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Here I am sitting at a laptop computer, in an uninspiring hotel room, drinking black coffee because they didn’t leave any creamer when they cleaned the room this morning. Normally I like hotels, in fact, I LOVE hotels…someone else cleans for you, there’s always cable TV, there’s a desk, a fancy bathroom and magically clean towels appear when you arrive back to the room.

This one…not so much.

Perhaps it is the 65 foot ceiling or the bed that feels like granite or the ground floor location with running diesel trucks clunking away throughout the day. I don’t know exactly how to pinpoint this one, but there’s something not right about it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a shabby place, it’s new and fancy, but there’s something about the feng shui in here that makes me feel uncomfortable and creepy.

Speaking of creepy…Dave and I are shooting a short movie for our friends Mike and Eric. It’s a beautiful script where we play brothers, one who is about to die (Dave) and one who is searching for his place in life (Ryan). We’ve done our first bit of the shoot and it has been just awesome…you realize when you are away from something how much you miss it and how much you really love it. FuddyTV is wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but it is essentially up to us to come up with everything from script, shots, editing and so on. With “Another Place” we simply can focus on acting and Mike has been an amazing director. Very helpful with motivations, directions and great shots. I believe I may have shed a tear, I can’t be quite sure but when Dave and I were shooting one of the scenes my eyes may have been leaking…

Right, creepy…

A house we are shooting in has a story, as all houses do, but this one has an extraordinary tale to tell. I won’t go into too much detail, but I will say the house we shot in was the location of a suicide in one of the bedrooms. At first I was hesitant to go into the room or even look at it, but curiosity got the best of me and we went to look. Unfortunately it wasn’t your average suicide either, it was a fairly dramatic end…the person chose a gun to put an end to a life.

It is amazing to be in such a place where you know someone took their own life. Not only is it eerie and strange, but there’s a hum and sadness that falls over the place…which actually played exactly into some of the scenes we were shooting.

I kept waiting for something to happen, something to reveal itself as the day wore on. I guess I believe in that stuff, that nobody really goes away when they, well, go away, so I was wondering what small sign I would see when we were there. It didn’t take long…

As we were setting up for the first shot, ready to go for the first scene, the camera was set, the lights were in place and Dave and I were on our marks. Mike and Eric were next to the monitor watching and as any director does counts down to action…

3, 2, 1…Action!

Crack! One of the florescent lights cracks, burns out in dramatic fashion and falls off its clamp. There’s a moment of silence, I look to Mike, Eric, Erica and Carl…wondering did that just really happen? I’m not sure if anyone else saw any significance in that, but I sure did and it set the tone for the rest of the day. We were in his house, and he reminded us that he was certainly still there….

Cheers,
Ryan
for FuddyTV

I can never claim that I’ve done the smartest things in life or made the best decisions, in fact, I’m not really sure if any of us can. Mistakes are just a part of being human, but it is the best of us that choose to learn from those mistakes that we’ve experienced. I recently made a dumb decision, based purely on the past and emotion and I kick myself in the butt for doing it. I have always found it fascinating when we look back at those moments when we’ve made the wrong choice and think to ourselves, what the heck was I thinking? When was that ever going to be a good idea?

In my time in Los Angeles I learned so much about life and about what to do when faced with adversity. I actually laugh now when I think about the plethora of incredible situations I was faced with. Bad people, bad times, wrong places…all of that. Yet when I look back all I can do is shrug my shoulders, giggle a little and take heart in the idea that I took the positives and learned. I learned. There are people out there who learned life through university, through family life, by books…I didn’t go that route. I took my bags, walked down that unchartered road and dealt with what crossed my trail. In some respects this was a good decision, in others it was not. I look back and think that maybe living those mistakes isn’t always the best plan, maybe listening to the things that were said was actually the better way to go.

Needless to say I made a mistake recently. I made a bad choice. It wasn’t a life changing choice or a socially unacceptable one, but it was enough to make me feel terrible. Sometimes it is the littlest things that you do, that affect YOU the most, whereas the world around goes by with little more than a blip on a radar screen. For instance I am writing this, taking the time to sit and pour out the things that I meant to say but didn’t. So while the world may not notice a thing, I feel like a good writing is in order. Funny how that works…

We’re all going to make mistakes and bad choices, hopefully we go through life not making too many and avoiding the bad ones. But I will take this bad decision I made and learn from it, as we all should, but sometimes do not. Good people do do stupid things, and from that they will learn, whereas the rest won’t…

I learned something tonight.

Cheers,
Ryan