did I, to some degree, for a long time. I’ve worked really hard to grow out of that, I hope). But the point is to seek out content in this vein-- not what I consumed necessarily (I would not wish that many GOT thinkpieces on anyone), but stuff that interests you. The more of this you mindfully consume and the more perspectives you collect and compare, the more context you’ll have for what’s being discussed and the more you'll naturally start to form your own opinions on it. You will learn, slowly, by osmosis, to pull what strikes a chord with you from the noise.

REPLICATING IT THROUGH YOUR OWN PERSPECTIVE

The cool and fun part is that to some extent, your brain will start doing this on its own. You’ll read a book and you'll just notice more. You’ll call plot twists faster, or be more cognizant of the pacing, or connect dots you might not have otherwise connected. You’ll see the logistic scaffolding in your own work more clearly and you’ll be more aware of choices you’re making subconsciously. You’ll recognize thematic hypocrisy or worldbuilding inconsistencies and have the language to name them.

And you’ll also have the tools to explore your less clear-cut, more emotional reactions to art. And this is the most important but “hardest” part of this: sitting with vague feelings and unformed thoughts trying to suss out what’s at the heart of them and why, using your hard-won critical “training” and your contextual knowledge.

I like to frame them as questions:

Why did the end of [book] feel disjointed? Why didn’t I connect with the main character in [book]? What really resonated with me about the plot of [book]? Why does [character] appeal to me more than [other character]? Why does [book]’s use of [theme] make me uncomfortable?

Sometimes it comes down to just preference or subjective taste, and that’s fine and good to know. But more often than not, you’re reacting to something concrete that can be identified:

The ending of HOUSE OF SALT AND SORROWS feels disjointed because it comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with our heroine’s efforts in the larger story. I didn’t connect with the main character in HEARTLESS because within the context of the worldbuilding, her choices didn’t make sense. What really resonated with me about the plot of UPROOTED is its thematic coherency. The Darkling appeals to me more than Mal because the villain romance power fantasy aspect of the series is better fleshed out and ultimately more rewarding to read than the love story of two flawed teenagers. ACOWAR’s use of trauma and recovery makes me uncomfortable because it ceases to be a sincere element of anyone’s arc or characterization and becomes yet another tool to make Rhys look like the best and coolest and wokest fae boyfriend.

Pulled from an old Captain Awkward article, this is something I have in a sticky note on my desktop as sort of a criticism guide:

One of the things we try to do is to push past “I liked it”/”I didn’t like it” as reactions to work. What is it? What is it trying to be? Is it good at being that thing? Was that a good thing to try to be in the first place? Did the artist have a specific agenda? How did it play with audiences at the time? Does it play the same way now? What stereotypes does it reinforce/undermine?

Even if it’s only for your own personal growth rather than intended for an audience, I recommend putting burgeoning critical thoughts or questions you’re trying to “work through” down in writing somewhere: goodreads reviews! tweets! blog posts! spamming your group chat! Even just a private word document. The synthesis of thoughts into written content forces you to identify and choose a specific articulation of your idea(s). If it’s in a pubic or semipublic forum, you’ll also be able to see which of your ideas resonate with other people, and that can (isn’t always, but CAN) be useful information as far as having an external barometer for when you’re onto something.

And then..... you do that a bunch of times in different ways for many years, with a lot of different books and movies and games and whatever else. Like any other skill, you will get better the more you do it. (Again: I have been doing this for ten years now, and it still took me three months to write that video script. Forming nuanced, informed opinions and then articulating them coherently is hard.)

As kind of a footnote tip, seek out peers who have the same goals and feelings, and try to connect with them! Lots of my current internet friends found me back when I was posting on my personal blog about problems i had with THE SELECTION or RED QUEEN and we bonded over having similar opinions and being in similar places in our writing/ reading/ careers. These people now beta read my scripts and posts and help me brainstorm or refine ideas. I strongly believe that creatives (and critics) do their best work and grow the most within a network of support and feedback.

But also, in regards to creative writing in particular, i want to be clear that having fun is the most important thing. I absolutely think creators need analytical skills to improve their craft, but without the enjoyment of doing the thing at the core of it, there is no craft at all. If you have to choose between the "smart” thing and the fun thing, choose the fun thing. Tbh, if you’re worried your work is bland, analysis probably isn’t the solution-- figuring out how to have more fun is the solution. And letting yourself lean into the stuff that’s wild and awesome and so incredibly you that it sets you on fire to write is a skill of its own :)

19 notes · View notes

silyabeeodess · 5 years ago

Text

Hey, Fusion Fellas: As heartbroken as many of us still are over the DMCA shutdown, it’s nice to see so many fans of the game continue to carry on in whatever way they can. I’ve kept up with whatever news appears as much as I can, seeing the news spread and more people come together to find ways to enjoy something that was such a big part of their childhoods. There’s some stuff I’d like to say, regarding my personal thoughts and what I plan to do since I know some of you follow me for my fanwork of the game. The first half is largely negative so, if you like, you can skip over that: I’ll have things written in bold to mark where this starts and breaks off.

I’m still angry at CN. I know about the guy spreading lies to the network and I understand that they have to protect their IP. That’s not what I have a problem with. What I have a problem with is a multi-million dollar company targeting a harmless, fan project over a piece of their IP that they themselves have confessed they aren’t planning on doing anything with--effectively keeping it vaulted where no one is allowed to touch it: Targeting a group of devoted fans who’ve shown more love and care for this franchise and the fanbase (along with the shows its attached to) than their own hired creatives have. Beyond a matter of law, this is a matter of respect--and CN has lost all of mine.

Take a game like Undertale and its creator, Toby Fox. You have a small team making a game that boomed in popularity, similar to FusionFall back in its hay-day. The difference is people can still buy UT and the game continues through the AU that is Deltarune while there’s no possible way for fans of FusionFall to ever experience it without a server. So how do these two separate creators--Toby Fox and CN--react to their fans? Toby Fox says, “Hey fans! Go make your fanart! Make your fan games, so long as you don’t try to make money off of it. You can even make your more mature content, just please tag it separately from the game’s official title.” Here, you have someone at greater risk of financial loss; understanding that what the fans create, they create out of love; giving as much allowance as he can to the people that enjoy what he started. Cartoon Network? “Yes, we know you love this game and although we’re never going to touch it again, you can’t either. How about you watch our awful reboots instead? We know you didn’t want them and that you don’t like them, so we’ll be sure to call you names and spit on you if you have anything negative to say about us. Because we don’t actually care about you.” This is a company that doesn’t think of its fans beyond the dollar signs they see attached to them. The fact that they’ve apparently only addressed one person over the course of weeks despite the countless emails and messages sent to them regarding FusionFall is also terrible--like they’re waiting for people to give up so the whole issue can be swept under the rug, like they think we’ll simply forget.

That post I made before about this? I still mean it. Cartoon Network doesn’t respect us, so why would I want to support them? Moneygrubbing, Hollywood empire Disney has shown a better attitude toward people than CN has as of late--and I can’t stand a large bulk of what Disney’s done over the past several years! Everyone can make their own choice regarding the company--I’m not calling for a boycott--but I’ve stopped watching their shows and I’ve cancelled my plans for purchases I was going to make for their newer merchandise. Even if I could make a few exceptions for them, their behavior overall is too horrible for me to want to give them so much as a dime of ad revenue from watching a video.

Because of this, I’ll be perfectly honest, I don’t even feel like making fanart anymore or writing the headcanon posts I’ve been covering. I’ve enjoyed them, but they have been always solely for fun and it’s hard to want to make anything when all that’s happened is on the forefront of my mind. Part of what makes it so hard on a personal level is that I loved what Cartoon Network used to be--and admittedly does still exist in small fragments of their content now. The creatives that wanted to push the envelope for animation and storytelling: Not the trash banking on old shows and jokes that were dated the moment they uttered them in hopes of getting a cheap laugh because there’s nothing better on TV. (Not even realizing how doomed for failure they are as things move toward streaming because then people can shift through the garbage that much easier.) When I was a kid, I watched the PPG on a regular basis and Numbuh 5 from KND was the person I wanted to be. In middle school, I planned my afternoon schedule around episodes of Total Drama Island and bounced on a trampoline while singing Are You CN This? like it was the top single of the year. In high school, our theatre members’ turns backstage were shared watching Steven Universe. Now, I feel nothing but bitterness and disappointment, like someone who’s lost a friend that changed for the worst.

So, how will this effect what I post? I did have a bunch of stuff planned, but I keep going back and forth on what I want to do. It’s hard to truly enjoy making stuff, as mentioned before, but at the same time I’ve never been one to drop anything easily (even if it takes me years to actually get something done, as some of you who follow me for other things already know.)

Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t post a fic for last month’s prompt and haven’t posted any new prompts for this month. I did start writing my story for April, but ended up leaving it hanging when everything hit. I don’t know about finishing it, and since I’ve been the only person working with the prompts from what I’ve seen, it seems pretty pointless. Since I kinda began an arc with a few of them, I might try to at least wrap that up, but I just don’t know.

For the comic, since I already have some work done on what would’ve been the first chapter, I might go ahead and finish that. (Just know that it’s several pages long, meaning it’ll still take some time to finish... and that you’ll need to be braced for wave of posts when its done. It’s got about eleven pages now: I would have more done, but since I backtracked on the script to cover the tutorial rather than jump straight into a totally original plot as first intended, some of that stuff had to be put aside.) Keep in mind thought that it really might be just that chapter. Without the drive and with being so backed up on other projects--and since we don’t have the game to rely on for references as easily anymore--I just don’t know how long I could keep working on it.

With the headcanons, I could still do a fair amount of research to get those done, but it’s just not the same. If I made more, the masterpost would still be updated; however, tags on the posts themselves would be limited to FusionFall rather than include the cartoons. I don’t care about traffic: I don’t want any confusion from anyone thinking I’m supporting CN’s current work. (Petty? Most likely, but at least there’s no question where I stand.)

Even if I don’t post as much FusionFall stuff, people are still free to send me asks about the game. So long as the asks follows the terms I’ve set up for my blog, it’s perfectly fine. I’ll try to answer them as usual.

Overall, at least for now, expect these posts to wane: Not dropped entirely, but definitely less frequent. I’ve said it multiple times already: I just don’t know. I’m upset that the game’s gone. I’m upset at those involved for its shutdown. I’m upset at those who don’t care about the fans and those who act like the fans are wrong for caring. I’m upset at those in the community going at each other’s throats when people are trying to salvage the fanbase as much as they can. The whole thing is just plain sad and I don’t feel like there’s much I can do except sit at my desk, pick up my pen, and push myself to do what I’ve always done: Focus on my work.

#silya speaks #fusionfall

18 notes · View notes

letterstothemidnightsociety · 4 years ago

Text

THURSDAY OCTOBER 8, one of the longest running television shows of our time begins airing the final episodes of it’s final season. Guys, Supernatural is 15. FIFTEEN. It can practically drive a car now. As one friend put it, “that show had a Quinceañera.” And if you don’t know how significant that is, think of the last show you know of that made it to season 10. Take your time, I’ll wait.

Whoever I stole this birthday invite from, they are probably older than this show.

I started watching Supernatural in 2008. I was 19, I had just begun my journey towards Over-Worked, Under-Slept Millennial, and my best friend recommended it. I can’t really remember how the conversation went, but I’m sure at some point it was “It’s scary, and it’s got these two brothers, I’ll send you a link!” cuz we were trash and we were broke and Netflix...existed? Hulu existed, but not in the way that either of those sites work now, so we watched by...ahem...other means. It is probably why my first laptop stopped working after 3 semesters of college.

And damn, I was hooked. I don’t do scary movies and honestly, I was legit creeped out by a lot of these episodes, but it had two hot dudes who took down a monster every week and then (the real kicker) had a bigger, season-long mystery they were trying to solve. And occasionally, they got punched in their big dumb beautiful faces. If I had known what a kink was at the time, I would have said that someone was reading my dream diary.

Over the next 12 years - Let me say that again for those of you in the back - TWELVE YEARS - I had an on-again-off-again relationship with the Winchesters. It was pretty hot and heavy in the beginning. I was jumping on the back of this 67 Chevy Impala 3 years in, so I had three seasons that I bought on DVD that I binged and was caught up with season 4 by the time the midseason started to air in late January of 2009. I was introducing all my friends to Supernatural, I made several people watch the entire first disc of season 1 with me, irregardless of whether they’d asked or not. Things started to cool down towards the end of season 4 as life started picking up and I know...I caught...the tail end of season 5? I think? I distinctly remember the final scene of the final episode, but honestly, I can’t remember how much of that season I actually watched.

At that point, I considered Supernatural to be a weird pseudoaddiction. I’d be clean for a while, years even, and then Netflix caught up with consumers and I could binge whole seasons in a weekend. It’d be, oh, I could just watch an episode. Just one episode. Maybe two. And then the weekend is gone in a blaze of classic rock and rock salt and I’m left with something like but not necessarily a hangover where my feelings live. I think I did this for seasons 6 through, like, 8? Eventually, Netflix stopped putting it at the top of my dashboard and it was easier to avoid. And I said to myself, well, when they finally get to the last season, THEN I’ll go on one last run, one last big score, and watch the whole series again in one go.

But the seasons kept coming?? And they?? Didn’t stop?? Guys, I don’t know how many of you care about this but, Friends, one of the most popular sitcoms of all time that defined an entire generation had ten seasons. TEN. Supernatural is ending with fifteen! For an industry where most shows don’t make it past a pilot, let alone a season 1, this is INSANE.

But now it’s ending. Even though a pandemic halted production just two episodes away from the finale, Supernatural is finally outta cassette tapes. The Wayward Sons may finally (??) be laying their wearied heads to rest (?? lol, I know).

And frankly, 2020’s been a real sh*tshow so I thought “Why not?”

And if I’m doing this and I’m not interacting with anyone on a human level, I might as well chronicle this epic dive into a time capsule of television because frankly, what the hell else am I doing?

Cuz that’s what this is guys. 15 years in TV time is multiple lifespans. Shows are born, grow into something Emmy-worthy, and die in less time than Supernatural has been on the air. You know what else aired their pilot episode in 2005? The American version of The Office. You know when The Office ended? 2013.

So let’s talk about pilots because that in and of itself may be a thing of the past not too far from now.

Guys, I love pilots. I will probably say this a lot over the next, uhhhh...many months, but I love pilots and I love season ones, especially for a sci-fi and fantasy shows because that’s where your characters are at their most vulnerable, their most unsure. The writers and producers are really digging around, trying to figure out what the groundwork for this world is and there’s something so exciting about exploring it with them, as an audience.

Pilot’s are great, pilots on spec are even better, and that’s a lot of what the Supernatural Pilot feels like. It’s got a real indie/guerilla-style horror movie vibe, like the crew scraped together just enough cash for that one special effect scene but had to skimp out on a lot of the other production stuff, and still managed to turn something around that is totally, 100% watchable and somehow more charming than if they’d had the budget to make something really polished? Go watch Night of the Living Dead (1968) and tell me that movie would have been better if they’d had a bigger budget. You could, but I won’t agree.

Ok so a quick break down of technical terms. A television pilot is basically the first episode of a TV show. Well, that’s not exactly true. A pilot is kind of like making a sample or a blueprint of your show that you hand over to the television networks and say, here! This is what my TV show will look like. Will you pay me money to continue making it? And the networks (think ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and The CW - remember, this is Network, not cable) will spend January through April of every year reviewing pilots and deciding if they want to pay you money to make more episodes. Well, every year except 2020. See: sh*tshow. Sometimes the network comes to you with an idea, or maybe, you’ve pitched your script/show to some executives and they buy in for that first pilot episode to see where things will go. Neither of these scenarios are a sure thing, and pilot season is always rife with will-they-won’t-they tension. In fact, if you’re working on the show, there’s a real possibility that pilot will get re-shot after studio notes, you’ll lose your job to someone the studio liked better, and then the show still may not get picked up. A pilot shot on spec is in even more of a limbo scenario because nobody asked for this! And just to follow through on Pilot Season - after the networks decide to buy your pilot, they then air the pilot at Upfronts (usually in May) where their many ad companies decide if they will pay money to air their ads during those shows. This is where we get things like prime time and key demographics - if you thought TV was all about the art, you are very wrong. TV, like most other industries, is still a business that’s about making money.

Back to the Supernatural pilot. Now, from my research, series creator Eric Kripke had been working on the concept for 10 years. He was big into classic rock, big into urban legends and big into cowboys and all those things get married ever so neatly in this show. A lot of his initial ideas remain unchanged, at least for the first season - he wants two brothers, traveling across the country, facing off with America’s Spookiest Myths and legends. A lot of it did change. I honestly feel like I remember reading an early draft of the pilot where Sam and Dean are cowboys? But I’m also pretty sure I’m imaging that. What I’m not imagining is this ridiculous early draft where John’s been locked in an insane asylum, dies before the first episode starts, and Sam’s been living with an aunt and uncle his whole life and knows nothing. They still use something close enough to the La Llorona legend as the catalyst for the episode, but a lot of other things are changed. This is not the Sam and Dean we come to know and love. This is also a good example of when you SHOULD listen to notes, because this draft was rewritten after executive producer McG and his Wonderland Sound and Vision production company signed on, but before they actually shot the script.

