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.