C300: A Bleeping Actor

Eric Coughlin

Eric Coughlin

Veteran
A one minute short film I made on the struggles of becoming an actor.

A friend and I made this as a mean and lean two person cast and crew. I'm the lead actor, DP, co-director, writer, producer, and editor. He was the co-director, camera op, and co-DP. Audio was a Schoeps CMC641 on a light stand mounted boom pole into a Sound Devices MixPre3. Camera is Arri Amira with Canon 15.5-47 and 30-105 cinema zooms.

 
Really nicely done Eric. Very clever writing, good acting I do say, and looks top notch. Personal taste - could have gone comedy in the last 2-3 seconds which would have made it much more palatable and sharable (especially during national suicide prevention month....)
 
great audition - really... but you're not quite what were looking for in this role. We'll certainy be keeping your details on file and we'll be in contact.

BTW - we could use some of those locations you found if you could give us the details, just not with you in them, you understand.
 
I respect your creative spirit, but that ending is a little insensitive. There has to be a better way to bookend it without making light of something that is sadly very real.

-gl
 
Lotsa sensitive people on here...

I have a really F’d up sense of humor and like the dark stuff. And I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s watching stand-up comedy that people are scared to even acknowledge existed, now.

If you don’t learn to find humor in whatever life may throw at you, your life is going to be very miserable. Which explains a lot about society, now.
 
Well, ya'll must not like Heathers (1987), South Park, or Groundhog Day, which all have comical suicide scenes.




But no, I stand by my ending. It makes perfect sense for the point of the story, which is that acting is a tough career and if you become too obsessed with it (or any career), giving up relationships, putting all your financial cards in that one boat, relying on getting accepted for talents you may or may not have, etc., then you can destroy your life, literally or figuratively. I have many actor friends, so that's heavily what the movie was inspired by. And the suicide is supposed to be funny, tongue-in-cheek, and serious, at the same time, like most of the movie. Comedy-drama. I think some of the actors who watched it related to it, thinking, "Gah, sometimes this career makes me want to kill myself," but in a more frustrated tone than an, "I'm actually going to do it" tone.

I played it in front of an audience of 50 people, many of them actors, and death on film happens a lot with no audience reaction, but there was a big gasp from the audience from the suicide, so to get that level of reaction, I'm thinking, "Job well done." As well as the praise for the film that I got from many actors afterwards. I get that not everyone likes the ending, but I do, and I think it's a much more powerful ending than what those who dislike it would likely come up with. Remember, criticism often is not very useful without the constructive part, so I'd be happy to hear suggestions of actual better endings. I don't think it ending on the last line and then cutting to black would have been as good or powerful of an ending.


NorBro said:
P.S. Were you by any chance inspired by the following piece? (Probably not but just wondering as it reminds me of it.)

Not safe for work - https://vimeo.com/92060696
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Had not seen that before.


NorBro said:
plain and simple.
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That's your opinion. That's great. Please remember it's just that, an opinion.
 
7 more opinions for your consideration, or not:

(1) Sensitive subjects require sensitive execution if they aren't a part of a complicated story or at least a bigger picture. Your short film is more silly than serious (even though it has a captivating serious 10-seconds in it that would have been perfect for a cliffhanger) with an ending that provides nothing but tasteless shock value.

(2) If you're a writer, I'm sure you can think of other ways to end it. Or you're going to have to start learning.

(3) One example: You could have ended it with you having a brief encounter with someone who just might help you with your big break (could even be a love interest). And it could have left a positive message and one of universal hope for people to never give up.

(4) Violence in cartoons is heavily studied, and it's controversial, and its effects on the brain are unclear how it compares to real life violence.

(5) Groundhog Day. The man was suffering and also realizes there are no consequences to his actions (not that it makes it right but if it's a part of the bigger story then it's a part of the story...yours doesn't have one).

(6) Regarding feedback to your film: Do consider some people lie and/or do not share their honest feelings (especially face-to-face).

(7) Highly recommend not showing this to "normal" people as part of your normal work. All but a few will distance themselves from the subject besides Hollywood producers.

___

Unfortunately and very sadly, suicide exists. And it has and will continue to make its way into motion pictures one way or another, but your particular execution in this context is what I don't like about it.

So, yeah - just my opinion and it doesn't matter at all quite frankly.
 
Eric, you don't have to apologize for your creative choices.

NorBro, you don't have to like Eric's creative choices.
 
I don't have anything else to say about it.

I thought he was right about providing the "constructive part" of feedback (or at least attempting to), so that's all I had to add.
 
NorBro said:
(3) One example: You could have ended it with you having a brief encounter with someone who just might help you with your big break (could even be a love interest). And it could have left a positive message and one of universal hope for people to never give up.
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Which is the exact opposite of the message that I was trying to make. I think It’s better to give up at a career that you are not succeeding at rather than to obsessively stick with it and throw away other important things in your life like your relationships or a steady job that you can actually make a living off of. Consider the ending of La La Land, where the two protagonists give up their passionate relationship with one another so they can pursue career success. At the end of the movie, they have achieved career success, Emma Stone seems to be in an okay but not amazing marriage, Ryan Gosling is still single, and I just didn’t like how they chose relationship mediocrity and singleness to pursue their career over their relationships.

So I wanted to make a movie that shows how overly pursuing your career at the expense of other aspects of your life can leave you, as it says in the movie, lonely, suicidal, etc. And unlike in La La Land, a lot of people who give up all these things in life to pursue their career, still do not achieve career success, especially with acting.

So, the suicide shows in both a literal and figurative sense how their excessive ambition and career pursuits destroyed their life. Consider it a cautionary tale, that would not be as impactful if it ended with the person either having a happy ending or just ending sad but still alive.

That’s not to say acting is not worth pursuing, just that balance is important in life. Ideally, a healthy work/life balance can be achieved and one shouldn’t have to completely choose one or the other. There are plenty of famous successful people who still have time for other things like having a family and hobbies.
 
If you would like the message above to be clear then don't end it like that!

It's okay to give up a career/passion, not a life!

(Just makes even less sense to me now that you've explained it more.)

___

In the video someone kills himself after portraying the hardships of pursing an acting career, which includes making multiple jokes (including possibly sexual activity).

Look, I'm not a saint. I don't blink when people get murdered in horror movies. But just saying...your text explanation and the video in its current form do not share the same message, IMO.
 
Run&Gun said:
If you don’t learn to find humor in whatever life may throw at you, your life is going to be very miserable. Which explains a lot about society, now.
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I think you're overestimating how much the ability to find humor in things is a learned and sustainable behavior vs a product of brain wiring/composition + current mental state.

My hometown experienced a suicide epidemic and living through it made me realize just how fundamentally different our brains can be when it comes to processing inputs and how some things simply can't be overcome by sheer will, positive attitude, humor, etc. as I previously believed everything could.

For the record, I'm the same as you are and turn to humor to cope with virtually everything, but while it's fine and easy for us to say "laugh about it", it's just not that easy (or even possible) for everyone else. It's a combination of our brains and our life experiences that allow us to do that. Unreasonable to expect or even advise others to be the same way, imo.
 
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