I’m still recovering from yesterday’s film shoot. I don’t have any pictures from it yet, so please enjoy these other ones from a different film shoot last year:
The first time I took a film acting class, I was in my twenties and was told that my facial expressions were “too big for camera“, which was very frustrating, because I never got that note when I did theatre. Obviously.
This made me feel very insecure in regard to film acting. I had read somewhere that actor Telly Savalas said “practice stillness” when working with the camera. I believe that is wonderful advice for the right moment and the right scene and I do want to get better at it. One time an acting teacher told me I should “put tape on my forehead so I could feel how much my face was moving“. As if being an animated person was a bad thing. When I was working on the movie, “Scream” as a stand-in for Neve Campbell, I would watch her through the monitors, and she was very still. I was standing next to the sound board and the engineer said into his walkie to the assistant director, “Tell Neve to speak up, I can barely hear her.” I was shocked that an actress, who was mic’d, still wasn’t loud enough for the sound engineer. It was like she was my complete opposite. I thought, hey maybe I can teach her how to project and she can teach me how to be still.
When I finally returned to theatre years later, my solo performance teacher told me to “get bigger and louder“. I had never gotten that note in all my years and I vowed to never let the film people make me so small again.
In other news, in my ongoing family tree research, of all the Donahoe clan (my last name) I believe my fourth-great-grandfather, James Donahoe, was the first to come to the U.S. from Ireland.
He arrived to America around 1795 and owned “1 Log House” in October 1798:
Oh, how I wish that log house was still standing.
Thursday, March 20, 2025:
Theresa Donahoe 