The World's Tiniest Share in a BAFTA!

On Sunday night the BAFTA TV awards were announced. For my non-Brit friends BAFTA stands for British Academy Film and Television Awards. They do one ceremony for cinematic releases and one for telly.

So here's the story.
Almost exactly a year ago I joined Gadbury casting as a supporting artiste (ie. an "extra") and they sent me to Trafford in Manchester for a couple of days to play a factory worker in a film called Boy A. It was my first time and very weird but fun, in an odd kind of way. I had to do really exciting things like walk past a window, or pretend to count bottles in a warehouse.

It turned out that Boy A was taken from a fictional book by Jonathan Trigell, based loosely on the famous Jamie Bulger case; the Boy A in question being one of the young murderers trying to build a new life and identity after his release from prison. For those who don't know, Jamie Bulger was a little Liverpool boy of about 2 years old who, in 1993, was taken quietly away from his mother by two older boys (both 10) in a shopping centre, who then tortured and killed him.
(On a personal note, it actually made me feel ill to write that last sentence. Jamie was born in the same year as my eldest son - in other words, I was taking a two-year old boy out shopping with me at the same time.)

The main part was played brilliantly by a young actor called Andrew Garfield, and bravely too. He would have been 10 himself in 1993, so he's exactly the right age, but would you want to be associated with such a dangerous part?

The film
The film of Boy A came out on Channel 4 (where else?) in November last year. It isn't the sort of thing which would attract me and, frankly, I watched it because I was in it! In many ways I'm glad I did but I also wish I hadn't.
Boy A is bleak, deliberately so. The colours are washed out, the atmosphere is all echo and emptiness and the whole thing does Manchester no favours at all. It was what it set out to be: a hard, gritty, uncompromising drama. From my point of view it was two hours of fucking grim. As you can tell, I didn't really enjoy it much.
As for my part - after all the cuts I appear for about two seconds walking away from camera. I only knew it was me because my beloved and my mother recognized the way I walk.

The award
Amazingly Boy A won a BAFTA. Really, that's not so amazing because it was actually won by Andrew Garfield as Best Actor - he earned it too. He's a really nice lad and a damn good actor.
The odd thing is that because I was involved in it - and despite the fact that I barely appear, have no functional role or input to speak of and didn't actually like the end result - I still feel some kind of weird pride in the award.
Somehow I feel like I've got the world's tiniest share in a BAFTA!
Strange or what?

On a much brighter note, Best Film was won by Mark of Cain which starred my agent, and a proper actor, Matthew (Michael) McNulty. Fantastic!

Love,
Seán

A Band is Born!

This is more a diary entry than one of my usual rants, but what the hell. It's something I'm rather proud of and want to share.

April 12th.

For those who don't know, I'm involved in doing stuff to help restart the Basement Social Centre/Café in Manchester. On Saturday April 12th a group of people involved had decided to join in the days of action for squats and autonomous spaces by creating a family-fun-day-type-thing in a public space. At the meetings various ideas were put forward. I offered a Tai Chi workshop and suggested that I ask some of my lovely musican friends if they'd like to get together for a fundraising busk.

So, some time in March this year I mugged my friends Womble and Brynjar into having a go. I play wooden flute and tin whistle and I'm self-taught and, therefore not especially good. Brynjar plays guitar, self-taught like me, but he hasn't really performed before.

Womble is a different matter altogether. She plays violin, amongst other things, and is classically trained to a high degree. When it comes to understanding music she really knows what she's talking about, which can't be truthfully said of the other two of us.

From my point of view that's fantastic. Not only has she got a better ear than me (not difficult), she's forgotten more than I've managed to learn - and working with a properly trained musician means I can learn a whole lot more.

I think we managed about four rehearsals, in my kitchen, which included choosing tunes and working out how to put them together, chord structures and so-on. All-in-all, maybe 6-8hours of rehearsal time was what we managed.

We even thought of a name - Cacaphonix - for which my number one son created a banner

And then came the day.

We met up at Cathedral Gardens in Manchester on Saturday afternoon. The people running the show (Hi, Nic and Vera. X) were finding food and painting banners. Sara took the munchkins doing stuff, a samba band turned up as well as more people and I did my workshop.