Now from what I’ve read, the WB picked the show up for (4) episodes initially, and ultimately picked it up for a full season of (22) episodes. This was, at the time, a pretty standard season and a pretty standard way to get it. They had a better deal than The Office, anyway, which only got picked up for (6) episodes in their first season, then got picked up four episodes at a time for season 2.

Now let’s go over that paragraph one more time and talk about what a hecking DINOSAUR this show is -

FIRST off - Supernatural premiered on THE WB. It PREDATES The CW!!

Man guys, you remember they had a frog as a mascot? Oof, that would not work today.

Secondly, it got 22 EPISODES. We’ll get into this some more when we talk about that evil bugs filler ep, but think about how many episodes were in the last show that you binged on Netflix? 8? Maybe 10?

Welcome to the exciting world of GRAPHS brought to you buy https://www.theringer.com/tv/2017/8/4/16094348/inefficiency-week-mourning-the-lost-long-tv-season

OH! And SPEAKING of Netflix and streaming services like them, they’re kind of killing pilot season AND upfronts. They pick up shows when they want to. They “air” them when they feel like. There are no ads because you pay for that content on a monthly basis and also they don’t even have commercial breaks. I am slowly seeing the passage of time in one (1) episode of television and I think I’ve aged 100 years.

Here is just one of MANY articles about the death of Pilot Season

Finally, and most importantly, this show got a better deal than The Office. And that show was an NBC primetime show.

This show was nominated for 193 awards and won 50. And it ended when my nephew was still in kindergarten. He’s gonna be in high school next year.

So what about this Supernatural Pilot? Was it any good? Honestly, I’m gonna say yeah. This is some very solid Hero’s Journey here. I think the only weird thing about it is that Sam is our Hero, our point of contact character that gets us into this world. And I only say that because I’ll be real up front and say that I’m a Dean girl through and through. I don’t hate Sam, but because we live in a world where we have to choose, it’s Dean 4Eva.

From that early script draft, we learn the plan was for Sam to be in the dark and essentially be our audience stand in so that Dean can explain all the backstory. I think the decision to make John Winchester raise his kids as a weird fringe paramilitary outfit and establish Sam as the brother that tried to get away is a good one. It’s a very “Arrive Late” (or if you’re fancy, in media res,) sort of attitude and it works and you’ve already started building in the Atonement with the Father. There’s still some pretty excellent exposition dialogue, but what are ya gonna do. Sam, did you really need to explain to Dean that your collective father “raised you like warriors”? Or that you “kill everything we CAN find?” It’s fine. You’re beautiful and I love you. But also, he knows all that.

You have the Call to Adventure - Dean showing up and saying “Dad hasn’t been home in a few days.” You have the refusal of the call (“He’ll sleep it off”). You have your supernatural aid (hah!) giving Sam a push out the door - that’s Dean. You have your famous line that I quoted along with the TV - Dad’s on a hunting trip. And he hasn’t been home in a few days.

The dead mom backstory seems pretty on the nose, but the “burned on the ceiling” concept was new and unique enough that I was intrigued to find out more. Listen, I’ve already admitted I don’t watch a lot of horror so if this has been done before, don’t @ me.

La Llorona or Woman in White or Weeping Woman was a new trope to me at the time, so it too seemed fresh. I see that myth show up in a lot more Supernatural-type shows now, but in 2008, at 19, I was like, oh this is different. Not to mention - this definitely leaned in to the horror aspect. I know I’m a baby, but it aired at 9pm, which is the more adult side of Prime Time, so the WB thought it was too spooky for kids who had early bedtimes. So there.

I HATE when they do this cuz it freaks me out EVERY TIME and THAT’S NOT EVEN HOW THESE MIRRORS WORK??? SHE’S NOT EVEN IN THE BACK SEAT IN THIS SHOT!

And then at the END, when Sam STILL refuses the call to adventure, you have the real Crossing of the Threshold - Jess is ALSO stuck on the ceiling, dead, and on fire. Spoiler alert, but they had to fridge her early to make the rest of the season work and so it shouldn’t be a big surprise. Sam’s all in and we get 21 more episodes of him and Dean and that car.

Is it technically fridging if she’s lit on fire?

And let’s talk about Jess for a second cuz actress Adrianne Palicki is giving a LOT more in this performance than a fridged girlfriend should be required to. She’s likeable, she’s down to earth, she’s crushing it and and all this with only, like, two scenes of dialogue. I say this even though we meet her in a slutty nurse costume - COME on WB.

WB what the hell is this wardrobe. What the HELL is THIS.

In fact, all of the extras in this show are crushing it? Louis is instantly likeable and he disappears after his first scene, never to grace our TV’s again. And these extras in the town in Jericho, California - I kind of love them. As CW (or I guess, WB) as Jessica is, these extras look like they found them at the local highschool and I LOVE THEM FOR IT. They probably came to set already in makeup and wardrobe! They POSSIBLY brought their own jewelry! They’re weirdos and they are GREAT. I’m pretty sure this will NEVER happen again on this show because once the $$ came in, so did the more polished-looking one-off characters.

Lookit these magnificent goth weirdos! And great news, both these actresses have very full, non-goth careers after this.

Also, heckin’ Joseph Welch is just crushing it. This man has NOTHING CW about him and that’s maybe why I like him so much? Everything about the scene with him and Sam is pretty heartbreaking, from his rundown car graveyard to his rundown physique with his rundown accent to the fact that we never actually see his face. Seriously, really LOOK at this scene - WHAT is going on with this cinematography? Is this a reference to something? It’s SO bleached out and SO stark and WHAT is going on???

WHAT is this lighting? And also this guy was played by Steve Railsback was on X-Files!

You can’t talk about Supernatural without talking about the chemistry between Sam and Dean and that’s probably the real hook here? I mean a) very beautiful. I will probably talk about this a lot. Let’s call it what it is here, they’re beefcakes and they’re made for me and people like me. It is weird that this show is so macho but their primary audience was mostly there for the babes. And by babes I mean Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki. And b) they REALLY sell the whole brothers thing. They’re both from Austin, TX which feels like a weird coincidence. They were both already on WB shows before this one, also a weird coincidence. And they just click. They just do. It’s impressive, and occasionally creepy when we start to get into the Wincest of it all, but lets not talk about that.

Oh, and the MUSIC! The music just makes it. If you don’t believe me, watch the Netflix version of the first season and then find yourself a DVD version. See, TV shows need to acquire a license to play popular music during the show. Nowadays, the CW actually tags their songs in the episode so you can find and presumably buy it later, but they still have to pay royalties for using those pop songs. When Netflix acquired Supernatural, they did NOT acquire the licensing to use the classic rock songs from ACDC, Metallica, etc. and so you’re left with some pretty bland and generic production music that’s something like but not necessarily Back in Black. More like, Back in...Grey? This pun didn't work how I wanted it to.

And the show just...doesn’t work? Like, who knew BACKINBLAAAAACK! Was so instrumental to whether I thought this was quality programming or not. Side note - it ruins my favorite piece of dialogue of maybe the entire series -

Sam: I swear, man, you gotta update your cassette tape collection.

Dean: Why?

Sam: Well, for one, they're cassette tapes.

Do the young people even know what a cassette tape is? I AM the CRYPTKEEPER.

So yeah, you got a lot of ingredients to make something pretty great. Did we know then that it would launch a juggernaut of a television program that would still be on the air in the Year of Our Reckoning, 2020? I was a big fan of Firefly, so I was 99.99% sure this show was gonna get canceled at any second. In fact, I was thrilled, in 2008, to find there were two more seasons after the one I was currently watching. Of course, season 3 aired around the time of the great Writer’s Strike of ‘07, where nothing looked good and few programs survived, but we’ll get there.

In a final, kind of spooky, almost premonition-type decision the WB actually decided to air this pilot episode a whole week early on Yahoo!. Yeah, you remember Yahoo!, right? The search engine that briefly tried to have its own original streaming content and then we all abandoned it in favor of the monster that is Google? Yeah. This episode premiered online. I haven’t done enough research, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this was probably one of the first ever TV shows to start on the internet? Weird to think that was a novel and innovative concept at one time.

So this is it. This is the end of the era. Are we gonna get any more shows that last as long as this one did? Who knows. Are we as a culture gonna care at that point? I don’t know. Our TV habits have changed so much in the last few years that it’s hard to say how we’ll watch TV in the future. But credit where it’s due, boys. Nice huntin’.

#Supernatural #season 1 #pilot #season 15 #Sam #Dean #Winchester #Television #Quarantine Binging #CW #WB

2 notes · View notes

earth-to-ned-s1-e1-joss-blog · 4 years ago

Text

Watch™» Earth to Ned Season 1 Episode 1 / Full Episode

‘Earth to Ned’ ~ S14E10 | Season 1Episode 1 | OWN Series HD Watch Earth to Ned Season 1 Episode 1 (S1E1) From OWN

✓ Enjoy watching! Watch Full Episode Online Complete! ✓ P.L.A.Y ➜➜ https://123movies.nextflixtv.com/tv/94883-1-1/earth-to-ned.html

Love stories from the black community explore the secrets behind successful marriages. After spanning three successful seasons, fans are eagerly waiting for its fourth installment. But the question is: will there be a Earth to Ned season 4? Let’s find out. Earth to Ned Plot The show’s contents are very simple and summary-friendly. Each episode is a happily married couple’s perspective into relationships, commitment, marriage, parenthood, and their responsibilities thereof.

Earth to Ned Earth to Ned 1X1 Earth to Ned S1E1 Earth to Ned Cast Earth to Ned Episode 1 Earth to Ned OWN Earth to Ned Eps. 1 Earth to Ned Season 1 Earth to Ned Episode 1 Earth to Ned Premiere Earth to Ned Full Season Earth to Ned Full Episodes Earth to Ned Watch Online Earth to Ned Season 1 Episode 1 Watch Earth to Ned Season 1 Episode 1 Online ● I do not OWN this song or the Image, all credit goes, It’s so Awesome. Subscribe and Share with your friends! to my channel. See for more videos!!. I want to say ‘thank you’ for being the friend!!

Television Show or TV Show History The first television shows were experimental, sporadic broadcasts viewable only within a very short range from the broadcast tower starting in the 1930s. Televised events such as the 1936 Summer Olympics in Germany, the 1937 coronation of King George VI in the UK, and David Sarnoff’s famous introduction at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in the US spurred a growth in the medium, but World War II put a halt to development until after the war. The 1947 World Series inspired many Americans to buy their first television set and then in 1948, the popular radio show Texaco Star Theater made the move and became the first weekly televised variety show, earning host Milton Berle the name “Mr Television” and demonstrating that the medium was a stable, modern form of entertainment which could attract advertisers. The first national live television broadcast in the US took place on September 4, 1951 when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco was transmitted over AT&T’s transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets. The first national color broadcast (the 1954 Tournament of Roses Parade) in the US occurred on January 1, 1954. During the following ten years most network broadcasts, and nearly all local programming, continued to be in black-and-white. A color transition was announced for the fall of 1965, during which over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later. In 1972, the last holdout among daytime network shows converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season. Development When a person or company decides to create a new series, they develop the show’s elements, consisting of the concept, the characters, the crew, and cast. Then they often “pitch” it to the various networks in an attempt to find one interested enough to order a prototype first episode of the series, known as a pilot.[citation needed] Eric Coleman, an animation executive at Disney, told an interviewer, “One misconception is that it’s very difficult to get in and pitch your show, when the truth is that development executives at networks want very much to hear ideas. They want very much to get the word out on what types of shows they’re looking for. To create the pilot, the structure and team of the whole series must be put together. If audiences respond well to the pilot, the network will pick up the show to air it the next season (usually Fall).[citation needed] Sometimes they save it for mid-season, or request rewrites and additional review (known in the industry as development hell).[citation needed] Other times, they pass entirely, forcing the show’s creator to “shop it around” to other networks. Many shows never make it past the pilot stage.[citation needed] The show hires a stable of writers, who usually work in parallel: the first writer works on the first episode, the second on the second episode, etc.[citation needed] When all the writers have been used, episode assignment starts again with the first writer.[citation needed] On other shows, however, the writers work as a team. Sometimes they develop story ideas individually, and pitch them to the show’s creator, who folds them together into a script and rewrites them.[citation needed] If the show is picked up, the network orders a “run” of episodes — usually only six or 13 episodes at first, though a season typically consists of at least 22 episodes.[citation needed] The midseason seven and last nine episodes are sometimes called the “mid-seven” and “back nine” — borrowing the colloquial terms from bowling and golf. Stay up to date on coronavirus (Covid-19) Humans were designed to breathe through our noses, and Patel and Rizzo agree, nasal breathing is better than mouth breathing due to its filtration system and immune response. For people who think they have sleep apnea, Patel recommends participating in a sleep study (which you can do in the comfort of your own home), and if the results indicate sleep apnea, investing in a CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machine, which helps normalize breathing by opening up airways and even reducing inflammation in the nose.

Stay up to date on coronavirus (Covid-19) Humans were designed to breathe through our noses, and Patel and Rizzo agree, nasal breathing is better than mouth breathing due to its filtration system and immune response. For people who think they have sleep apnea, Patel recommends participating in a sleep study (which you can do in the comfort of your own home), and if the results indicate sleep apnea, investing in a CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machine, which helps normalize breathing by opening up airways and even reducing inflammation in the nose.

Once the underlying cause of mouth breathing is rectified, you can try to more consciously breathe through your nose until it becomes second nature. “Mouth breathers should be encouraged to take a sip of water every hour and challenged to close their mouth afterwards,” as a nasal breathing practice says Joi Lucas, MD, a pediatric pulmonologist at Lakeland Regional Hospital in Florida. She also recommends setting an alarm as a reminder, and practicing slow, deep nasal breathing exercises periodically. Nasal breathing will not ward off viruses like Covid-19 on its own, but it is one of your body’s built-in defense mechanisms against them. It should also just make you feel better all around. Considering the state of things, there’s no better time to make it a habit.

#Earth to Ned Full Episodes

1 note · View note

momo-de-avis · 5 years ago

Text

Wordtober Day 18: Misfit

Presented without comment.

----

It’s not like I’ve always wanted to be an actress, it was just something I discovered at one point, and I was already good at public speaking so—not that far a distance to travel, right?

Well, almost. Because you see, as soon as I left school and decided on following that path, I realized I was actually not that good at it. Until then, I thought a few school plays and some praise from the drama teachers was enough, but then I was thrust into the real world and found myself facing the most dreadful monster anyone in the arts will face: criticism.

And criticism said that I sucked at it.

I never really went to college, I just took it to be a stupid idea—spending thousands for three years of studying acting. It’s not like it was a medical degree, or law school—I mean, it’s not on the same level of demand, right? I just thought, a few workshops, some professional one-year courses, a few masterclasses with well-known names, and it would suffice. I read a bit on my spare time too, mostly plays, and though I tried picking up books on acting, I generally just quit after a while, bored out of my mind.

I always loved the idea of pretending to be someone else on a stage or in front of a camera, this thing about letting go of who you are entirely as you prepare for a role, and embody someone else so deeply you almost forget about yourself. I always was fascinated by method actors losing their marbles over those wacky roles they poured themselves into, body and mind. A bit morbid, yeah, but interesting. I thought I was learning more from them than I possibly could in a three-year-long university course.

So I did what I could, here and there, and after four years my resume amounted to a few masterclasses and courses that cast me aside before a fellow competitor who showed up with big university names listed alongside pompous grades. This might have been about when I realize I’d made some serious misjudgement, and a petty one at that.

Six years down the line, and I was making a living out of being an extra on random shit on the telly. A few soap operas, some historical TV shows, even talk-shows. They paid little, but at least production provided a snack, and the good thing was that I got to stand in the back, watching the crew go mad about a slight fault in equipment or what-have-you, which gave me the chance to strike up a nice chat with some pop star from the telly out there. It was fun, even educational, considering TV stars love giving you unsolicited advice when you share your wish of becoming an actor with them. But it was actually quite crushing too.

I mean, I had to listen to these people going on about never quitting, never giving up on my dreams, that it’s a cutthroat world out there, competition this and that, and everyone wants a piece of what they have—go on, fly, you little bird! Sure. But not really. I might have misjudged things and should have gone to university, definitely, but it’s not like I didn’t try. I did try. I went to casting calls nearly every week, attended lectures, all that. I just hated wasting my time with networking, the one thing everyone insisted on was absolutely a necessity, like whatever talent you might have, it won’t matter until you talk like a pompous ass.

Ten years, and the best gig I had landed was a poorly made theatre production about a little kid on the moon that was, if I am being honest, a straight-up rip-off from The Little Prince, and intended at a younger audience too, though I suspect the theatre director’s decision on casting grown adults to play little children in an almost demeaning way was the major ingredient to attracting a series of college students who had a laugh with it. The critics weren’t nice about it either, but I did my job.

There were other jobs, but they were equally bad, if not worse. This one just paid best.

