Punched Up Cameo

Shawn Bruce holds my light meter as I set my flashes

Woke up at 5:30 this morning to make my way out to the burbs to be on set for 7:00am. I was hired to shoot a guy by the name of Shawn Bruce for the show "Punched Up". The show takes random people and punches up their life. For this episode that person was Shawn and to punch him up they decided to make him run for Mayor.

My job was to take pictures to be used for his campaign. Sounded simple and straight forward enough to me, that is until I realized that I would be shot on camera while taking photos. Yes, I would be in front of multiple cameras.


Pat Thornton stands in while we wait for the crew to be ready

Fear started creeping in. I'm no actor. Sure I have lots of friends that are actors and I've seen enough shooting from behind the camera that at least I knew not to look directly at the cameras pointing at me.

As the day progressed the most difficult part of the whole job was lugging all my studio gear over to the school. Four light stands, one studio light, two umbrellas, three flashes, my lenses, extension cord, laptop, and of course my camera. The being in front of all the video taping wasn't too bad at all. First, It's not like I was changing the diaper on a alligator. It was a normal photo shoot. I knew how the equipment worked. It was my stuff after all.

Second, the real actors, in this case Pat and Lauren were the center of attention and did their improving in such a big manner that no one else on the screen could screw up. Yes they were that funny. The director did do a retake because I was shot grinning. It's tough to not laugh, kind of like holding in a sneeze until you hear the director call "Cut!".


Pat hams it up.

The scene was quite short. I have a new level of appreciation for actors now. Standing on and hitting your mark, having the same expression, pose, saying the same dialogue over and over so you could be shot from different angles, it's a lot of think about.

If you get YTV you can see my debut speaking part in the episode "Shaun Bruce for Mayor". I don't know when it airs but you can check out the YTV web site for that.