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Another half day on the “You Don’t Have To Be a Superhero” project, with some to-camera interviews for my character. Though there were a few notes written for this it was pretty much all ad-libbed, which is an enjoyable way to work, as long as you can keep on talking. Of course not all of it is going to be used (there must have been well over an hour of actual footage), which gives you some leeway, but I was still surprised about the amount of decent stuff I managed to come up with. I suppose after years of blogging and podcasting (and creating stand up shows largely on stage) that my brain is quite used to spewing out stuff. And most of the spew turns out to be sweetcorn. Which with a little wash down is completely edible (as long as you don’t tell people where it came from).
I am not quite sure how it works, as with most of the creative process. It’s important to be in character enough to allow that to give you a good steer, but often a question came in and I had no idea how I was going to answer, only to hear myself answering it. I suppose that’s just how conversation works and not many of us stress unduly about keeping a chat going with someone even though we haven’t got a script to work from. Admittedly if you knew you had to be funny at least half the time that might add a bit of pressure.
But I like the way that I am able to surprise myself with this stuff. I was feeling quite weary by the end of it, but still churned out some funny and even philosophical stuff about the symbiotic nature of good and evil.
Why bother writing scripts when you can just get actors to improvise it all for you? I should keep my mouth shut. I might do myself out of some of my other jobs.
Tonight we watched a chunk of Katherine Ryan’s series “How Did You Get So Rich?” Without Ryan being involved I wouldn’t have been interested, but she’s a sharp and humane performer, showing empathy where necessary, not allowing prejudice to get in the way of her presentation, but also ready with a withering and sarcastic putdown, expressed so charmingly that the target often doesn’t realise they’ve been gently burned.
There was a woman who’d made millions by creating a serum from bee venom that is apparently good for people’s skin. I mean who knows if that’s actually true. But the woman claimed to dream all of her products, which wouldn’t make me have much confidence in them and which might explain why she’d market something as surreal and random as bee venom. But that night I seemingly dreamed about carrots for hours on end. Even in my dreams I was thinking, “Does this mean I am supposed to market something with carrots?” I assume it does. But I don’t know if there’s much you can get out of a carrot except carrot batons and carrot juice. And that’s an area of the market already cornered by fat cat carrot magnates. Maybe there’s something that can be done with the carrot pith that’s left over from carrot juice manufacture. Or carrot peelings.
I reckon that’s it. I reckon if men wrap their cocks in carrot peelings for a month that their cocks will double in length (think about it, it works for carrots). But only special carrot peelings work so you still need to buy them from me.