Twelve years on, and I escalated to a commercial on toothpaste, where I played the fake doctor saying nine out of ten dentists went absolutely nuts over this one brand, while holding a tube of—I kid you not—bland white paste that smelled of plaster. Later on, I’d even do a fast food commercial where I had to bite into a burger riddled with needles to keep the lettuce, cheese, tomato and beef straight, and though my stardom amounted to a close-up of my nostrils and biting teeth, it took me five tries because I was terrified of being impaled in the gums.

I was frustrated, I won’t deny it. I was even ashamed of showing my resume to whoever, and for every casting call I attended, I could see the disdain on those faces sitting behind that desk—that dismissive look of a casting director as she pushed her glasses down the bridge of her nose, read my miserable career’s story and asked me questions I dreaded answering. I even auditioned for bold parts I knew I’d never get, things like proper characters on TV, the lead detective on some cop show, or the love interest in a soap opera, even standing girl showing off the prices in some quiz crap.

Nothing.

You speculate when you fail, you know. Think often that it’s you: maybe you’re ugly, you’re cursed, you don’t dress properly, you don’t talk right, you lack whatever bedazzle these people, sitting at the top, have—you just lack something. Though I had the talent, I think—I might have sucked when I first started, but I got better, and there are enough mediocre actors out there making six figures to prove talent doesn’t mean shit in this world—right? So I really could not tell why I was failing, when I tried—I tried, time and again—and I just failed and failed and failed. Fail again, fail better—Beckett was a lying twat, that’s what.

Then, one afternoon, I went into a casting call for something grand, a secondary role for a recurrent character on a major TV production, some sci-fi stuff. It seemed easy enough when I read the script and the guidelines of what they were looking for, and I didn’t really do much practising—I’m good at improvisation, I reckon, even tried it for a while, though it mostly deals with comedy and I am not funny. But outside of that, I swear I am good at improvising—so I went with it, given what I had.

And I blew it. I mean monumentally blew it. I stuttered every single line that came out of my mouth, I asked to stop and try again five times, I paced back and forth with heavy breaths, trying to put my mind in order, but everything was just scrambled inside my head like when you drop a bunch of papers on the ground and try to put them back together, and I was sweating profusely—I mean, I looked like a morning jogger on his way back home. I don’t know what happened to me, I just froze in an instant of panic like I never had before—it’s my greatest quality, I can just stand before an audience and act, audiences just do not bother me at all, I’m good like that. But that day I just… felt wrecked. I couldn’t even admit to myself I should have prepared, but I had set this goal, that if I’d manage to just improvise the right way with no proper warm-up, then that meant I was good.

But I wasn’t. I blew it bad. And I walked out of there absolutely certain I had missed on yet another major opportunity.

As I opened the door to leave, someone else was coming inside, though at first I missed it and nearly let the door smash against their face. I turned back abruptly, held the door for them, apologized and… froze.

She looked exactly like me. I mean exactly the same. Same sandy-brown skin, same heart-shaped, chubby face, same light brown hairs, slightly discoloured at the tips, same tawny lips and brown eyes, even the same freckles on the nose—just everything exactly like me.

Our eyes locked on one another and she smiled, but I was certain I was just so shaken I was beginning to imagine things, so I just went home and never thought about it again.

Eight months later, the show debuted. I didn’t have any intention of watching it, considering it reminded me of my worst failure yet, but I was just skimming through the channels that night and happened to stop there for a second to reach in and grab my water bottle, and I saw it. I saw her.

She had gotten the part, and she was on TV, playing the side-character that was to be recurrent as well, but with my face. Exactly like me in every aspect—even as she spoke, it was my voice, same precise tone and accent, same quirks to the Rs and fluctuations of the Ls—just everything. A carbon copy of myself.

I searched her online—the name, at least, was different—and was slapped with a never-ending list of websites showering her with praise. The secondary character who was stealing the show, a new star was born; the flesh, the depth, the vigour she gave this mundane woman on the screen, the unmatched talent—truly, a rising star.

I can’t express just how angry it made me feel. She looked just like me—it was impossible that nobody could see it—and it turns out, I hadn’t dreamed it, that day. The more I searched her online, the more her face showed up—everywhere, just everywhere, endless pictures of this woman who had stolen my face and my talent and now every pair of eyes in the country—the world!—was on her.

I called my mum, asked her to have a look, insisted on the similarity without ever really saying just how starkly equal we were—and she dismissed it. Laughed. What do you mean!, she screamed, amused. Tou two look nothing alike! I called a friend, asked the same—even before I could spell out my troubles, she was already showering her with praise—oh, have you seen the show?, it’s marvellous, I love her role, she just puts so much heart into it, you have to watch it! But when I pressed her, she pushed it aside—looks didn’t matter, she told me—though that wasn’t even the subject at hand—and surely, you two look nothing alike.

Yet everywhere, it was me that I saw. That woman had my face, my body, my voice—and had stolen my talent.

I tried to forget about it, kept going to casting calls—and somehow, from that moment on, it seemed my luck turned for the worst. I got struck by an unexpected sense of panic, sweating profusely and shuddering at every step, hyperventilating as if I was about to pass out, and forgot my lines. I trusted my instinct on improvisation still, but that one tool that had helped me so much in the past was suddenly useless. I became afraid of hearing the sound of rejection—no, nada, zilch, bye, you suck, choose another career—it haunted me at night and I’d wake up with tears as I thought about this woman with my face stealing my confidence.

Nobody could see it. Everyone I asked, everyone I knew, I insisted she looked exactly like me, but they couldn’t see it. They laughed it off, said I was imagining things; when I pressed, they began to walk away and frown at me with suspicion as if I was nuts; when my reason began to cloud my judgement, they showed worry, suggested I should seek help. At last one day, I screamed at mum for not daring to see it and she started crying, saying I was just jealous of her fame as I had been all my life, with my dismissive attitude towards all and any who got the things I had wanted for so long without even trying hard.

She was lying, of course. I wasn’t jealous, though I couldn’t stand their pep-talks during filming breaks, between a coffee and a cigarette, and their follow-your-dreams bullshit. But this was different. I wasn’t jealous, it was just outright unfair! She looked exactly like me, how could nobody see it? And ever since she appeared in this world, she had stolen my everything—my attention, my chances, my glow, my focus. I was a shit actress again because a random stranger with my liking simply pulled the rug from beneath my feet and reaped the profits of what I had sowed!

It got worse, of course. I started drinking to get her face off my mind, but she was all I thought about, which is incredibly bizarre because the face that popped up in my head at night, as I rolled in bed with a headache, was mine, but now I was seeing myself from the outside, as—I suppose—the world saw me, but through this heavy filter of absolute scorching hatred. Yes, I hated her; I hated her so much it was all there was on my mind; I hated her with all my might, with all my vigour, and I wanted her to go away forever so I could retrieve what she had stolen.

I mean—it was unfair! Because my mum was wrong, I tried so hard, and this broad stole my appearance, my face, my voice, my outside, and suddenly she’s being given the chance to rise to the top! I even checked her resume: she attended university, worked with a drama company for three years, did comedy improv—are you joking me? Everything I tried and failed at, everything I shoved aside because I didn’t want to waste any time—she got it? That’s what separated us, what made me a failure, and she a star—a college degree?

And I mean—what else? Did she have anything I didn’t—despite, well, clearly my appearance? Maybe she fell for that crap everyone kept telling me, in the most condescending manner possible: you have to talk to people, networking is the way to go! Just talk, like that—just hold up a glass of wine and pretend, pretend you’re just like these uptight assholes standing at the top, share a laugh at a joke you don’t understand and be all fancy to their eyes—was that it? Because there had to be something else, something else besides my appearance and my talent. Just something.

I searched for very long, so long I lost focus and was out of work, eventually. I watched her videos, her interviews, analysed her behaviour—she even had my tics! The way she bit her lip, picking at the skin, while she listened to someone talk, or how she clicked her fingernails together when she thought about a question, turning her eyes down to her lap—those were mine! I even remember seeing pink magazines going on about how cute it was that she bit the skin of her fingers before a live interview because she was nervous—seriously? I did that!

Just… everything. Everything there was to know about me now existed in this person like an unauthorized biography. She told people my life’s story, my experiences, my past—the dogs and guinea pig I had as a child, the tiny scar on my knee from when I fell on the schoolyard at eight years old, that quip about the piece of paper I burned during class at fifteen.

Even when she talked about the things that were clearly hers, there was something of me. There was this one interview where she admitted she almost didn’t go to college, and when the interviewer asked why, she said, with a coy smile and pushing a lock of her hair back—like me: oh, because I was so afraid of trying something new and being put to the test, just being put into this position where I would be forced to be critical of my own talents, and I was scared of failing. And then, she looked straight into the camera.

I swear, watching that face, sat on my couch, I swear she was looking at me; I swear that bitch knew. She knew she was talking about me, because those were my thoughts. That nervousness, that hesitation, that was me on the day I held the form in my hands to apply for drama school, but didn’t. That fear was mine. And senseless as it was, I was in the right to claim my own fears, dammit! I had stood in the rain, shaking with anticipation, and I had thrown the papers in the bin because I didn’t want to be subjected to the endless torture of being told by college professors that I sucked!

My drinking got worse, my eating habits were shit, I moved back in with my mum, and my life just generally spiralled out of control. I attended casting calls with a hangover and ruined my chances; I started bawling my eyes out in the middle of shooting a commercial for a coffee brand; I fell asleep while filming a documentary where I played an extra, and was kicked out when I started a fight with the casting director on another shooting because she complained about my lack of makeup. Everywhere I went, I was just a shadow of this woman that twinkled before the cameras like a star in the skies; I was just the shameful part of a starlet, a skeleton in a closet I didn’t even know. The evil twin, if you will.

I thought my life was over. A year passed, and my mum thought I was developing an unhealthy obsession with this woman, saying I should just walk up to a mental hospital and check myself in—no more suggestions, just blatantly saying: you’re insane. My friends stopped talking to me because, according to them, I was acting strange, unable to let go of the inane idea that some random actress who had risen to fame so quickly looked, acted and existed exactly like my carbon copy. They refused to see that she was me. They refused to acknowledge that her stories were mine. They denied any similarity—over and over again, they just told me I was batshit crazy.

So I quit. I quit my dream, my life and my passions, and I just let this person possess my everything, while dreaming of hating her so much I’d kill her if I had the chance.

And that was it. It was either me or her, but this world was not made to have the two of us in it.

I tried messaging her. Found her online, every profile I could, and pasted the exact same message on every one of them, sent privately: you stole my life. Seconds later, every single messaging system beeped: you stole my life. The exact same words I had sent her, now sent back to me. I tried again, this time typing something different: you’re pretending to be me, you scheming little bitch—and they beeped back: same message, ipsis verbis. Eventually, I slammed the keyboard, producing a string of incomprehensible jargon of just random letters, numbers and symbols—and hit enter. And the exact same string of nonsense was returned to me.

I stared at the blinking cursor for a long time, shuddering in the half-darkness of my room in dread, certain nothing about this was normal, and yet the prevailing emotion to my heart was just pure, boisterous rage. Whatever it was, whatever she was, it was clear she was keen on driving me insane, forcing me into the piths of my own madness, until all there was to my existence was my obsession with this double that had stolen my life and made a spectacle out of it—while no one believed me.

So I looked for her. It wasn’t hard to figure out where she lived, not with all the gossiping magazines stalking her to the gym, to the store, to the movies, complaining about her outfits—outfits I owned, too. It simply took a little patience, some careful watching, some geographical studying of her movements, and within two weeks, I managed to figure out where she lived by simply following her route home.

It was night when I finally decided on confronting her. She turned the street and walked ahead calmly, hands deep in her pockets, and I stalked her into an empty alleyway with barely a light on. She stopped in front of a closed door, placed her hand on it and turned around—looking straight into my eyes with a twisted, perverted smile. Then, she pushed the door open and went inside—and left it ajar for me.

The building was bare empty. I mean bare empty. Every light was off, the lift not working, no sound coming from behind any door in any hallway. No plants, no garbage bins, not even a piece of advertising flapping off some mailbox—nothing. As if nobody lived there, except her. It was so vacant, so hollow, it made me shudder, like I was walking into a trap, and were it not for my obsession on hating this woman, on setting this matter straight once and for all, I would have gotten out of there. I was shaking in terror, absolutely mortified of the idea of what I would find there—I mean, the walls were dirty, with chipped off paint, some of them riddled with old graffiti—it seriously looked stripped bare of life, and like it had been so for a very long time.

But I still went inside. Terrified of what was to come, quivering at the sight of every dancing shadow, breathing heavily, I went into that dark, hollow building, reeking of old pipes and copper, and found the only door open with light inside.

I went in, but the flat appeared abandoned as well. There was but a ratty old sofa in the middle, a broken coffee table in front of it, no TV and no electrical apparatus of any sort, just old furniture scattered about. No curtains either, just the electric lights outside shining in with ease, and it cast a faint glimmer of yellow and orange on the absolute misery that was the flat. Even as I crossed the door, a million things cracked under my soles and I saw, to my surprise, there was just rubble everywhere, pieces of old stone crumbled down, broken glass here and there and garbage. A dusty bottle in a corner, a syringe glistening beneath an old chair, cigarette butts and empty crisp packets everywhere.

She stood under a doorway, her face absolutely frozen, the traits of her that composed me barely visible under the lack of light—and I trembled at the sight. I hated her, but there was something inhuman to that woman, something out of this world. She wasn’t normal. She was not supposed to exist. She was not something someone just made happen, something that just existed, that was just… there. She was like a glitch, a malfunction that nobody set straight, and I wondered—how long had she been there? Had she been there all my life and I hadn’t noticed? Had she been watching me from afar, waiting for the right time to reveal herself in full and take over my insecurities and failures to aggrandize them and twist them to her own liking, making me the sorrowful, miserable looser on the fringe of despair?

I didn’t know what to do for a long time. All my body felt compelled to do was cry, just curl into a ball and cry, and sobbing into my clothes, bawling like a toddler, I just said: why? I wanted to tell her I hated her, I wanted to pick up a shard from the floor and stick it into her skull, I wanted to cut her and make her bleed, to watch her wither in pain and maybe even cry too—but I just teared up and shrivelled in tears.

I don’t know how long it passed, but it seemed quite long. Throughout, she didn’t move—she just stood and watched. When I finally wiped my tears and looked into her eyes, she was smiling—that same perverse smile of someone sketched into reality solely to cause you fear and horror and make you tremble in your whole existence, just someone tailored to be your very own tormentor. I hated her still, but what I felt more vividly inside my pumping heart was utter, paralyzing fear. Fear she would take over me so completely I would eventually vanish, evaporate like sand in the wind, gone into thin air, forever; until all that was left was but a faint memory of someone who might have been there once, but wasn’t anymore—until that too would be gone. And I’d be nothing but a mistake forged somewhere in the past, by two people who had sorrowfully made sex one night to produce a child, and that child would fall into oblivion, stolen from the memory of the world forever by an alien meant to mimic my very own self.

I was so terrified she would take everything away from me that was all I’d be left with: nothingness, obscurity. Worse: me. Just me. Just my failures and my life. Just a life led through a string of mistakes I had swept under a rug to pretend they had never been there and moved on with a false sense of security, terrified of starting over. I was terrified this woman, who had stolen everything that was me, was there to laugh one last laugh and take all that I had left: my broken self.

And there she was: the projection of a failed dream. Successful in all I had never been, able to overcome every step I had climbed down, clambering her way up while I kept on falling. The ideal. The past and future without so much as a hint of the present—in the flesh, through me, in my image. Laughing in scorn.

She gave a step forward, picked up a shard from the floor, twisted it in her fingers; her smile grew, white teeth glinting silver, and something daunting fell on my shoulders as I watched in silence, quivering in dread. She looked again at me with a glare, and the corners of her lips fell abruptly as she frowned and pressed the shard between her fingers.

“Is this what you want?” She asked; with one swift gesture, she pulled up her sleeve and gripped the shard. The glinting piece of glass entered her flesh, a slick, thin line of red slithered up her arm, and it thickened as the pressed deeper and deeper—eyes locked on mine—until the blood pooled on the ground beneath her.

I flinched, gasped and held onto my arm; I felt that jabbing pain too, but it was somehow sweet, and instead of warding it away, I embraced it—though the crying returned, and this time more copious than before. And when she was done, she did it again—slicing herself until the blood squirted out and her fingers were covered in red, and not a slight sense of pain to her. All I could say was one thing: stop hurting me.

She stopped, dropped the shard on the floor and walked away. For a very long time, I couldn’t move, cast over a sense of paralyzing terror so great I was afraid of opening my eyes and find things I didn’t want to see—but glad, so glad she was gone. And I knew then—somehow, I knew—she was gone for good. Gone from my life. Gone from the world.

I looked down at my arm, pulled up my sleeve, and there was a scar there, long and thin, but marked with a lump of creasy skin.

It was morning when I went home. From that day on, she ceased to exist. No more articles about her, her name wasn’t listed in any movie, and every poster ever made with her now featured someone else. When I told people her name, they didn’t recognize it.

She was just gone, as if nobody had even noticed she’d been there at all.

