This blog will probably be silent for the next month as I pour all of my writing energy into a novel. I've always considered myself a writer even though I have gone long periods without writing any stories. But even during those periods, I was writing something. Writing a Facebook status is writing something. And I've written two blogs over the past few years, a pro-life one and this one on art modeling.
I started the novel a little over a week ago, and I'm about 4,000 words into it. I've taken the last couple of days off from writing to finish the book I've been reading (Stephen King's 11/22/63 which I highly recommend) and to prepare myself for the big National Novel Writing Month. Technically, I should be starting from scratch on November 1st, but doing the 50,000 words in 30 days challenge was something that just hit me in the last couple of days. So, if I do get 50,000 words by November 30th, my novel will be sitting at around 54,000 words. And to be marketable, it needs to be around 70 to 80 thousand words. And I very much want it to be marketable. Being an author doesn't have to make me rich, but if it would just replace the income from my full time IT job and allow me more time to model, then I would be a very happy camper.
And by the way, the novel will center around two art models who first meet when they model for an art class together. Their relationship develops when they participate in an unconventional and controversial anti-abortion protest. So the novel will be a blending of my two blogs and will deal with such uncontroversial subjects as religion, sex, and politics. It's something that I hope takes on a life of its own. I'd much rather create my characters and let them determine where this thing goes rather than scripting the entire thing. I'm hoping that writing that many words in that short of a time frame sparks that very thing.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Friday, October 11, 2013
Vacation Day
I took a vacation day from my full-time job this past Tuesday. I don't get many since I'm still new. I have five regular vacation days and one floating holiday for 2013, and Tuesday was my next-to-last available day. And how did I spend that day? I managed to get booked for a couple of classes at the University of North Texas. Does it seem odd to take vacation days from one job so that I can go work at another? If it were any other job, I would say yes, but modeling is, to me, not just any other job. I love any opportunity to model that I can get. I'm already looking at a date in November to take and go model again, using that last vacation day.
The classes I did were Drawing II classes, and we did the perspective exercise that I blogged about last spring. This time though (and for the first time in my near 29 year modeling career), I managed to get video of myself modeling.
The casting agency that was doing the casting for Naked and Afraid contacted me about a new show they are doing. I applied for it (without a clear understanding of what I would be doing if I were selected), and my application was advanced to the interview stage. I did a phone interview which I had to video. I then had to upload that video to the production company. As part of that process, they wanted me to submit about thirty photographs of myself in my every day life. They also wanted me to shoot and upload a "B-Roll," video of myself, doing what I do. So I took video of myself sitting at my desk at work, going into the church, and holding a baby in the nursery. I also found a video clip of myself playing vintage base ball that I uploaded with the others. And on Tuesday, I took and uploaded video of myself modeling for a drawing class.
Getting the video wasn't easy. I did several one minute gesture poses for the class that I tried to shoot. But in the resulting video, I was only visible from the shoulders up. I changed the position of my borrowed iPhone (the production company specified iPhone because it would take 1080P high definition video) and went into a 20 minute pose. The result was a fifteen minute video of myself being really still (when the entire B-Roll footage was supposed to have been about five minutes). Of course, I couldn't break the pose to turn the video off, and I wasn't going to ask the teacher or one of the students to disrupt their class time to do it for me. So the video ran until the iPhone ran out of space.
I did upload the entire fifteen minutes to the production company and told them they could edit it down however they wanted. The beginning of the video should be usable since the instructor is in the shot giving instruction to her students as I got into the pose. What I found really interesting was watching the video with the FF button pressed. I could see my respiration and that my facial expression changed a bit as the pose went on. But other than that, I stayed really still. It was a simple standing pose, and there wasn't any swaying or fidgeting.
The classes I did were Drawing II classes, and we did the perspective exercise that I blogged about last spring. This time though (and for the first time in my near 29 year modeling career), I managed to get video of myself modeling.
The casting agency that was doing the casting for Naked and Afraid contacted me about a new show they are doing. I applied for it (without a clear understanding of what I would be doing if I were selected), and my application was advanced to the interview stage. I did a phone interview which I had to video. I then had to upload that video to the production company. As part of that process, they wanted me to submit about thirty photographs of myself in my every day life. They also wanted me to shoot and upload a "B-Roll," video of myself, doing what I do. So I took video of myself sitting at my desk at work, going into the church, and holding a baby in the nursery. I also found a video clip of myself playing vintage base ball that I uploaded with the others. And on Tuesday, I took and uploaded video of myself modeling for a drawing class.
Getting the video wasn't easy. I did several one minute gesture poses for the class that I tried to shoot. But in the resulting video, I was only visible from the shoulders up. I changed the position of my borrowed iPhone (the production company specified iPhone because it would take 1080P high definition video) and went into a 20 minute pose. The result was a fifteen minute video of myself being really still (when the entire B-Roll footage was supposed to have been about five minutes). Of course, I couldn't break the pose to turn the video off, and I wasn't going to ask the teacher or one of the students to disrupt their class time to do it for me. So the video ran until the iPhone ran out of space.
I did upload the entire fifteen minutes to the production company and told them they could edit it down however they wanted. The beginning of the video should be usable since the instructor is in the shot giving instruction to her students as I got into the pose. What I found really interesting was watching the video with the FF button pressed. I could see my respiration and that my facial expression changed a bit as the pose went on. But other than that, I stayed really still. It was a simple standing pose, and there wasn't any swaying or fidgeting.
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