Tempest7: Blogger

General Casting

Today I had an interesting experience, my first general casting. Actually it wasn't anything special but since it is the first time I've done it, I guess it is special for me. I went back to D8 in TST for my casting. When I got up to the office I noticed they had several chairs set up outside in the hallway before the main door. There were already 3 or 4 girls sitting outside. As I approached the main door I noticed they had setup an additional row of chairs infront of the sofas on the left and on the right of the room. They were pretty much all full. There were obviously more girls than guys in the room. I walked up to the front reception and asked for "Paul" for my general casting. I was given a sheet of paper with my casting instructions, but I noticed a big problem already; the instructions were all in Chinese. One of the girls at reception remembered me from my initial visit and told me it was okay, she would see if she could find someone to help me out. I wandered back into the hallway and took a seat. I was concentrating on trying to decipher the Chinese before me, aside from Chinese name, English name, and Hong Kong and USA there was very little Chinese I could understand. The girls beside me were peaking over and commented on how our sheets looked the same. I figured out later that probably the bottom will be reversed. While I was waiting around I had a good feeling being the best looking guy waiting around. Equally I knew I had the worst Chinese in probably the building. They managed to pull Ruby to help explain my role to me. Basically I will be recorded when I enter the room. I need to state my name in Chinese and in English. I need to tell them how tall I am and how much do I weight. I need to explain my previous line or current work and also about activities and hobbies that I like to do. Followed by a description of my personality and then the script. She spent sometime explaining that there are two characters in the script, "King" and "Jenny", who were previously dating and had made plans to marry but were separated because of work. King is waiting in Hong Kong, he has been preparing for the wedding and has been keeping fit and desperately wants to see Jenny again. When Jenny calls to tell King that she will be returning to Hong Kong, but with her new husband, King is devestated. I was given a bit more time out in the waiting area to consider how I would play my role. There's not much for me to think generally it was dictated how I would express myself the problem is still that I can not read but at least I know what they are roughly suppose to say. There was a cute staff member that was coming in and out talking to the reception that I noticed, she kept me fairly distracted most of the time. When I got in for the actual casting I presented my information (I forgot to tell them about my previous line of work but they didn't seem to mind or care...) and needed some help to start my script. Aside from Paul sitting in the middle with the video camera there was another man and another lady sitting on his left and right side respectively. The man I guess would play the male role with the female actresses and the women was there to play the role of "Jenny" while I played the role of "King". It was short, not very smooth but I didn't feel too bad out of it. Looking back there was plenty of things I should have done, lets hope there's a next time. They took my picture again and I left.

I was already running late for my meeting with Raymond. When I got to SME Education May pulled me aside to speak with her and the other sales force about selling in the Seminar coming up on Monday. May had quickly e-mailed me a powerpoint presentation in the morning and I had glanced through it. We talked about a few concepts, and they pretty much gave me some ideas and left it up to me to come up with something for them. We basically had an outline figured out and I went in to help Raymond finish off his class. After class I went to find the store in Mong Kok where I bought my phone. It looks like it would take a couple of days to fix but at this point in time I need to have a phone to communicate so I told them I would bring it back.

There has been a typhoon 1 warning which for now means it keeps raining. I'm getting sick of the raining here, we need this much rain in Canada for the crops, I just don't need it here in Hong Kong. Surprisingly I think the streets should be cleaner than Seattle or Vancouver because of the amount of rain I see coming down. So far Seattle still wins as the cleanest city I've been to.

posted by Tempest7 @ 11:00