And now, being the only one who remembers her, who remembers all that horrible, gnawing pain that ate up my arm that night, or that paralyzing dread of seeing my double steal from my failures, feels like being stuck inside a cage forever.

___

Past Challenges:

Wordtober Day 1: Ring

Wordtober Day 2: Mindless

Wordtober Day 3: Bait

Wordtober Day 4: Freeze

Wordtober Day 5: Build I

Wordtober Day 6: Build II

Wordtober Day 7: Enchanted (Encantada)

Wordtober Day 8: Frail

Wordtober Day 9: Swing

Wordtober Day 10: Pattern

Wordtober Day 11: Snow

(Skipped Day 12)

Wodrtober Day 13: Ash

Wordtober Day 14: Overgrown

Wordtober Day 15: Legend

Wordtober Day 16: Wild

(Skipped day 17)

#wordtober #my wrodtober #writing #my writing #creative writing #fiction #more magical realism than horror but hey #this one's personal #my wordtober #i fucking mispelled it the first time and tumblr wont let me delete it smdh

8 notes · View notes

strxberry-milk · 6 years ago

Text

WIRES

1|2

genre:fluff, mafia au, angst, neighbour au

pairing:reader x gang member!changbin

warnings:n/a

word count:2.3k

four months passed after i witnessed a murder. changbin was very much my only support network at the that time, i couldn’t talk to my uni friends of work colleagues since they would go to the police. changbin tried his best not talk about his gang but i had questions i wanted answers too. so a tuesday night we sat down and he explained everything - he told me what his gang done, who the members were etc.

at first i was nervous, they had made a lot of enemies that were constantly out to get them but changbin made it very clear that he would make sure i was out of it at all times. we had spent many nights together sitting in each other’s apartments, binging tv shows together and stuffing our faces of fast food. when i worked the late shift at the restaurant changbin would always wait outside for me and we’d walk home together, it made me feel safer and changbin felt the same. he didn’t say anything but i knew he was worried about the yakuza finding out i seen the murder.

we had grown closer over the months, i had told him things that nobody knew other than me. i told him about my parents death and how i had to fend on my own for a year, it was still hard to talk about them even though it happened three years ago. changbin also shared things, he felt guilty for not talking to his parents after joining SKZ but he had his reasons. he didn’t want to put them in danger that’s why he was always so distant towards me when we seen each other in the hall of our floor.

—

i was half way through my saturday night shift. the restaurant was buzzing with loud chat and laughter while people tucked into their meals. i had three hours until i could leave to meet changbin which i made me excited but anxious at the same time. i walked round the restaurant, picking up empty plates and glasses, taking orders and giving customers the bill of their meal. we had booths in our restaurant that usually large numbers of people sat in but it was nearer the back.

“y/n table thirty are ready to order,” my manager said pointing to the second booth, “okay,” i sighed grabbing my notepad and pen before walking over, “hi my name is y/n and i’ll be your waitress for this evening,” i flashed a fake smile while spitting out my scripted line that i had lost count of saying. i didn’t notice at first due the dim lighting of the booth but as i worked my way round the table i suddenly had a sense of danger hit me. the last man to give me his order was familiar.

it was odd i couldn’t put my finger on it until he said one sentence. “i’ll go for my favourite. i liked that the last time,” as soon as the word like left his mouth the realisation clicked. he was the member of the yakuza. he killed the man in the alley. a sudden sick feeling came over me like a strong wave of the sea, quickly writing down what he wanted i left in a dash. anxiety filling my stomach. if he noticed that i was there that night he would have noticed that it was me who served him. “i’m taking my break,” i muttered to my colleague before rushing off to the locker room.

scrambling through my bag to find my phone which happened to be at the very bottom, i immediately called changbin. “please pick up,” i whispered desperately, panic rising in my chest. “who is this?” a unrecognisable voice spoke from the other side of the line, “uhm is changbin there?” i muttered and soon enough his voice came through after noises of shuffling and muffled voices in the background. “y/n what’s wrong?” he asked as if he already knew i was panicking.

“the man from the alley is here,” i breathed out heavily, sitting down from the overwhelming dizziness and my heart beating loud in my ears. “does he know it’s you?” he asked calmly but the discomfort was there. “i...i don’t know,” stuttering i let out a few deep breaths trying to calm myself. “y/n, avoid the table okay? i don’t want you getting in danger,” he stated strongly, i nodded to what he was saying forgetting that he couldn’t see me, “i’ll come get you at the usual time just be careful please,” changbin pleaded, i let out a little okay and hung up knowing i’d have to get back to the table.

the tables food was ready and i had to take it over not matter how hard i tried to get someone else to do it, we were all busy. sighing inwardly i picked up the plates of food and plastered a fake smile on my face. after placing the plates infront of the men i asked the usual question “anything else i can get you,” a choruses of no’s were heard and everyone apart of the yakuza member started to tuck into their meals. “do i know you?” he asked puzzled, anxiety filled my chest and my smile faltered slightly. “i don’t think so, enjoy your meal,” i smiled and walked away breathing heavily.

—

my shift was finally over but the table i dreaded serving was still in the booth. grabbing my bag and jacket, i waved a few goodbyes to my coworkers and left the now quiet restaurant. changbin texted me a few minutes ago saying he was going to be ten minutes and just to wait at the door like usual so i did. it was chiller at night, so i ended up pulling my jacket closer to my body trying to keep the small amount of heat i had.

changbin soon arrived a small smile on his face, “hey you ready?” he asked signalling for me to follow. when walking home i didn’t notice that the older yakuza member watching us leave together.

“do you want to get pizza?” i faced him finally acknowledging the hunger growing, “definitely,” he laughed and we started to walk faster so we could get our fast food. changbin and i entered my apartment and he went straight to phone to order our midnight snack while i went to change out of my jeans into something more comfortable. “i got cheese and pepperoni,” he announced when i walked back in with pillows and blankets in my arms.

the couch soon turned into a makeshift bed for us, i stuck on a movie for us to watch while we ate. this was what usually happened on a saturday night and i looked forward to it everytime. twenty minutes passed and finally the doorbell rang, i jumped out of the multiple duvets and raced to the door. “that’ll be twelve seventy three,” the young pizza delivery man said and handed over the pizza after i gave the money over, a small thanks and i was racing back to the living room.

we ate in almost complete silence, the only noises were from the tv and the occasional car driving past but it wasn’t many. the two boxes were soon empty and that remained was the grease stains and bits of crusts i didn’t eat. “i needed that,” i sighed in content laying back onto the pillows. “me too,” changbin hummed in agreement and slided the pizza boxes near the small dining table. “y/n did he talk to you tonight?” he suddenly questioned about the gang member.

i nodded and explained to him that he recognised me and that he must of seen me hiding in the alleyway that night. “if he comes back, please be careful,” changbin took my hand gently looking me straight in the eyes which was a little bit intimidating. i just nodded unable to form words, his face was so close to mine. my eyes wavered and ended up dropping to look at his lips. without realising what was happening we both leaned in. our lips brushed against eachothers and were soon attached.

he brought his hand up to my cheek cupping it lightly. my hands found their way to his hair, entangling my fingers in his locks, when we broke away our foreheads pressed against eachothers and my eyes shut. “i think you should stay,” i whispered smirking lightly, “i agree,” and he attacked my lips with more kisses.

the following morning i woke wrapped up in changbin’s strong grip. smiling softly i buried my head further into his chest, “morning,” his gruff voice spoke, vibrating in his chest. “morning,” i sighed happily, changbin’s fingers drew soft patterns on my bare shoulder lulling me back to sleep. “what time is it?” i groaned as the morning sun hit my eyes, “just after ten,” he answered and his grip tightened.

we lay in eachothers arms for the next two hours - chatting nosense and drifting in and out of sleep. “we need to get up now,” i giggled trying to finally sit up but changbin’s grip kept me down. “changbin, come on!” i cried out attempting to sit up another few times, “five more minutes,” he smirked closing his eyes. “five more minutes turns into two hours with you,” i sighed and his grip loosened so i could bow sit up. my bare shoulders were exposed to the chilly air making me chitter slightly, “five more minutes actually,” i wrapped myself in the duvets and cuddled into changbin trying to heat myself back up. he then erupted in giggles at my reaction to the cold air.

when we actually got up it was one o’clock in the afternoon which meant i had four hours before i had to go back to work at five. “i’ll make us some lunch,” changbin announced and made his way to my kitchen before i could protest. while he was in the kitchen, i started to tidy up from the night before; folding the extra blankets and putting them back in the hall cupboard, binning the empty pizza boxes and riding up my messy bed.

changbin came out with two plates of kimchi fried rice with a fried egg on top of each moutain of rice. “wow this looks great,” my stomach grumbled after looking at the plate of food, my hunger only setting in now. smiling widely i tucked into the food as soon as the plate hit the table, “thank you,” i hummed in content. “glad you like it,” he chuckled.

—

changbin let out a groan full of annoyance as we sat in his apartment, “what?” i asked looking up from the book in my hands. “i’m bored,” he moaned, poking my cheek with his finger. “how about we go out for dinner?” i offered and it was an immediate yes, chuckling i got up abandoning my book to go get changed into something more smart than sport leggings and a baggy jumper.

i had a few clothes items in changbin’s wardrobe after spending nearly three months here. after the night in my apartment, our relationship went from friends to lovers quite quickly. SKZ hadn’t been busy for the past few weeks, and the yakuza was staying low which was strange but i was happy that changbin was safe from danger.

changing into a denim skirt and t-shirt i looked a bit more put together than before. “where should we go?” i asked walking through the hall, mascara in one hand and concealer in the other. “what about the pizza place oro?” he called out from the living room. “sure,”. once i was ready i changbin emerged with our jackets in his arms, “it’ll be cold outside here,” he smiled and handed over my thicker jacket over. “thanks,” i gave him a quick peck on the lips and made my way to the front door remembering to pick the house keys up from the cabinet.

changbin took my hand as we walked down the stairs away from the comfort of the apartment. “at least it’s only ten minutes away,” i pointed out as the cold air hit my exposed face. november’s weather was coming in hard this year and i was not a fan - i hated the cold weather which usually came with rain and winds. i stuck closer to changbin’s side as we walked down the street hand in hand.

we were seated after a few minutes of waiting since it was a busy friday night. “y/n, i need to tell you something,” changbin sighed, putting down the paper menu. “what is it?” i asked confusion written across my face nerves suddenly filled my stomach, “the.... the yakuza sent us a warning yesterday,” he explained - “they said that they know you were there that night,” he grabbed my hand as i started to panic. “changbin... what do i do?” i whispered gripping his hand tighter. “nothing, you going to live your life normally, and i’m going to protect you,” he brought my hand to his mouth and placed a chaste kiss on my knuckles.

our dinner conversation was filled with our worried thoughts about the situation we were now faced with. i knew they had been too quiet, changbin sometimes came home with bruises and cuts littering his skin but recently nothing. “the guys are going to help obviously,” he assured, pasta wrapping around his fork. my appetite was gone and stress came in it’s place.

i cleared half of my plate before i started to feel sick from nerves, anxiety was slowly creeping up but changbin was there to keep me calm. “how about we go get ice cream and a movie?” he asked smiling sweetly. we payed the small bill and left the restaurant. “we’ll be fine,” he assured hugging my side tighter.

62 notes · View notes

jeffmac813 · 5 years ago

Text

Too Many Cooks Stories

On October 28, 2014, a short comedy piece named Too Many Cooks aired in the "Infomercials" slot on Adult Swim -- 4am. Within one week, though, the short had garnered over 5 million views on YouTube and become a viral smash. I asked my editor Sarah Ottney at Toledo Free Press if I could cover the phenomenon, and thanks to Adult Swim, garnered interviews with the short's creator, Casper Kelly, and actor William Tolarsky, who played the silent killer named Bill. These stories are some of my favorite pieces I've ever written, because of how quickly they came together and how kind and excited their subjects were at Too Many Cooks' surprising success.

(written 11/12/14)

"Too Many Cooks": Creating a New Cult Classic

The writer behind the net's most bizarre viral sensation

Written by Jeff McGinnis

It starts out looking like most any cliche, cheesy sitcom opening sequence from the 80s. Upbeat, bland theme tune. Actors turning with a smile to the camera. All very familiar.

But then things start to happen that feel ... wrong. The theme music never stops. Just keeps on playing. More and more cast members appear, past the point of being ludicrous. The show's genre seems to change -- from sitcom to cop drama to prime time soap and more. And then there's the creepy guy who suddenly starts killing the rest of the cast.

This is "Too Many Cooks," the comedy short that is taking the internet by storm. Produced for Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" late-night lineup, the dark satire first aired during the network's "Infomercial" slot -- meaning 4 a.m. -- earlier this month. But something happened when the clip found its way online, and soon the bizarre short had exploded virally. In about a week, the myriad postings of the short -- both official and otherwise -- have garnered over 5 million hits.

And at the epicenter of it all is a young writer and director named Casper Kelly, who is both ecstatic and a little dumbfounded.

"It is super, super -- THREE supers -- exciting and thrilling, almost veering into the other side, of flop sweat and panic," Kelly said in an interview with Toledo Free Press. "I'm holding it together, having fun."

Kelly is not a new voice among Adult Swim's class of comedic subversives. He has worked for years at production headquarters in Atlanta, composing funny promos for Cartoon Network shows, writing for shows like "Squidbillies" and "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," co-creating the series "Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell." Not typical fare, even for late-night basic cable, but Kelly revels in the creative freedom working at Adult Swim provides.

"It's wonderful, and our boss, Mike Lazzo -- he's a tough audience," Kelly said. "He's a very sophisticated viewer, and gets bored easily. But when he likes what you're doing, he gives you a lot of rope. A lot of freedom to try it. And does not micromanage. He gives you kind of big ideas at the beginning, and might give you ideas at the end, but in the middle, he lets you do your thing -- which is great."

Still, Kelly was hesitant to pitch the idea that would become "Too Many Cooks." Though there was plenty of precedent for the network doing experimental ideas like it in their late infomercial slots, he wasn't totally confident that the concept could sustain a full short.

"I had the idea, and I didn't even tell Mike Lazzo, because I didn't know if it would work. So I was afraid to pitch it. But I told some co-workers, who at a work party told him. And the idea made him laugh, so I had to do it at that point."

Filming came together remarkably quickly given how complicated the finished product would prove to be, Kelly said. "Interestingly -- and this was probably a good thing -- we did not have a lot of time, because we had a narrow window open up where our production company could do it. So once I had the outline, I think we only had a couple of weeks. So I just had to think about it constantly and just kind of throw down every idea I could.

"We had a lot of time in post, but leading up to it was a mad dash. And so much work was getting headshots, and finding people that had the right look, to give you the feeling for that character."

Another crucial element would be the short's music -- that initially chipper tune that mutates into forms that are dramatic, haunting and more. Kelly was hands-on with its creation, as well.

"That took a lot of time. I wrote the lyrics -- most of the lyrics -- and then we used one audio guy, who was great, and then it got to be too much. Because we had no money -- he was doing it for us as a favor. He did as much as he could, and then we had to hand it off to someone else to finish it, who did a great job. I think I really got the best out of both of them.

"People were saying that song gets stuck in their head. It sure did get stuck in our head when we were editing it."

Kelly has no plans to rest on his laurels, even now that "Too Many Cooks" has garnered such remarkable fame and acclaim in such a brief amount of time. He's hard at work on the second season "Your Pretty Face," for one thing. And as to whatever opportunities may arise from here, Kelly said he's primed and ready.

"I'm excited, because I have opportunities now to make more stuff. And I have a notebook full of ideas, short films, and feature scripts and more. And I feel like a kid in a candy store right now."

"Too Many Cooks": Killer Bill

Atlanta actor makes mark as short's silent assassin

Written by Jeff McGinnis

The voice on the other end of the phone is kind. Bright. A little higher than you'd expect, given its owner. A definite southern twang, understandable since he's lived in Georgia so long -- though he's Pennsylvanian by birth. He's gracious, good-natured, a sweetheart. You wouldn't guess how natural he looks chopping people's heads off with a machete.

William Tokarsky is his name, and for the past week or so his face has become the central image of one of the internet's most wildly successful viral videos. He plays the killer -- "Bill," if the credit on IMDB is to be believed, though he's never named in the short -- at the center of the bizarre satire "Too Many Cooks," produced by Cartoon Network.

"I was working as an extra for [director] Casper Kelly on another show he does on Adult Swim," Tokarsky said in an interview with Toledo Free Press. "And we became friends, and he liked my look. And there were two or three other people he had in mind for that role, and we all submitted this little tape and audition, and he picked me. And I think I did a decent job."

Tokarsky is putting it mildly. His gleefully crazed facial expressions and malevolent presence are key to much of the short's dark comedy. It's a look that has served Tokarsky well since he first began dipping his toe into acting.

"I retired from General Motors. And they were making a movie where I live. And suburban Atlanta has become a hotbed of movie and TV production. And I was talking to some people that used to be on the line working, and there's people that were extras. And I thought, 'Well, I could do that!' And I just started doing that.

