There have been plenty of times when I have left an audition and thought “I wasn’t feelin’ that performance”. Luckily, this wasn’t one of those times. I spent the whole morning mentally preparing for the audition and every time I went to the restroom I would practice my lines in the mirror - remembering the notes that Lisa had told me. I just needed to make sure that I had personalized both scenes so that they were real to me. Then I needed to trust that I didn’t need to “act” or “show” any emotions. Just “be” in the moment.
I left the office early in order to arrive at the casting office 45min before my scheduled audition time. The casting office was a small little blue bungalow in santa monica. I parked my car up the street from the office and just sat in my car prepping myself for the read. 15min to my scheduled time I walked into the office and sat down in the very small waiting area. There wasn’t anyone else in the waiting room. It was one of those indicators that this was an important audition and that they were being selective in who they were considering for the role. About two minutes went by and the casting director came out and said “David Chiu”? I replied “yes” and she asked my to follow her into the back office. There she had a portable blue screen setup and a very tiny handheld camera mounted on a big tripod. She mentioned something about “the first time” and “bi-coastal”, but honestly I wasn’t paying attention. I was doing my final mental preparation for the read. The casting director looked at me and said “Oh! You look like you’re ready to go! Let me just turn on the camera real quick!” This was a good sign - the fact that the casting director could see that I was already emotionally prepped and ready to go. But I didn’t let her rush me. I said, “give me one more moment” and I just stood there centering myself. Then I moved onto the mark and started the scene. We did the first scene twice. The first time, I did it exactly how Lisa coached me to do it. The casting director said it was really good but to try doing it a little less intense - and to save the intensity for the second scene. The second scene we did twice as well.
I felt really good about my performance. I feel like I demonstrated the intensity they are looking for. Now it’s just a waiting game. I can’t help but to think how cool it would be to work on this movie with Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker….
Published on Wednesday August 22, 2007 .
This Friday I have a audition for a new Jude Law/Forest Whittaker movie currently called Repossession Mambo directed by Miguel Sapochnik, a one-time storyboard artist. I’m trying not to get too excited, but it’s hard for me not to think that this could be the break I’ve been waiting for. I’m reading for the role of:
[RAYMOND PEARL] late 20s - mid 30s. Another of Frank’s top-notch repo men, he is a “psychopath with a Union scalpel.”
What was interesting was that I received not only my sides for the audition, but FTP instructions to download the short movie “The Dreamer” by Miguel Sapochnik. The short movie was awesome and in the same vein of Children of Men or Blade Runner with a similar storyline to “The Island”. I understand why Hollywood came knocking.
So my reading is this Friday and I’m getting private coaching from my fabulous acting coach Lisa Mililo Clarkson who teaches scene study and audition technique at Joanne Baron/DW Brown and is currently the on-set coach for Days of Our Lives. The actual audition will be taped and sent to the director who is currently in Toronto. I’m just hoping to make a good first impression and make it to a second reading.
Published on Wednesday August 22, 2007 · Filed under: Technology .
I recently noticed that I wasn’t receiving any comment email notifications from Movable Type so I decided to dive into the system to figure out what was going wrong. Running mt-check.cgi reported back that sendmail was installed so I thought it might be a permissions issue between the the apache user process and sendmail. I typed in ’sendmail’ at the prompt and received back a message talking about “Exim“. Well, I’m not a Linux guru, but I do know that Sendmail!=Exim. So I turned to google to tell me what the heck Exim is and how do I figure out what’s going wrong. Google pointed me to the exim log file on the system which I watched as I sent test emails from Movable Type. The exim.log showed that it could not resolve the email addresses and was failing. A second thing I noticed was the ton of spam it was successfully blocking. So I went back to google to find out more info. I tried searching on keywords “exim movabletype”, “exim configuration” and couldn’t find anything useful. Then after staring at the exim.conf file for 10min, the lines “domainlist local_domains=” hit me. Google had told me that Exim was used for transferring and relaying local mail. My mail is being hosted at google through google apps. So I did a new google search for “exim google apps“. That search gave up a clue that got me one step further: If you are using a linux server, don’t forget to edit the /etc/remotedomains file to delete your domain. Well after poking around the file system I knew that I didn’t have a “remotedomains” file, but it did sound very similar to my “/etc/virtual/domains” file mentioned in my exim.conf. So I googled “/etc/virtual/domains“. And saw my final clue titled: Disable SMTP to certain local domains? That article did not have the exact answer but gave me enough information for me to solve the problem. To disable SMTP/mail service for specific domains just copy “/etc/virtual/domains” to some other file such as “/etc/virtual/domains_with_smtp”, edit the file and delete all the domains which use google mail, then point exim.conf “domainlist local_domains=” and “domainlist relay_domains=” to use this new file.
Voila! Email notifications now work!
Published on Monday August 20, 2007 · Filed under: Technology .
Over the past couple days I’ve been upgrading my various blogs to Movable Type 4. So far it’s been a pretty bumpy road - especially since I’ve also been migrating from a shared hosting plan over at Dreamhost to a super-fast VPS at Zone.net.
One of the biggest problems I had was with the new commenting system. Everything else seemed to be working fine, but every time I submitted a test comment the server would take a while to respond then give me a 500 error. Several google searches later and still nothing. I had a hunch that my problem had to do with the new captcha implementation in MT4 and the use of ImageMagick, but no documentation suggested that ImageMagick was a required component. Besides, I didn’t have captcha verification turned on. Another hour passed and I decided to go ahead and install ImageMagick…
BINGO! Now comments worked. So the lesson learned is:
ImageMagick is REQUIRED in a MT4 installation even if you don’t use captcha verification.
One of the biggest thing you’ll notice is that MT4 has a completely new look and feel. Personally, I don’t like it. It doesn’t seem to make it any easier to administer the system. In fact, it seems a little harder to navigate around MT4 since all the options are now buried within the new drop down menus. Another notable feature is the implementation of Javascript WYSIWYG text areas which make it easier to format text without having to type out HTML tags. There is also an option to switch between different text formats depending on your needs (coding, word formatting, etc). The MT Template tags have also been expanded to include the ability to set variables and create If/Then/Else logic structures. All of this is pretty helpful but I’ve found it better to create new index templates which output PHP modules which are then called by all the PHP archive pages (and main indexes) to include the content. For example, my Recent Entries sidebar module is actually setup as an index template which outputs a recent_entries_module.php file which is then included into my other pages using PHP:
<?php include (’recent_entries_modules.php’) ?>
The benefit of using this method is that this content is only generated once and written to the file system which saves on MT4 processing time when rebuilding pages. I’ve also found this method beneficial for more static content such as AdSense code, Flickr photo code or YouTube code because I can easily update those modules and have the change reflected across my entire site without having to rebuild the entire site.
There are still many more features in MT4 that I have not yet begun to explore, but so far I’m not all that impressed. BUT I still think Moveable Type is one of the best blogging/publishing platforms available - and I’ve tried the majority of them.
