All sorts of things are coming out, clips are being added to the blogs listed at the bottom, as they come out.
There's an audio play called "The Count of Monte Cristo," based on the 19th century novel by Alexandre Dumas, that's starting streaming May 21 on lots of audio podcast platforms, where I play the evil Mme de Villefort. My episodes won't be out for a while. This was recorded in the fall, director Chloe Wilson.
There's a vertical mini episode series on Short Max called "The Substitute Bride" where I have a role as a witness to an attempted murder. The episodes started streaming May 2, but I don't know if my episodes are out. I believe that this may be an English language remake of a series that first came out in China. Director Xiao Ying
The week of May 6, I participated in the filming of "The Divorced Billionaire Heiress" in NJ. This is another Chinese production. Apparently, this particular vertical series was the most popular one in China. The director was again Xiao Ying. She told me I was the prettiest grandmother in New York City, which was very flattering. There was a second woman there, whose full name I didn't get, who was introduced as one of the top directors in China.
It was interesting working in vertical format. They were able to use five or six cameras at once, so there was only one or two takes for every episode. With a wide screen, they have to do these views as separate takes, because the views overlap the camera positions. In the vertical format, there is no periphery. That made filming much faster.
It seemed to me that older women have higher status in China than in the USA. In the USA, the roles are commonly "older woman with Alzheimer's" or "older woman with cancer," where the primary feature of the character is that she is sick. Here, in "The Substitute Bride," I played an important witness to a crime; and, in "The Divorced Billionaire Heiress," I played the head of a large, family business. I appreciated getting higher status roles.
Another difference I noticed was that the director was constantly urging me to act in the way that I've learned to call "big" in the acting world. "Big" means really emphasizing the emotional response. Most video directors that I've dealt with here in the USA don't like "big." They will often tell me that I'm too "theatrical." They want subtler portrayals. It's been a learning process trying to suppress those "big" responses, but this director liked them, which was more fun for me.
My sister-in-law found a clip from "Mystic Tycoon" that I filmed this year, where I play the evil grandmother, Lisa. It turns out, which I didn't realize at the time, that this production was actually a video trailer for an audio podcast series. I embedded the Facebook video into a blog, so you can watch it even if you don't have a Facebook account. I haven't recorded any audio for this series, so I guess, if the evil Lisa appears in the audio, someone else has recorded it.
Links to separate blogs about these gigs (in reverse chronological order of the gigs.) Some of these blogs include embedded clips or links to clips