"I have a unique look, that garnered me a position up front sometimes, to the point where someone tapped me on the shoulder on 'Hunger Games: Catching Fire' and said, 'You have a speaking line next week if you want it.'"

No speaking lines were needed on the set of "Too Many Cooks," though. Tokarsky's silent maniac appears subtly at first, stalking in the background of many shots, to the point where many viewers may not notice him until he begins his mad slasher act in earnest. Even Tokarsky is surprised at how often he appears in the finished product.

"I never had a script when we did it. So basically, what occurred was, they would place me, or give an action, and I would do it. And you don't necessarily shoot in order. So it was a surprise to me that we were playing 'Where's Waldo,'" he said.

"I watched it the first time, and never saw myself in locations -- like the 24-second mark in, where I'm standing behind the little girl -- I didn't see myself there. But I was there when we filmed the damn thing! It's like I didn't see the big picture in Casper's mind when we filmed it. He gave me an action, and I did it."

The success of "Cooks" -- both on an artistic and popularity scale -- has come as a surprise for most. But even though Tokarsky admits he's not exactly part of the demographic the short is aimed at, he said he had a feeling it would either be a colossal success or an equally memorable failure."

"I was speaking with my wife, and I said, 'Well, there's one of two things that's going to happen. This thing is going to stink so bad, no one's ever going to see it. Or, it's going to go viral.'"

Now that his latter prediction has come true, Tokarsky's excited about the opportunities his sudden exposure may bring. "I would think I would get a few things out of it -- you know, the creepy janitor on a TV show," he joked.

"I've found my genre; I've found what I can do. So, I'm retired, and I have a decent pension, so, as a friend of mine, another actor, said -- 'It's all gravy.' And I'm having fun with it, I got an agent last April, I've pretty much stopped doing extra work except for Casper -- I'm going to work for him, because I like him, and he likes me, and maybe I can get a contract out of him on his other show!"

Is he worried about being typecast, thanks to "Too Many Cooks"' popularity? Not at all. In fact, he relishes the idea.

"I know who I am, so it doesn't bother me," Tokarsky said. "If you want to act, you got to get an agent, you get an agent where they don't have ten other guys looking for your role. Because how many guys want to be the creepy guy?"

View "Too Many Cooks" on Adult Swim's YouTube page: http://youtu.be/QrGrOK8oZG8

1 note · View note

weretheoneswhowrite · 6 years ago

Text

Getting to know you....

We at WTOWW have got a real treat for all of our faithful readers! We have a fun and exciting series that we're excited to debut today!

Want to know what's your favorite writers process for cranking out these engaging stories? Want to know how they build such realistic worlds and impressive dialogue?

Well now you can as we asked our talented spectrum of writers a few questions that will help you get to know them better.

These ladies really put in the work to bring you the stories we all love to obsess over and WTOWW are very happy we took the time to get to know them so much better!

First up we have @jonesywrites aka Kendra. She is a heavy hitter and a permanent marker in the Richonne Fanfiction hall of fame for her pieces like Bad Thangs, Machine Heart and Vantage Point and a host of other great stories that are not limited to only the Richonne Fandom. Her talent for world building is really unmatched, it was fun getting to pick her brain.

So take a few moments to relax, let's get to know Kendra a little better.

Why is Richonne so fun to write?

“I'm a huge romantic. Richonne's chemistry has always been so intense on screen, which is exactly what drew me to them. Exploring that chemistry in my writing is a total thrill because so much of my writing relies on details that the actors give me in abundance. Getting those details right (true to what you see on screen) makes me sooo happy as a writer.”

Do you have a writing schedule?

“Ha! I wish I did. I'm all over the place. It's hard to find the time to really dive in, so I'm stuck writing a paragraph here or there during the work week. I try to devote at least one day or a few hours on the weekends, but there's always so much to do, so I can only really update every now and then. It's a miracle if I can get back to back updates done.”

What is your editing process?

“ I will rewrite something a hundred times until I feel it captures what I want to convey perfectly. It takes me a long time to finish an update because I'm constantly going back to re-read it and edit it as I write.”

What drew you to fanfiction?

“I've been a writer since I was a little girl, but when it came to the stories I watched or read, I was always thinking of the characters I liked doing things that had nothing to do with the original plot. Scenes would come like visions in my head while going about my day or trying to sleep. Someone told me about fanfiction when I was in college and I decided to just go for it. Been hooked ever since.”

What has writing fanfiction taught you about being a writer?

“It has taught me humility, not to compare myself to others (to find my own unique voice and stay true to it), and it has helped me better understand my strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller. I move at my own pace but in my opinion taking time to focus on the things that make me a happy reader makes me a better writer.”

Who outside the fandom knows you write fanfiction?

“Not many people. Close friends. It's still not something people take seriously within the circles I work in. Being a copywriter, living in Hollywood trying to become a television writer, you just don't admit to writing fanfiction. At least not unless you intend to make a big joke out of it and get major side-eye for your trouble. ::shrug:: So I don't talk about it.”

How many people know you're a writer?

“Everyone I meet. I write for work, and I network a lot with folks out here trying to do what I am trying to do -- get into a television writer's room. It's an intrinsic part of me that I will always lead with. "Hello, my name is Kendra and I am a writer."

Where do you see your writing taking you?

“Hopefully to creating my own shows or finally finishing my first book. Time will tell.”

Do you have advice for writers just starting out?

“Don't give up. Find your voice and stay true to it. Don't compare yourself to others, it's a waste of time. Their voice is not yours. People want to read what you have to say, specifically you. Only you can say it your way, so find your way and go for it. Ask questions, lots of questions, of other writers because we're a community and we want to see each other succeed. Tell the story you want to read, not the story everyone else thinks you should tell.”

What do you wish you knew before posting your first chapter?

“I wish that I knew how to manage my time better. Heh.”

How many writing playlists do you have? Does your music have to change with what you write?

“ I make a playlist for every story I write that encapsulates that story's mood/world. I've been doing this for years, there's no other way for me. I must have music to write to and I must share it with my readers. Everything I publish was written to a musical score. They're all available on Spotify, too. Just look for the title of the fic or my user name, kendrawriter.”

How many projects do you have going on right now?

“ I have quite a few, it's all a jumble. Four open Richonne fics, one open WestAllen fic, a tv script and the tentative start to a young adult novel. Ehhhhhhh....I know. I know.”

Have you ever written a scene that’s made you cry?

“Once, in my first Doctor Who fic, Nightfall. An original character in that story that I based off of my grandmother died in the story. My grandma was very ill at the time and we feared the worst (she passed away a couple of year ago). Writing her death scene was tough. To this day I'm not sure why I did that to myself, but at the time it made sense for the drama of the plot.”

Where do you get your best story ideas?

“I take inspiration from literally everything. My best ideas have come from me just really wanting to see something and obsessing over how to write it until it's in the story. But I base a lot of things off movie or TV references from all the many, many I've watched since childhood. Machine Heart, for example, blends about 100 references from all my favorite sc-fi stuff -- Star Trek, Aliens, Black Mirror, Terminator, The Matrix, Strange Days, The Fifth Element, the list goes on...”

Do you have a solution for when you’re stuck?

“Just let it pass. It happens all the time, and over the years I've learned to just let it happen until I'm inspired again. Because once I'm inspired again, I go into THE ZONE and I'll write like crazy for days on end.”

What does WTOWW mean to you?

“ It's a community for me. It's full of really amazing, kind, funny, smart, talented women that I'm beyond grateful to know. Also, it's an opportunity to give less known writers a platform, and dive into some great writing prompts I otherwise wouldn't think of.”

Thank you Kendra for taking the time to share your story.

-We’re The Ones Who Write

#richonne fanfiction #fanfiction writers #jonesywrites #weretheoneswhowrite #WTOWW interviews

69 notes · View notes

natsthinkitythinkthinkthonk · 6 years ago

Text

Interview: The Two Dekus

Here’s the whole interview with both the Japanese and English voice for Izuku Midoriya (Deku).

This Anime News Network interview features the two voice actors behind Deku: Daiki Yamashita (Japanese dub) and Justin Briner (English Funimation Dub).

I just wanted to bring out this interview. But before we begin, I’m just going to say that since I watch Boku no Hero Academia subbed, I hold a bit of bias. Since I did crop a few parts out, you will find that Justin Briner might have said a few additional things in the interview, so if you want to get a few more comments from him, check out the original article! I tried to keep it even for the most part though.

I will also be including some additional posts, sources, videos, etc. of things that relate to this interview regarding the Japanese cast of My Hero Academia. I tried to limit myself to put under ten links and failed... sorry about that! Hopefully, you’ll find something you might like though!

[...] = additional words in their answer that I felt wasn’t crucial

ANN: First, thank you both for your time, I really appreciate it. When you auditioned for this, did you know what you were auditioning for, and did you know what a big deal it was?

DAIKI YAMASHITA: Yes, I was reading the manga before and I knew that this was going to be popular if it was made into an anime.

JUSTIN BRINER: Yeah, we got our hands on it a little later [...] You can tell, spending a little bit of time with the source material, that it's something special. [...] And after I checked out that first episode I got hooked, so I figured a lot of other people did too.

Did you immediately see yourself as him?

BRINER: No, not necessarily. [...] I didn't want to get my hopes up for anything for this.

YAMASHITA: You auditioned for pretty much all the male characters?

BRINER: Yeah, Deku, Kacchan, Todoroki, Minari, Tokoyami. I wouldn't have been good as many of them.

YAMASHITA: You tried out for so many characters.

BRINER: Yes, uh uh. I just really wanted to be a part of it, it seemed like something special to me.

Now that you're in season 3 and you did the movie, how has your relationship with Deku changed since the beginning? Do you feel like you play him differently now as his character has changed?

YAMASHITA: I think the mental part of it has helped me. At the beginning of the show, Deku seemed to be very weak. Very soft. You feel like “oh, is he okay? Is he gonna make it?” as a viewer, you see that. But once he inherits the power from All Might, the mental part of his character, he's become so strong. As I play him more and more as the seasons went on, I try to gain that strength as well for myself. So when I play against the strong villains, in my acting I try not to back down – I try to convey that mental strength in my acting as well.

BRINER: It's essentially the same answer here. [...]He started out very weak and insecure. [...]you can tell that he's gaining confidence. [...] Just being able to incorporate a little more confidence, a little more heroism every time, that's part of Deku's growing up.

Do you read ahead in the manga? And if so, does it help you prepare emotionally for what's coming?

YAMASHITA: Yes I do, I do. I read ahead and then I regret reading ahead. I was like “All Might—ohhhh, no.” So when I read that All Might and All For One battle in the manga, I was like “oh my gosh, I saw it, I didn't want to see it… I regret it.” It was shocking to me, before I even received the script.

BRINER: Same. I do read the manga, and I feel like I'm pleasantly surprised by every new development. It's so smartly written that I can't find myself not reading it every week.

Do you have a personal favorite scene, or a scene that meant the most to you personally from this show? Or the film?

YAMASHITA: There's so many. It's very hard to choose one scene, but in particular the second episode, where All Might tells him “you can be a hero.” That scene, along with the most recent scene when All Might points to Deku on TV and says “you're the next.” Those two scenes are very, very memorable. For me, myself, as well as for Deku as a character, those two scenes are very pivotal moments for the character, and very important to both myself and Deku as a character. And I think that those two lines and those two scenes are going to stay with Deku forever, and that's going to become a core of his becoming a hero in the future.

BRINER: I love that. [...] there's a moment in the sports festival when Deku and Todoroki are fighting against each other, and in the middle of the fighting he says something to the effect, to Todoroki, of “it's yours, it's your quirk, not his.” That's such a wonderful moment of—because Deku isn't the most confident person of all time. His quirk isn't even necessarily his own, but he's learning to live with it and make it his own in his own way. So to be able to instil what little confidence that he's gained to a friend in need is really beautiful to me, I think.

Deku gets into some guttural screaming, just world-class screaming. How do you prepare for that? Do you have to recover from it?

YAMASHITA: I eat a lot to prepare. I don't do anything particularly to protect my voice, but I feel like if I don't do anything then my throat is gonna get stronger. Like, if you do more—so essentially for me, it's eat whatever I want when I want and sleep when I want.

BRINER: Yes!

So you're playing the main character in a giant, hit show that could potentially run years and years and years and years and years. Do you feel like you're prepared for that, and do you see yourself still relishing the role, if, say, a decade from now you're still playing Deku?

YAMASHITA: Yes. In a narration, where Deku says “this is the story of me becoming the best hero.” So I would like to see him become the best hero. I would like to see that, and I would like to continue playing him as he becomes a hero. So I'll try not to die in the middle, in the process. I might be a grandpa by the end, but I would like to perform this character until he becomes the best hero that he can be.

BRINER: I mean yes, I love Deku, I love the source material so much and so dearly that I'd love to be a part of it for as long as I can. It really means a lot to me that way.

As a brief follow-up, when you were starting your career, did you ever have the aspiration to be like “well, I basically want to be Goku in a series that's as big as Dragon Ball.” You're the Goku of this show. Did you ever see yourself in this position? And was that ever your aspiration?

YAMASHITA: Yes. When I started out, yes that was my hope that I would be able to encounter roles like this. I think that it honestly takes a miracle for this type of encounter to happen, to get a role that can be in a long-running show, and something like My Hero Academia is very, very rare. So I'm very grateful for the opportunity, and I feel like, as I said before, I'd like to stay with it until Deku becomes the best hero that he can be. When he becomes that hero, maybe that's the time that my life ends. That's how I feel, almost. So I would like to continue playing and breathe life into this character until he does, so…

BRINER: All I've ever known that I wanted to do was act or perform in some capacity. I never knew exactly what avenue that would be. But the world of anime has always been something that's been very important to me growing up. I watched Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon before I knew what anime was. It was just another cartoon that I would rush home after school to watch. To be part of something so pivotal and so prescient, especially nowadays, is really special in that way. [...]to be a part of it now is really incredible. Because it feels like I'm working my hardest to be a part of something that's much bigger than me. And I get a lot of satisfaction out of doing my part in that.

All right, I've got two short ones left. One, if you were playing any character in the show that was not Deku, who would you want to play?

YAMASHITA: I can't think of anybody else but Deku to play.

Fair enough.

BRINER: True, I love Deku too. If you make me answer, Froppy.

Perfect!

YAMASHITA: Kero Kero.

BRINER: Kero!

YAMASHITA: Maybe like a villain. One of the villains.

Last question. In your heart, who do you think Deku should wind up with in the show? As a romantic partner.

YAMASHITA: As far as I can tell for now, just by reading the manga and doing three seasons, it looks like Uraraka is very high on his list. But in the movie… I feel (original character from the My Hero Academia film) Melissa Shield has gained… she climbed up the ladder towards the top, the top of the list. So when you think about the future development of the story, there might be a chance that Melissa-chan comes back. In that case, there might be a battle between Uraraka Ochako and Melissa!

BRINER: [...] I feel like Uraraka is… they're just meant to be, somehow. Let me just introduce Tsuyu into the mix, Froppy. I don't know, I don't know.

It's a good pick. It's a good pick.

YAMASHITA: Isn't it that you like that character? Do you just like her—

BRINER: Uhhhh, maybe?

Everyone likes that character!

YAMASHITA: I think it's your taste!

Tsuyu Is Popular With Everyone [video below]

youtube

“Who is Best Girl?” [Cast Answer]

BNHA Cast Interview (Daiki Yamashita, Nobuhiko Okamoto, Masuda Toshiki) - Relationship between the characters

Cast Imitating Their Characters

Seiyuu Comic (Daiki Yamashita, Nobuhiko Okamoto, Yuuki Kaji, and Kouki Uchiyama) with additional details

Ayane Sakura’s Nickname Origins

Yuuki Kaji Interview on Shouto Todoroki Nobuhiko Okamoto Interview on Katsuki Bakugou Junichi Suwabe Interview on Shouta Aizawa

BNHA Movie Special Event Additional Cast Images

Recording Bakugou - Nobuhiko Okamoto

If you like content like this, I recommend checking out my spam blog! It’s where I post my voice actor, shitpost, fanart, and just about everything else!

#daiki yamashita #bnha seiyuu #justin briner #bnha interview #boku no hero academia #mha #my hero academia #seiyuu

73 notes · View notes

snowbarrywatercooler · 7 years ago

Note

While I love Grant Gustin to pieces, I'm not looking forward to watching an hour long comic con involving him and Kevin praising WestAllen. Though I can't help but be curious about his forced answered and body language. If it's not too much trouble, could you pinpoint some of those moments in the video? I know it's on YouTube so I'd have no problem finding it. I'd just rather not watch the whole thing. Thank you in advance!

Here’s what I can sum up from the video.

VIP is $311. x Grant looks and acts tired from shooting Season 4 overall. David Rappaport knew him from 90210 and casthim in the role. David is also responsible for casting Candice too.Andrea was there. Right behind him at his signing booth.

