Hunting a Forest Deity in a Music Video

In September I got to work on a music video with Lawton Meyer. He is a young film maker I first met while working crew on the 48-Hour Film Project competition. He got a project making a video for a band in Brooklyn and he called me up to see if I'd be interested. He's a great guy and I love filming projects, so of course I said yes. In it, I play a futuristic bounty hunter who is trying to gun down an ethereal forest deity (my character drops dead before he gets a chance to shoot, so don't worry: the bad guy does not win).

Lawton, myself, and Chris, our cameraman, met on a Saturday morning at a forested park in Orange County, not too far from the Jersey border. The young actress playing the deity would not be on set until the afternoon, so we had plenty of time to shoot my scenes. I dressed up in this field hockey gear and carried around a plastic nerf gun and generally looked like a guy from some dystopian future looking to shoot things. Lawton had me walk around the woods looking evil and looking like I'm searching for something to kill. While we did this, hikers and dog walkers would pass by on the trails and wave at us. We waved back. Eventually, the actress showed up, we shot a quick scene of me taking aim at her and then dropping dead under the glare of her magical gaze, and that was my day. I packed up and went home while they continued to shoot scenes of her looking fairy-like and magical into the afternoon. Overall, a fun day.

One thing i learned is I apparently have a very menacing gaze, which is ironic given my not-so-menacing personality. Apparently when I aimed the nerf gun at the deity, my face was "apocolyptic," according to Chris. And tramping around the woods faux hunting, I look scary and intense. The thing is, throughout all this filming and intensity, I wasn't doing anything with my face. My face was just the same old default state my face is always in. I wasn't trying to look intense and evil. So I guess I have resting bitch face for men?

Maybe that is my niche in the acting business: intense, psychopathic, impassive people. It might be, because I don't have to work at it to look that way. I just have to stand there and present my face the way it always is. It's less work. Do less work and get paid for it: that's not a bad career arch.

Oh, here are some images. Enjoy.