Then it was our turn.

Okay, we played a lot of bum notes (well, I certainly did). Okay, we were slightly out of time on more than one occasion. Okay, we could barely be heard over the sound-system of the No Borders people.

Yet, it was great fun. We set up, we tuned up and we played. In public. For the first time ever. Perhaps I'm an attention-seeking tart (perhaps?!), but I loved it and I wanna do it again!

It is my hope that this officially heralds the birth of Cacaphonix, folk trio extraordinaire!

We even have documentary evidence:

Love and musicianship,

Seán

I'm a Film Star (sort of)!

Believe it or not!
Okay, I'm not really a film star, although I could pretend to be Johnny Depp's slightly chubby brother. I have been in a film, though. It was called Poppy Shakespeare, and was on Channel 4 on Monday night (31st March). It'll probably be on one of the digital channels again fairly soon.
I'll apologise here to my chums outside Britain who won't have the vaguest idea what I'm waffling on about.

Stardom
It's very wierd watching a film you've taken part in. When I watch a film normally I naturally suspend disbelief like any good TV-weaned automaton. The actual filming process doesn't matter to me and I treat the goings-on as if they are reality, albeit in a temporary and limited sense.
When you know the process it's very different. Firstly I was watching the film past the main characters to see myself and my friends who were playing the background parts. Secondly I remembered what happened in the actual filming and how completely different it was from what appeared on screen. Obviously that difference is down to the amazing skills of the crew and director, but it does give one a type of double vision.
I watched Harvey eat a little bit of banana in one scene. The important thing to know is that any scene is shot from several angles, each angle several times over. I timed one scene - 3 minutes (a longish one) - it took half a day to film. The whole scene is, therefore, repeated by the actors over and over and over again. The more people doing or saying something the more camera angles there are; the more camera angles there are the more the scene is repeated. Harvey ate a bite of banana in one scene: in reality he ate at least six bananas, very slowly, over a five-hour period.
Frankly, I feel ill for him.

Bunny
There are other things too. I know that the guy in the bunny costume is really a red-haired Scot, that the cameraman is called Zack and that my trousers were held up with safety pins. I know that all the cigarettes were herbal, but still absolutely vile, and that the director pinched a lollipop from one scene potentially cocking-up the continuity if anyone noticed.
Yet, despite all this insider knowledge I still found it all believable. Not just the film itself, but also during the making of it - it's that double vision thing again.

Acting
I make no claims whatsoever to being a great actor, but I like to think it's something I have a kind of raw talent for. I was cast as an unnamed mental patient in the film, and was told to be nervous and twitchy, subject to shocks; so I was.
In doing so, though, it became a temporary reality. When I heard "Action!" I was Mr Twitch, when I heard "Cut!", I was Seán again. It was less a pretending and more a momentary becoming - double vision again - and it struck me that what I've been doing is very much akin to Shamanism.

Shaman
I like the frog as a symbol of the Shaman. Frogs live in two worlds equally and neither entirely, they are a bridge between them. They need both worlds to survive.
The Shaman does the same thing. S/he ("He" from now on) moves between worlds equally, bringing the qualities of one to the benefit of the other. He has a double vision that sees the reality and necessity of both worlds at the same time.
The Shaman also does something else: he acts. To truly understand the creatures and people around him he becomes them in a temporary way. One of the ways a Shaman will honour his totem creature or animal allies is by dancing them, in other words becoming them temporarily.
I'm sure that many will simply pretend at first, but as I found, pretending with conviction turns into becoming.

Jazz
I'm back to the old Jazz cliché, Fake it 'til you make it again. If I can become a mad person in a temporary and controlled manner, what else could I, or anybody, be and for how long?
Can a human being become exactly that which they choose to be temporarily and then revert to some base state?
Can that be made permanent so that the new state becomes the base state?

I believe in Fake it 'til you make it because I know it works. What I'm finding fascinating is that should the Shaman/Actor be able to change the base state of their being then the base state must, necessarily, be impermanent. In other words, there is no true person except what (and if!) that person chooses for themselves.

Find your true will?

Love,
Seán