Kevin moderated the interview, he compares Grant’s work ethic to Matt Damon’s. Grantkeeps smiling and waving at his fans, he’s genuine even though he looks tired.Fame and wealth make Grant nervous, that’s why he doesn’t do many cons.Kevin keeps praising Season 4 over and over but he doesn’t mean it in histone. Grant is just nodding along. Praising the show along with him. Especially because they know what it’s leading up to. These questions are pre-screened, nothing is said on the air that Grant is not prepared to answer.On how he was cast: he tested the same time as Carlos. He claims theonly person he did a chemistry read was with Candice. I notice how he spokethere, he was lying because we would have seen it by now in some way, leaked or on a DVD. He neglected to bring up his screen test with EBR,which was on Season 1 DVD, his “chemistry test” with Candice was not, “so much chemistry.” Why can’t we see it then?12:46 is where the WA talk begins. The “drama for the sake of drama comment.” Even with the small cheering Grant’s face saysit all…his body scrunches up, his shoulders are held back and tight,his face is holding something that looks like a forced smile but he isn’t smiling,he’s acting, trying to sell WA. Kevin in spite of having the question already memorized looks down.

Kevin ignores the that fact of WA are step-siblings and insteadcalls them “childhood besties” no mention of incest at all going right into “nowyou guys are married.” Grant during all of this was holding a fist and fidgeting a lot,why he is so uncomfortable? If he has chemistry with CP, why does he giveoff so much discomfort whenever WA is brought up? Grant also says “if we canstay on the air long enough” and “I hope everyone saw the finale” which indicates he isn’tconfident in the show anymore. He doesn’t know what will happen. He triesto sell us WA but he can’t help being honest in the same answer, he can’tlie but he can’t piss off his bosses. When Grant mentions “I guess we’llsee…a kid? In the future.” A small crowd cheers but when the camera pansto the crowd nobody is smiling.

I’ve counted, maybe 4-5 WAs in a sea of 8,000, andeveryone is just as serious as Grant. These are not WA stans, they are superGG fans. Nobody cares about WA.

14:16 is where it ends. Grant is relievedthe discussion is over. His curt laugh at the end points that out.6-23 was the date of the panel, Grant hasn’t gotten the script yet, but will receive it on that weekend. When this is posted Grant will have already gotten the script.On Monday the 25th was the meeting with HELLbing.Season 1 Grant was reading The New 52 to learn about BA and TF. Season 2he stopped doing that so he can focus more on the acting. He also said “as someone growingup with superheroes you don’t want to get sick of it.” Grant’s energy really picked up when Kevin started talking about the firstepisode he directed. You can tell Grant loves working with him. Kevin feelsthe same way. When they are just talking Flash, it looks natural, less forced,less promo salesman, it looks like two friends talking as opposed to Viris or WA awkwardness.

22.56 is where Kevin brings up “in every episode there is always a WA peptalk scene” it seemed they just glazed over it and Grant just nods “yup” in a repeated manner agreeing that it’s monotonous to do.

Grant praises Jesse L Martin, being a fan of his because he bonded with himfirst and he was in Rent. Tom Canavagh is brought up and Grant says he ishis favorite actor to work with. Grant talked about Tom and Grant, the moviewas based on their real on set unfunny gags, Tom wrote and directed the shortmovie. After wrapping up Season 3 Grant had plans to do a movie and Tom filmedthe short movie in 2 days. The movie Grant was supposed be a part of “fell through”it could be referring to a recast because he wasn’t available at the time.Grant says he likes Time Travel and fans will ask him questions but he alwayssays he is confused. If the writers knew what they were writing about, I’msure Grant would have a clearer answer for the fans. He clearly likes it whenBarry time travels but when it’s used the right way.He loves Captain Cold and Wentworth as a “frienemy.” Big cheers for thatone and pan to the crowd to see smiles. Weather Wizard was brought up ashis favorite rogue. Mark Hamill as The Trickster.Kevin said his favorite season is the first one and that his favorite episodewas 1x15 where Barry time travels for the first time, Danielle was mentioned. He quotes the show as “Dawson’s Creek with capes.” Greg Berlanti wasa head writer on Dawson’s Creek. 28:17 is where Grant demonstrates how he does “the run” on the show. They don’tshoot his legs in frame. At the beginning they did with a treadmill.Grant is aware of what people are saying about his physic, body frame andKevin states “you have a runner’s body.” Grant agrees, “I have more of a runner’sbody than any other type.” Grant’s favorite episode is the Season 1 finale. Grant is very proud of theepisode and Kevin agrees as he brings up his infamous crying video he postedon youtube that gave him the opportunity to direct the show.Fan Q&A was around 30min mark. First question was: What is going to happenwith Nora Allen? Grant’s response is “she’s trapped in our time. We’re probablygoing to see Barry help her get back to her time.” Second question was about Grant’s education. He never graduated from ElonUniversity but was made an Alumni. He left after hisSophomore year to go on the road for “West Side Story.” Grant didn’t believehe would end up on TV, he thought he would be on the Broadway stage.Third question was about how they shoot each episode. Grant says they prepfor a week prior with table reads of the script, then shoot an episode for8-9 days. The network and studio watch it and make notes and cuts, during that time the SFX are added in. Every time an episode is finished it is 2 months agoso the show has a lot of time to omit, re shoot, polish what they want interms of what will make the cut. I don’t believe at all the show runnersare avoiding the feedback. They could easily incorporate so many things for future episodes it’sthat they choose not to. Do not tell me this is hard for them to do. Thisis how TV is run, especially a show like this. Grant says his favorite crossovers to shoot was possibly the last one inEarth X, but it was the hardest one, the Supergirl crossover was highlightedbecause of the location in LA. Grant lives in Venice Beach, Ca. Brandon Routhis his favorite actor to work with aside from Melissa and Stephen.Grant says working with Tom is a blessing and a challenge. He lovesbeing directed by Tom almost as good as being directed by Kevin. Flash has made him want to be a director but he doesn’t see it happeningwith the show. He calls it “impossible” but he mentions being interested indirecting an episode for their last season if “they let him.” The amountof control these show runners have is disgusting. Grant is a decent person and the star.He shouldn’t feel apprehensive if he wanted to direct, it’d be an honor if he did.He understands the character better than anyone. Kevin snuck in “before itall ends, who knows it might go on forever” Grant responds with “notforever.” At 38:10 the question is: how many more seasons do you think the show isgoing to do? He said at least 3 more, that takes it up to Season 7 but he saysanything could happen. Kevin adds “it’s strong in the ratings forThe CW.” Meaning if it was on a real network, it would be already cancelled.2 million viewers is not high. Right now with the adjusted they are at 3.0,with a demo of .6 thanks to the horrible Season 4 disaster Viris WA obsession. Kevin also added which surprisedme “the show will go on as long as Grant wants it to go.” Grant said he knew Kevin was gonna say that. Kevin says back it could go on for 26 seasons. Grant says sarcastically “imagine that?” Grant’s favorite musical is “Singin in the Rain” which got him interested in performing. The best part of being Flash is they give him his own superhero suit. Hementions wanting an authentic version of Christopher Reeves Superman suit.He likes wearing Star Labs and CCPD sweatshirts. The guy who asked the questionstarted asking Kevin a question and Grant was all “wtf wasn’t this supposedto be about me”? Everyone in the crowd laughed.His most difficult scene to film which was also his favorite was the scenewith Barry and his mom at the end of Season 1. His other most difficultscene was in Tom Canvanagh’s directed episode 3x19 where EmoBarry was. Kevincalled Grant with the wig “My Chemical Barry.” Grant said it was hard to shootbecause of the two conflicting emotions of playing Present Barry and FutureBarry wearing “a stupid wig.” Kevin compared EmoBarry to a “Hot Topic Employee.”Grant’s favorite Season is the first one, mainly because of how well the finale was constructed “so perfectly.”46:18 is where the question about which he prefers: his fictional WArelationship or his real relationship with Andrea. His exact words are: “Ienjoy my real relationship much more. Nothing against Candice, love to d-greatly.Yeah, it’s obviously very different. One is scripted for me and fictional.One plays itself out and I love her very much in real life. So, I think thoseare probably the biggest differences.” He doesn’t know what to say, the questionitself was lame, obviously there are huge separations from fiction and fact something the delusional doesn’t comprehend.Grant feels uncomfortable answering but he was polite and humored the guywho was obviously a huge Gr*ndice and WA stan. One of the 5 stans in there.When Grant does cons he doesn’t know how much it means to people and he’sgrateful for everything the fans give. He loves what he does. Grant loved filming the musical episode. No WA mentions. Especially singing “Superfriend”because he got to tap dance again. The crowd wants him to sing the song andGrant says he won’t. He thinks the heroes in real life are the troops, his mom because she was a single mother and supported his dreams.A fan asked “will we get a Run Nora, Run from Barry?” Grant credits Tom formaking that line iconic. Kevin agrees. Kevin says he did versions of theline in “The Runaway Dinosaur” because he loved it so much. Kevin said it is the show’s version of “May the force be with you.” No mention of “we are the flash” I wonder why….Grant answered what he has learned being The Flash and Grant credits Season1 again. He learned a lot from Barry’s empathy, his humility. He is a betterman than Grant is.

Grant got another fan request shout out but in the videohe said “Are we ready? You’re not here but 8,000 other people are.” Crowdwent nuts. The same fan asked him if he wanted to play a Marvel superhero,which would he play. He said Spider-Man. Grant comments on what it’s like to be the star of a TV show. Even thoughhe knows he is the star in truth, he is very humble in saying it’s an ensembleshow. No mentions of CP or IW or WA. Hear that stans who stalk this blog? Grant is too much of a gentlemen to bait you demons.Grant’s most embarrassing scene was when he slide across the floor in 4x02“Mixed Signals” paying homage to Risky Business. He says because he has “chickenlegs.” He also says in the finale when Wally comes back he dropped 6 champagne glasses in 2 takes. It’s included in the bloopers. He says if he goes to the Vancouver Con he will bringhis dogs. Grant says he watches when people on set run and walk and compare it to howhe does it unintentionally. He’s met people in life that want to race him.He feels like he is a fast runner in real life, but he admits out loud hedoesn’t like running. When they are using science jargon, Grant doesn’t know what they are talking about unless he googles it. Grant loves playing the villain more than the hero. Savitar was a lot of fun for him to play. It could be because he loved working with Danielle more closely but the show will not allow any Snowbarry mentions, he’s there to plug WA, it would destroy WA as a whole and he knows it.The last couple of minutes they were talking about Grant’s famous slide into scenes, he does it at the last minute of the interview. Do with the information as you will. Grant has highs and lows here. Whenthe lows are pretty low it’s jarring when they are high it’s obvious wherehis heart is. He is a good guy that doesn’t deserve the bad treatment he’sbeen getting. Whether it’s about his character, CP’s repeated abuse of him and body shamming. Grant is nothing but friendly and takes the punches with thepraise. I hope he does more cons in the future, maybe when he is more rested and less fatigued.

24 notes · View notes

disbestiles-blog · 7 years ago

Text

enchanted 02 - it’s time

Dylan O’Brien x Reader AU

Word Count: 1,713

A/N: TR is Brazilian. Why? For the story to make sense, it is necessary that the situations that are going to happen are rare, incredible and as if she were really living a dream. So I needed her to be from a country far from Dylan, far from being able to meet him, away from this universe of movies and series. Like I already said this is the first story I publish here so forgive me for some mistake and let me know if you like!

Part 1, Part 2 (you are here), Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

The chair turned and I came across a new me.

“You’re amazing! I’m going to have to register this change to put between my favorites!” Cacey said as she left to pick up her cell phone.

It was amazing how a simple change in hair color made so much difference in my face, I watched myself in the mirror a few times and after Cacey made all the records that she thought necessary I got up to leave. I said goodbye to her with a tight hug and thanked her for having done such a good job.

I arrived home and as soon as I closed the door of the apartment I came across my dad in the living room waiting for me. My dad just wasn't working while he was sleeping, even living together we saw very little, especially after I left the agency, but that day he must have decided to rest a little.

“Hi, my favorite daughter! You look beautiful! I liked the change in hair!” He said happily.

I rolled my eyes smiling. "I'm the only daughter how can I not be the favorite one? But thanks, Dad!"

He laughed agreeing and hug me. "Let’s sit down and talk a little."

That leaves me a bit worried, was he upset that I left the agency so fast? My father and I were always close and we talked about everything so I put my things aside and sat down with him.

"So, are you okay with all those changes in your life Y/N? You need anything?” He asked seriously.

"I’m good, dad! In fact, I’ve never felt so safe anyway being a risky thing but I think it will be a good experience.” I answer apprehensive but confidente.

He nodded smiling, and picked up a very small gold box that was on our center table and give it to me to open. I removed the tape and saw that they were two keys. I looked at him in surprise.

"Y/N although I really like you close to me I think you deserve to have your own apartment, it’s near the Warner Studios so you can walk and enjoy the scenery as I know you like.”

I gave a tight hug almost knocking him to the ground saying several “thank you”. I was in the clouds.

“Now I need to get back to work and if you need help you can ask them … I mean, if it’s urgent you can talk to me.”

My father had a personal secretary who solved all the problems in my house but I didn't like the feeling of having someone take care of my things, so I asked him to stop wrapping her in it. I nodded understanding that he had forgotten and went to my room, needed to reread the script of the first day of rehearsal of the series and rest.

“Hope Brooks was a 22-year-old woman who worked as a Fashion Designer in a series production company. She loved to dress up several characters but her boss made work sometimes stressful. She shared the apartment with her childhood friend Ellie. Hope was funny, clumsy and addicted to internet /social networking, she was single but didn't care about it. She liked to have fun.”

The name of the series was “Crime’s Partners” and as the cast wasn't yet fully defined I had only a few texts to read and prepare for the character. Probably only tomorrow I would meet some people from the cast and some scenarios that were being finalized.

I fell asleep looking at various decorations and furniture for my new apartment and woke up in alarm with the alarm clock. I got up, put on a comfortable outfit, put the texts in my bag and got the keys to meet the new apartment when I finished in the studio. The Warner studios were in Burbank, 26 minutes from Los Angeles but now I could be calm about the distance after my father’s gift.

I arrived in the studio and went to the area they notified me, so when I arrived I saw 1 men and 2 women talking to Georgie, our director. They seemed to be my age.

Georgie saw me approaching and walked toward me. “Hey Y/N! I want to introduce you to your co-workers! These are Olivia, Emma, and Noah.”

I approached and greeted everyone, both enthusiastic about the situation. Olivia was more or less my height, she was brunette with a wonderful Latin appearance and had a contagious smile. Emma had short, blond hair and I remembered Kristin Bell. Despite his smile, Noah had a serious air with his mysterious light eyes and perfectly tidy blond hair.

Georgie indicated the direction for us to meet with the rest of the staff, then we saw a large area with several set-up scenarios, I saw a cafeteria that was in ruins and three small apartments that in the series would be located in New York.

My eyes glittered and I could already feel all the emotion of that dream come true. She caught the attention of the staff and everyone gathered in a circle to hear her speak. She introduced us to everyone and told the respective characters that we were going to do.

I discovered that Olivia would be Ellie, my best friend, and roommate. Emma would be Joane and Noah would be Michael. The three had already done some relevant roles on TV and were “sub-celebrities” as we call it in Brazil. Apparently, I was just a beginner, but I tried not to get worried about it.

Georgie went on to say “We’re still finalizing the contract the two actors who will be Jake and Robert, but we’re going to start rehearsing some scenes with the four of them. We’ll all be together soon!”

She said with some suspense due to the fact that they were speculating on two big actors for these two roles. Everyone clapped and began to position themselves in their places. The staff seemed to enjoy working with Georgie very much, I imagined it was because of their confidence and the way she made it all sound easy. After instructing everyone about which scene we were going to rehearse she told us to stay relaxed and take the time to get closer.

The rehearsal was fun and I could see that everyone was getting comfortable with each other. Even Noah who seemed serious at first was very comfortable. After many rehearsed scenes and a few laughs, Georgie finished the day’s work. I said goodbye to Emma and Noah, and Olivia approached me.

“Y/N, I knew that you were Brazilian! Is that serious?!” She said trying to hold her papers and bag with kinda difficulty.

I helped her, smiling, "yes it’s serious! I’m starting now in this acting thing.”

“Oh, but it doesn't look like, you’re great! Would you like some coffee with me?” Olivia said with a true animation in her voice.

“Sure, let’s go!”

We went to a cafe near our set and ordered cookies with cappuccinos. Olivia told me about her career so far and about some funny situations, she had already gone through. I told her about the whole story of how I came to stop in Los Angeles, from the new apartment and about my funny story with Dylan when I was at the salon.

The chat flowed naturally like we had been friends for years. After finishing our coffee, I asked if she wanted to go to the new apartment with me and she accepted.

The apartment was really close to the studio, which would make my life a lot easier. It stood in a street full of colorful buildings with several mini gardens on the doors. According to the address that my father had given me, mine was the yellow that stood between a rose and another blue. Great combination, by the way. We went up to the second floor and when I opened the door I came upon another surprise.

The apartment was all furnished and partially decorated I just needed to get some details straight. We went in and Olivia was delighted with everything, just like me. My father knew my taste and left everything in the Scandinavian and clean style. The apartment was huge just for me, with a living room, kitchen, two suites and a balcony that looked more like a mini party area.

