So the year is 2016, and I remember being told, yet again, that I didn’t have a strong enough reel to get myself more audition opportunities… which made things even more frustrating because I’d made such a focused effort to get better quality head shots as well as take a few (expensive) acting classes.
To be fair, neither one of those things guarantees that you’ll gain more opportunities, but I felt like “not having a reel” was something that’s mostly out of my control and that it didn’t seem fair to deny me a possible opportunity because of that.
Towards the end of the year, I decided that I was tired of being told the obvious and chose to do something about it. I reached out to one of my close friends who does cinematography work and together we made a list of skits that we would try to film once I came back to Florida to visit for the holidays. These were all things that served as inspiration for creating “Pokemon Go” and the other skits that would follow it.
He needed more examples of his shooting style and editing and I needed something that featured me enough to put in a reel.
What made this especially challenging was that we essentially had to shoot 5-6 different skits in one day with limited resources. I decided to do a skit that poked fun at the cultural phenomenon that had been the release of “Pokemon Go” and how, at that time, it didn’t amount to much more than catching Pokemon… you couldn’t trade them or battle them, and as someone who grew up in the era when Pokemon first blew up, the inability to do those things just seemed silly to me.
This particular skit would also serve as the acting debut of my good friend Jorry, who acts opposite of me in this scenario.
-Anthony