“If it were Hope Brooks here I’d be taking pictures! You have to register that memory girl!” Olivia said this already taking the phone and asking me to do some poses.

We took lots of pictures, selfies and we laughed a lot imagining the parties that we could live there. After we ordered a pizza and killed our hunger Olivia got up to go home as it was getting late. I said goodbye to her and since everything was already furnished I decided to stay there that night. I took my computer to read the news of the day and check the social networks and some Twitter accounts were already talking about our new series. It was weird reading my name as an actress but it made me feel good.

I checked the feed because there was nothing better to do when I saw that Dylan had posted a new Tweet with the following news.

“I look forward to sharing some news with you but for now I can only say: it will be incredibly fun!”

I liked Tweet and decided but don't say anything. I didn’t want to seem alike stalker or fan that freaked out for any reason. I researched on some websites to know anything about the novelty that Dylan was talking about but I don’t have success. I let the curiosity put aside and to focus all my thoughts to rest.

I remembered the rehearsal of the day, the details of the apartment, thought of the things I liked best and found myself thinking again about my meeting with Dylan and how fluffy he had been. I sent that thought out of my head and decided to sleep because now I had a job to deal with serious and I needed to sleep to prepare me for the next day.

Did you like it? I’m hoping for your thoughts here

SERIES MASTERLIST / MASTERLIST

#imagines #dylan o'brien #dylan o'brien imagines #dylan o'brien x reader #dylan o'brien series #dylan imagines #teen wolf #american assassin #dylan o'brien fanfic #the maze runner #maze runner #fanfics #stiles stilinski #letstories #dylan o'brien smut

53 notes · View notes

zeroviraluniverse-blog · 7 years ago

Text

33 Fun Facts About Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Visit Now - http://zeroviral.com/33-fun-facts-about-buffy-the-vampire-slayer/

33 Fun Facts About Buffy the Vampire Slayer

On the genre-busting television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the heroine saved the world—a lot—over the course of seven seasons. Buffy premiered on the WB 21 years ago today; here are a few things you should know about the show. (And this is just the tip of the stake.)

1. THE SHOW IS A SEQUEL OF SORTS TO A MOVIE.

In the late ‘80s, writer Joss Whedon had an idea for a movie that would subvert the horror genre. “I had seen a lot of horror movies, which I love very much, with blond girls getting killed in dark alleys, and I just germinated this idea about how much I would like to see a blond girl go into a dark alley, get attacked by a monster and then kill it,” he said. “And that was sorta the genesis for the movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The movie, penned by Whedon and directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, hit theaters in 1992. It starred Kristy Swanson as Buffy, Donald Sutherland as her watcher Merrick, and Luke Perry as her love interest, Pike (David Arquette also starred as Pike’s best friend-turned-vampire Benny). But the film was different from what Whedon had originally intended. “My original script for the movie was kind of dark and scary and it was comedic, but the final product was much more a broad comedy,” he said.

A few years later, the rights holders approached Whedon about making a TV show out of his creation. He wasn’t sure it would work, but “I started to think about it and I came up with the notion of playing all sorts of horror movies in high school and making them metaphors for how frightening and horrible high school is,” he said. “With the show, I kinda wanted to get back to the roots of genuine horror, but with a lot of comedy and a lot of edge and a lot of self reflective sort of examination of horror. But at the same time, get genuinely creepy and hopefully genuinely moving.” And the TV version of Buffy was born.

2. KATIE HOLMES AND RYAN REYNOLDS COULD HAVE STARRED ON THE SHOW.

Could you imagine Katie Holmes as Buffy and Ryan Reynolds as Xander? According to a 2000 biography, before she was Dawson’s Creek’s Joey Potter, Holmes was offered the role of the slayer, but turned it down to go to high school. Reynolds refused the role of Buffy’s wisecracking sidekick. “I love that show and I loved Joss Whedon, the creator of the show, but my biggest concern was that I didn’t want to play a guy in high school,” Reynolds told The Star in 2008. “I had just come out of high school and it was f***ing awful.”

3. GILES WAS THE FIRST ROLE CAST.

According to casting director Marsha Shulman, “Anthony Stewart [Head] was the first person that got cast on the first day we started casting. He was just it.”

Many other actors who read for the part, Whedon said, made Giles too stuffy, but Head’s take was a little sexier. “Tony Head was one of the few people that we saw and instantly knew right away that nobody else was going to play that part,” Whedon said. “He embodied it perfectly.”

4. SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR AND CHARISMA CARPENTER SWAPPED ROLES.

Gellar auditioned for the role of Sunnydale High queen bee Cordelia Chase before eventually being cast as Buffy. “At the time, we were all trying to find our way to make the show something, its own thing apart from the film,” Schulman said in The Watchers Guide. “We didn’t think of Sarah as Buffy because we thought she was too smart and too grounded and not enough of a misfit in a sense, because Buffy was this outsider. How could Sarah be an outsider? She’s so lovely. So we brought her in as Cordelia, and she was fantastic as Cordelia. Then we went to the network, they knew that Sarah was a star from her previous work, and that she could be Buffy, and that we could do that Buffy.”

Carpenter, meanwhile, auditioned for Buffy before being cast as Cordelia. “I think that the way it turned out is the way it was meant to have turned out,” Carpenter told the BBC. “I’m extremely pleased that I wound up with the character that I have for a myriad of reasons. … I don’t know that I would have been ready for that kind of fame if I’d gotten Buffy. So, I think [Buffy] went to the right person.”

5. WILLOW WAS RECAST AFTER THE PILOT WAS SHOT.

Willow, science geek and Buffy’s best friend, was an exceptionally tough part to cast. “We had actually cast someone else in the pilot. It just didn’t work,” Shulman said. “When we got picked up, we always felt that we were going to start again and look for another Willow.”

“I was determined that we wouldn’t have the supermodel in horn rims that you usually see on a TV show,” Whedon said. “I wanted somebody who really had their own shy quirkiness. While the network and I were looking for people, Alyson Hannigan slipped under our radar. She came in and we didn’t really know that she was going to be the guy, and then when she read for the network we were just blown away. She brings so much light and so much tenderness to the role, it’s kind of extraordinary.”

6. DAVID BOREANAZ WAS DISCOVERED BY THE CASTING DIRECTOR’S FRIEND.

Whedon, the network, and the casting director saw a number of guys read for Buffy’s eventual boyfriend (and vampire!) Angel before David Boreanaz auditioned. “The breakdown said the most gorgeous, mysterious, fantastic, the most incredible man on the face of the earth,” Shulman said. “I think I saw every guy in town. It was the day before shooting, and a friend of mine and called me and said to me ‘You know, there’s this guy that lives on my street who walks his dog every day and I don’t know what he does but he has all the things you’re describing.’ And the minute he walked in the room, I wrote down on my notes: This is the guy.”

Still, despite the fact that Boreanaz gave “very good read,” Whedon wasn’t sold on him. “He wasn’t exactly my type,” he said. “I wasn’t sure we necessarily had the guy here until I asked the women in the room, who had turned into puddles the moment he walked in. I had to defer to them—they seemed to know better than me, and thank god I did, because David turned into a great star and a very solid actor.”

7. THE FIRST VERSION OF THE THEME SONG WAS A DUD.

Whedon wanted the credits sequence—which begins with “this scary organ and then devolves instantly into rock ‘n roll”—to spell out for viewers exactly what the show was about: “Here’s a girl who has no patience for a horror movie, who is not going to be the victim, is not going to be in the scary organ horror movie,” he said. “She’s going to bring her own youth and rocking attitude to it.”

Dissatisfied with an early version of the theme, Whedon opened it up in a contest of sorts to local indie bands. It was Hannigan who suggested Nerf Herder; the band ultimately wrote and recorded the show’s theme. “They created the show and were filming the first season and the people there … hired some fancy pants Hollywood guy to write the theme song and they didn’t like it; they wanted something more rocking, I guess,” Nerf Herder’s lead singer, Parry Gripp, said. “So they asked a bunch of local, small time bands who they could pay very little money to come up with some ideas and they liked our idea and they used it. And the rest is history!”

The band rerecorded the theme in the second or third season because the first recording was a hasty affair, and the song went off-tempo in the middle, Whedon said.

8. THE SHOW SHOT IN A WAREHOUSE—AND AT ACTUAL SCHOOLS.

In the beginning, Buffy didn’t have much of a budget, so instead of shooting on a soundstage, the crew used a huge warehouse in Santa Monica, California. “We were very much on a tight budget,” Whedon said. “This hall you’ll see a lot of in the first 12 episodes. It is the entire school. We only had the one hall, so we use it over and over again. It’s really kind of sad, actually.” The outside of the warehouse also doubled as the entrance to Sunnydale’s only club, The Bronze. “When we designed the club, we put the door to the club on the outside of the actual warehouse so that we could go in from the outside because that would give it real life and make it very realistic,” Whedon said. “And of course we did it just once, and then once more in the third season, because you have to wait until night to shoot, go in and out and light it, and it’s just enormously complicated.”

Torrance High School in Los Angeles subbed in for the exterior of fictional Sunnydale High. It’s a popular spot for film and TV; you might also recognize it from Beverly Hills, 90210, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, 90210, She’s All That, Not Another Teen Movie, and more. And when Buffy went to college, most of Sunnydale University was shot in the warehouse, but some parts of the first episode of the fourth season were shot at UCLA.

9. THERE WAS A REASON FOR THE VAMPIRES’ CREEPY FACES—AND THE “DUSTING.”

In the Buffy movie, the vampires looked like regular people with sharper teeth and paler skin. But for the show, Whedon wanted to increase the sense of paranoia by making the vampires resemble normal people until it’s time to feed—at which point, they transform into monsters. But there was another reason, too. “I didn’t think I really wanted to put a show on the air about a high school girl who was stabbing normal-looking people in the heart,” Whedon said. “I thought somehow that might send the wrong message, but when they are clearly monsters, it takes it to a level of fantasy that is safer.”

Getting into vamp mode—which required a prosthetic that fit from the forehead down to the bottom of the nose—took about an hour and 20 minutes. “It can be tedious,” David Boreanaz said in 1998, “and taking it off is the worst part, because you have to sit there and you just want to rip the damn thing off—but you can’t, because you’ll take a piece of your skin with you. It has to be removed very delicately. But the end result is definitely worth it.”

The film also had vampire bodies lay where they fell after they were staked. But Whedon had different ideas for the show. “It was a very conscious decision to have [the vampires] turn to dust, clothes and all, because I didn’t think it would be fun to have 15 minutes of let’s clean up the bodies after every episode,” he said. The show’s visual effects artists worked on and refined the technique over the seasons.

10. THE CREATORS DREW ON EXISTING VAMPIRE LORE FOR THE SHOW.

But they didn’t use everything. Vampires don’t fly on Buffy or turn into bats because the show didn’t have the money and Whedon thought it looked silly. Other elements of vampire lore, however, were used: Vampires don’t have reflections; they can’t enter a house unless they’re invited; they’re vulnerable to garlic, crosses, sunlight, fire, and holy water; and they can be killed by beheading or via a stake through the heart.

11. GELLAR HAD SOME PROBLEMS WITH THE DIALOGUE.

The show was famous for its “Buffyspeak,” which was partially inspired by California Valleygirl-isms and how Whedon and the other writers spoke. For Gellar, though, that dialogue sometimes was an issue. “Joss has his own sort of language that’s difficult for us mere mortals to understand,” she said in 1998. “I grew up in New York. We didn’t have Valley girls, and constantly, I’m asking him ‘What does this mean? I’m not quite sure.’ There’s a very funny story about [my audition] where the first line is ‘What’s the sitch?’ And there I go walking in, and my first ‘What does this mean?’ No idea it meant situation. Talk about blowing a job instantly.”

12. HERE’S WHERE YOU’VE SEEN SEASON ONE’S BIG VILLAIN BEFORE.

Underneath all of the Master’s vampy makeup is actor Mark Metcalf, who has appeared in Animal House (he played Doug Neidermeyer) and Seinfeld (he played The Maestro), among many other films and television shows. “Most of the guys we read came in and gave us villain villain villain in a very unimaginative way,” Whedon said. “Mark’s not that character, he’s just sly. He undercut all of the villainousness with real charm.”

13. THE CAST AND CREW HATED THE LIBRARY SCENES.

Head delivered much of the show’s expository dialogue in the library—and cast and crew alike came to dread those scenes. “He’s brought so much to all these really tough speeches, giving them life where they had very little because they’re full of so much information,” Whedon said. “When we finally blew up the school at the end of season three and were in the library for the last time, everybody breathed a great sigh of relief because these became the bane for us when we were filming, to go back into this space and talk yet again about what the peril was going to be.”

14. DARLA WAS SUPPOSED TO DIE IN THE SECOND EPISODE.

The vampire (played by Julie Benz) was supposed to expire at the end of “The Harvest” after Willow doused her with holy water, but Whedon kept her alive because he thought Buffy and Angel’s romance would be more interesting if it was a triangle; Darla, of course, was Angel’s sire. She was eventually killed in episode seven, but would continue to pop up in other episodes—and in the spin-off show, Angel—from time to time.

15. GELLAR AND BOREANAZ WOULD EAT GROSS STUFF BEFORE KISSING SCENES.

In a 2002 interview with The Independent, Gellar called love scenes “the unsexiest thing in the world.” What she and Boreanaz did beforehand couldn’t have made it any sexier. “[We] were the worst,” she said. “We would do horrible things to each other. Like eat tuna fish and pickle before we kissed. If he had to unbutton my shirt or trousers I would pin them or sew them together to make it as hard as I could. Once I even dropped ice cream on him.”

16. THE SHOW BUILT ITS OWN GRAVEYARD.

In the first season, Buffy shot in a graveyard in Hollywood. “It meant going out all night, until sunrise, a lot of times,” Whedon said. “That was back when we had the energy for that kind of thing.” Starting in the second season, they created their own graveyard in the warehouse’s parking lot. “It made our lives a whole lot easier, but it doesn’t give you the scope that you get from [the Hollywood graveyard],” Whedon said. “It’s a really beautiful place. Looks great.”

“We poured in kerb, back-filled it with dirt and planted grass and lots of trees and stuff and that’s our graveyard set,” production designer Carey Meyer told the BBC. “The majority of our cemetery stuff actually takes place in that little tiny parking lot. At night, with a couple of headstones in the background with all the trees and such, you can really cheat to make it look quite large.”

17. WHEDON HAD AN INTERESTING NICKNAME FOR GELLAR.

At a cast reunion in 2008, Whedon revealed—to Gellar’s surprise—an odd nickname for her, borne from the fact that she dealt with so much pain on screen. “David [Greenwalt] and I used to crow, when we realized what Sarah could do,” he said. “We used to call her Jimmy Stewart, because he was the greatest American in pain in the history of film.” Gellar laughed and said “I never knew that!”

18. AT LEAST TWO ACTORS PLAYED MORE THAN ONE VILLAIN.

Brian Thompson, who played vampire Luke in the first two episodes, returned in the second season to play The Judge. “Quite frankly, we were in a hurry,” Whedon said. “We already had his face cast and we knew he could put makeup on and give us a good performance.” Camden Toy, meanwhile, played a number of villains, including one of the Gentlemen in “Hush” (season four), a skin-eating demon called Gnarl in “Same Time, Same Place” (season seven), and Ubervamp Turok-Han (throughout season seven).

19. THE WRITERS HAD THEIR OWN TERM FOR PLOT-MOVING DEVICES.

It was coined by writer David Greenwalt. “A lot of this stuff is based on myth and horror movies, and a lot of it made up for our convenience,” Whedon says. “At one point, when we were trying to figure out exactly what Buffy would be trying to do [in the first episode], Greenwalt just shouted out ‘For God’s sake, don’t touch the phlebotnum in Jar C!’ We have no idea to this day what it was supposed to mean, but it became our word for the vague mystical thing—such as the master’s cork in the bottle theory—so phlebotnum is our constant on the show.”

20. WHEDON WROTE THE LARGELY DIALOGUE-FREE EPISODE “HUSH” TO CHALLENGE HIMSELF.

Season four’s tenth episode, “Hush,” features creepy villains called The Gentlemen, who come to Sunnydale and steal the residents’ voices … so that no one can scream when the monsters cut out their hearts. There are only 17 minutes of spoken dialogue in the 44 minute episode. Whedon wanted to do a largely silent episode because he felt like he was phoning it in. “I had fallen into the ‘people a-yakkin, I can sort of do this without really thinking about it’ style of directing, and I wanted to curtail that in myself,” he said. “On a practical level, the idea of doing an episode where everybody loses their voice presented itself as a great big challenge because I knew that I would literally have to tell the story only visually, and that would mean that I couldn’t fall back on tricks. I wanted to do something harder.” Though Whedon was terrified that he wouldn’t be able to pull off the episode, it was well received by critics, and is a favorite of fans and the series’ stars alike.

21. THE GENTLEMEN WERE INSPIRED BY A DREAM.

A version of Buffy’s creepiest villains first appeared in a dream of Whedon’s; they floated toward him while he was in bed. “What I was going for was very specifically a very Victorian kind of feel, because that to me is very creepy and fairytale-like,” Whedon said. He created a drawing, which he delivered to makeup supervisor Todd McIntosh and John Vulich at Optic Nerve, the special effects house that created the prosthetics for the show. “I was drawing on everything that had ever frightened me, including the fellow from my dream, Nosferatu, pinhead, Mr. Burns—anything that gave that creepy feel,” Whedon said. “We get into a lot of reptilian monsters and things that look kind of like aliens, and what I wanted from these guys was, very specifically, fairy tales. I wanted guys who would remind people of what would they were scared of when they were children.”

Whedon’s ultimate hope was that kids of a certain generation would be as traumatized by the Gentlemen as he was by the Zuni Doll from Trilogy of Terror. The team cast mimes and actors who had done creature work—like Doug Jones—to play the Gentlemen.

22. THE HARDEST CHARACTER FOR WHEDON TO KILL OFF WAS BUFFY’S MOM.

One of Buffy‘s most critically acclaimed episodes is season five’s “The Body,” in which the slayer’s mom, played by Kristine Sutherland, dies of natural causes. Whedon said in a 2012 Reddit AMA that Joyce was the toughest character for him to kill. He did the episode, he said in DVD commentary, because “I wanted to show not the meaning or catharsis or the beauty of life or any of the things that are often associated with loss, or even extreme grief, which we do get in the episode. But what I did want to capture was the extreme physicality, the almost boredom of the very first few hours. I wanted to be very specific about what it felt like the moment you discover you’ve lost someone. And so what appears to many people as a formal exercise—no music, scenes that take up almost the entire act, if not the entire act, without end—is all done for a very specific purpose, which is to put you in that moment of dumbfounded shock, that airlessness of losing somebody.”

The moments after Buffy discovers her mother dead on the couch were done in a single take, which Whedon had Gellar perform seven times (the actress has called the episode one of her favorites). “The cameraman had the camera on his shoulder the whole time and was running around,” Whedon said. “It wasn’t a steadicam—he had no harness because I wanted that urgency of handheld, that you’re in the moment of it. It’s an extraordinary piece of acting from Sarah … to go from the extremity of first finding her, the helplessness of not knowing what to do. All the things that Sarah had to go through in this, she had to go through many, many times. And every take was extraordinary.”

23. ONE SHOT IN “THE BODY” WAS INSPIRED BY DIRECTOR PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON.

One shot in “The Body” follows the coroner after he examines Joyce’s body out to where Buffy waits with her friends in another single take. “I am a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan,” Whedon said, “and I had been watching Magnolia excessively before I shot this. So these endless tracking shots probably owe something to that. What can I say, I’m a hack. But what I was really trying to get at here was, again, the reality of the space. I wanted to see Joyce very clearly, and then I wanted to walk all the way over to where Buffy was, where her loved ones were, so that you understood she was down the hall, she was really there. We weren’t on a different set.” Whedon gave kudos to production designer Carey Meyer for building sets that would let him get those long takes.

24. GELLAR KNEW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IN SEASON FIVE WELL IN ADVANCE.

Several moments in the final episode of season three foreshadowed two major events in season five: Namely, that Buffy would get a sister (Dawn, played by Michelle Trachtenberg) and that the slayer would die at the end of season five. “I’ve actually known the [plot of the] entire last season for about three years,” she told the BBC. “There was a dream sequence that Buffy had with Faith. Faith had a riddle, and it was something like ‘Little Miss Muffet, sitting on her tuffet,’ counting down from whatever the numbers were, and I went to Joss to ask what it meant. That’s when he explained to me that I was going to have a sister, that Dawn, the character of Dawn, would be coming on the show. I think that’s exactly when I became aware also of what the future plans were.”

Why manufacture a sister out of thin air? “Part of the mission statement was, let’s have a really important, intense emotional relationship for Buffy that is not a boyfriend,” he told Salon. “Because let’s not have her be defined by her boyfriend every time out of the bat. So, Season 5, she’s as intense as she was in Season 2 with Angelus, but it’s about her sister. To me that was really beautiful.”

25. SEASON SIX WAS THE TOUGHEST FOR GELLAR.

After the fifth season, Buffy moved from the WB to UPN and resurrected its heroine for the sixth season—which was darker in tone (and more controversial) than any season before it. “It was definitely tough for me,” Gellar said at a Paley Center event in 2008. “It’s so hard to separate myself from her, so it was tough for me to see these situations and say ‘But Buffy wouldn’t do this.’ … I know Joss and Marti both had to talk me off a ledge a couple of times because it just felt so far removed from me at the time, and maybe that was the point. Maybe I was struggling the same way she was struggling to find out who she was. It just felt so foreign to me. … We love her, and I think it was hard for all of us to watch her suffer. … It was a tough time. And I think that’s what came through in the end, and that was great. When Buffy herself resurfaced, we sort of found our voice again.”

26. WRITER/PRODUCER MARTI NOXON HAS A CAMEO.

She’s the lady with the parking ticket in “Once More, With Feeling.”

27. GELLAR CALLED THE MUSICAL EPISODE “DAUNTING.”

“I’m a perfectionist, I come from a long line of lots of preparation, and certainly that was not the case with this,” she said. “If I had my druthers, we would have gotten it about two years ago and been in classes for a year and a half, maybe six weeks of rehearsals? Instead of four days.” At a Paley Center event in 2008, Gellar admitted to “begging” to be let out of it. “I begged for Buffy the rat,” she said. “I kept thinking, ‘Bring the rat back.’”

28. STONE TEMPLE PILOTS’ LEAD SINGER WAS A FAN.

Scott Weiland reportedly became a fan while watching the show in prison. Gellar, who later appeared in the band’s music video for “Sour Girl,” had a theory about why the show was so popular among prison inmates: “Hot chicks doing battle. It’s like acceptable porn.”

29. GELLAR KNEW THE SHOW WAS OVER BEFORE THE REST OF THE CAST.

In the March 7, 2003 Entertainment Weekly cover story, Gellar announced that Buffy was coming to an end after seven seasons. “I love this job, I love the fans,” she said. “I love telling the stories we tell. This isn’t about leaving for a career in movies, or in theater—it’s more of a personal decision. I need a rest. Teachers get sabbaticals. Actors don’t.” The rest of the cast found out the day the story hit stands. “I was devastated,” Hannigan said in 2013. “I was just very shocked.”

30. BUFFY’S ADVENTURES CONTINUE IN COMIC BOOKS.

A number of writers who worked on the TV show have also worked on the comics. Even James Marsters, who played vampire Spike on the show, wrote a comic about his character. “I was at the San Diego Comic Con and I was describing an idea that had been kicking around my head for a long time to [artist] George Jeanty, who draws a lot of the Buffy comic books,” Marsters told io9. “And he thought that it was a fabulous idea and that I should definitely get in touch with [Dark Horse editor] Scott Allie. He made the phone call and then I pitched it to Scott over the phone and Scott liked it a lot. It’s a story that was going to try to be made into a Spike movie years and years ago.”

31. THERE WAS TALK OF AN ANIMATED SERIES.

Whedon and the show’s other writers produced seven scripts for an animated Buffy series, which would have taken place during the show’s first three seasons and been voiced by the cast. Sadly, no one wanted the show. “They were really fun to write,” Whedon said. “We could not sell the show. We could not sell an animated Buffy, which I still find incomprehensible.”

32. THE SHOW SPAWNED ACADEMIC COURSES…

A number of colleges and universities offer courses on the show; they’re called “Buffy Studies.” People have written books and held conferences dedicated to discussing the themes of the show and presenting papers on it. According to the Los Angeles Times, attendees at a 2004 Buffy conference “were presenting 190 papers on topics ranging from ‘slayer slang’ to ‘postmodern reflections on the culture of consumption’ to ‘Buffy and the new American Buddhism.’ There was even a self-conscious talk by David Lavery, an English professor at Middle Tennessee State University, on Buffy studies ‘as an academic cult.'”

An informal study conducted by Slate in 2012 showed that, when it comes to pop culture in academia, Buffy is number one: “More than twice as many papers, essays, and books have been devoted to the vampire drama than any of our other choices—so many that we stopped counting when we hit 200.”

33. … AND A BOOK OF SLANG.

Publisher’s Weekly called Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon “a strange marriage of a fan guide and a linguistics textbook.” Said The Kansas City Star: “If you’re curious about the word ‘ubersuck,’ or just want to remember which episode you first heard it in, this is the place to look. As Buffy would say, it is not uncool.”

BONUS: RARE BEHIND-THE-SCENES FOOTAGE

During the second season, Pruitt filmed behind-the-scenes footage of the cast goofing off and getting into makeup, the stunt crew at work, and some of the show’s most iconic sequences. You can watch it above.

Additional sources: DVD commentary; The Watcher’s Guide.

All images courtesy of Getty Images unless otherwise noted.

This piece originally ran in 2014.

#33 #Buffy #facts #Fun #Slayer #Vampire #Facts

2 notes · View notes

jeremystrele · 4 years ago

Text

A Day In The Life Of Rae Johnston, Trailblazing TV Journalist And Organisation Super-Woman!

A Day In The Life

Sasha Gattermayr

SBS and NITV’s first science and tech editor, Rae Johnston. Photo – Alisha Gore.

‘I used to be a terrible morning person, but now I love it. It’s so peaceful,’ says Rae. Photo – Alisha Gore.

Rae has been working from home recently, and spends the first hour of the day clearing her inbox. At 9am the NITV team has an editorial meeting where everyone pitches their stories for the next 24 hours. Photo – Alisha Gore.

Once she’s gone on air or pre-recorded from the TV studio, Rae heads into the voice-over or radio booth to record a podcast episode or promo voice-overs. Photo – Alisha Gore.

Rae has just finished Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, an acclaimed memoir about the author’s experiences as a woman working in a tech startup in Silicon Valley. Photo – Alisha Gore.

Rae Johnston is an incessantly curious person. She has a system-minded brain and a constant thirst for knowledge, the perfect combo for a groundbreaking journalist at the top of her game. She is also a lifelong gamer and self-confessed geek, two passions that primed her for success in her first TV gig – a role as a video game TV presenter. This was the start of her windy, non-traditional route to journalism, one that involved no formal study and a LOT of on-the-spot learning.

‘I went through so much hate and harassment online during my early career, as one of the few female video game journalists in the country (and the world) that I’m pretty much indestructible at this point,’ she says. ‘There is very little about my own life that I keep private – I believe that by sharing the ups and downs in my life it helps break down the idea you have to be “perfect” on social media.’

Now, she’s at NITV and SBS, as the network’s first Science and Technology editor, a role which sees her producing content for television, podcasts and digital channels, as well as hosting tech and science-related panels and events around the country.

‘I love creating processes and efficient ways of working,’ says Rae, identifying herself as a ‘routine person’. ‘That’s always the biggest challenge of helping to create a new role – figuring out how it will work within the existing business – but it’s also my favourite part. Present me a problem, I’ll find five solutions and categorise them by effectiveness, resources required, and time needed to implement them.’

She’s not kidding. The big reveal during our interview (which is a surprise to no one once you’ve seen Rae’s credentials) is that she’s a fastidiously organised person. Between uninstalling social media desktop apps, scheduling her workdays down to 30-minute increments, and some pretty serious spreadsheets I would love to get my hands on for my own life admin purposes, Rae has some of the most impressive productivity hacks going around.

But when it comes down to it, for Rae everything rests on the four ‘wells’: well-rested, well-fed, well-caffeinated and well-organised. I’m obsessed with that mantra.

FIRST THING

I set my alarm for 5am every weekday. On Saturdays I let myself wake up naturally, but it’s usually no later than 7am whether I like it or not. On Sundays, I’m up early again to get ready for a hike.

On weekdays, the first thing I do is throw on my activewear and head to the gym. I like to do classes, whatever is happening, to mix it up. It’s usually a combination of yoga, boxing, and reformer pilates. On Saturdays, I grab a coffee with my husband and son and take our dog to the park. On Sundays I pack my hiking backpack with a thermos of tea and head off to a National Park for the day.

I used to be a terrible morning person, but now I love it. It’s so peaceful.

MORNING

Most days I work from home all day. If I’m hosting an event, or have a filming day in the studio I’ll drive. I bought a car for the first time this year, after 20 years of receiving not-worth-trading-in-hand-me-downs from family. I love driving.

I get back from the gym about 7am. I’ll pop my headphones in and catch up on news podcasts while I do some housework and have a coffee, then at 8am my workday begins.

I like to spend the first hour of the day clearing my inbox, then at 9am the NITV team has an editorial meeting where we all pitch our stories for the day. I could be writing an article for online, producing a TV news segment, scripting an explainer for our current affairs program, or preparing for a podcast episode. Working across all platforms means I have so much flexibility with where stories get to go.

For the rest of the morning, I’m usually making TV and radio appearances as well as chasing and conducting interviews on Zoom for my upcoming stories. It’s my peak research time.

I’ve been getting better at having breakfast every day. Working from home means I can cook something decent to eat while I’m doing my research.

LUNCHTIME

I break for lunch at 12pm every day, and try to eat in the sun as well. I’m following the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet at the moment – it makes me feel better, and gives me more energy.

AFTERNOON

If it’s a studio day, I’ll drive to the SBS/NITV studios after lunch. There I’ll usually head straight into hair and makeup, where I edit my scripts from my phone.

Once I’ve gone on air or pre-recorded from the TV studio, I’ll head into the voice-over or radio booth to record a podcast episode or promo voice-overs.

Then I like to clear my inbox again. Some days, I can get through all my emails.

My final task of the workday is to sort out my schedule for the following day. My life basically looks like a game of Tetris in a Google Calendar.

I usually have a big afternoon slump after recording – being on-air fills me with so much adrenaline, once it leaves my body I just want to nap. I usually have a piece of fruit and a cup of tea to give me a boost at around 4pm.

EVENING

I officially finish at 6pm, but sometimes I have radio or TV appearances in the evening. I find it hard to get any writing work done once the sun sets. I’m great in daylight hours, but as soon as it gets dark, my brain turns to mush.

Myself, my husband and my son take turns to cook – it’s great. If I’m cooking, I’m usually roasting a chicken or making a big pot of soup. My son is the burger specialist, and my husband loves to smoke meat, it’s amazing.

I love to knit while we watch a movie at nighttime. My nan taught me to knit when I was little, and I recently picked it back up again. It’s something to do with my hands that isn’t mindlessly scrolling through Instagram.

I do one of two things to switch off – I hike, and I play video games. Both force me to focus on one thing, don’t allow me to multitask, and show me new and wonderful places with friends and family.

LAST THING

I’m usually in bed by 9:30pm. I’ll start to wind down at 8:30pm with a hot shower, my skincare routine, some comfy PJs, a herbal tea and a book. I’ve started journaling recently, too.

I have clinical depression, and getting enough sleep every night helps me manage it. If I have a bad night, it can throw me off for a week. Sleep is very important to me, and I need a lot of it.

‘If it’s a studio day, I’ll drive to the SBS/NITV studios after lunch. There I’ll usually head straight into hair and makeup, where I edit my scripts from my phone,’ Rae explains. Photo – Alisha Gore.

Flooded with so much adrenaline after being on air, Rae usually experiences a classic 4pm slump. She usualy has a piece of fruit and a cup of tea to keep her going. Photo supplied courtesy of SBS.

Rae officially finishes at 6pm, but sometimes she slots in radio or TV appearances in the evening. Photo supplied courtesy of SBS.

Right now I’m listening to, watching, and reading…

I can never listen to, watch or read just one thing at a time.

So right now I’m listening to a few podcasts: Curtain by Amy McQuire and Martin Hodgson, the Wall Street Journal Tech Briefing and Shameless are my current regulars.

While in isolation I’ve been re-watching Parks and Recreation – I needed something comforting. I’ve also been watching Doom Patrol, an incredible comic series adaptation with Brendan Fraser.

I just finished reading Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir of her experiences in the early days of Silicon Valley. I’m currently reading Growing Up Aboriginal In Australia, a collection of stories written by some of my NITV colleagues and edited by fellow Wiradjuri woman Anita Heiss. It really highlights the diversity of experience we have.

I get my best work done when…

I’m well-rested, well-fed, well-caffeinated and well-organised.

My productivity tool/tip is…

I’d be lost without my calendars. I have a year-to-a-view spreadsheet that I use to block out big event hosting days, and I use the weekly view on my digital calendar to schedule my workdays in 30-minute increments. It sounds like a lot, but it works for me, and keeps me on track.

I’ve uninstalled Twitter and Facebook from my phone, and only access them on desktop during work hours. I also set limits on Instagram so I don’t waste time scrolling.

A philosophy I live and work by is…

It used to be “never hope harder than you work”, and then I experienced burnout. Now it’s more along the lines of “do what you can, with what you have, where you are”. Everyone is “winging” it. Your best is always good enough.

Something I’ve learned the hard way is…

The importance of scheduling in down-time as well as work. I’m still learning where my limits are, and sometimes overextend myself, but I’m getting better.

Keep up with Rae’s fast-paced life on Instagram!

0 notes