Oooh that smell ...

This is my "what's that smell?" face, an expression I wear pretty frequently, if the hours of video I've been watching are any guide.

One of my goals for the year was to track down, collect, organize and digitize as many of my commercials and industrials as I could find. 

It's an involved process. Never mind the "getting," which is hard enough. Only occasionally do the producers send you copies, so you usually have to hound them. And for the bank spot I had to pay 30 bucks just to get a copy made.

Then, once I get a hold of them, the real work begins. I'm learning a lot doing it by the seat of my pants. Downloading freeware that turns DVDs into mpegs, then some other freeware that converts those into a language that iMovie can understand so I can then edit them down and cut out the extraneous stuff, then the uploading to Facebook or YouTube, etc.

But even that's not the hardest part. The hardest part is watching them. My only "real" on-camera coaching was a series of one-on-one sessions with a guy who's a former Chicago talent agent and is now living and working in LA. In those few hours with him I learned quite a bit. But a few of these reminded me of a comment he made that I apparently did not take to heart. 

He said I had this habit of making this weird face -- like I just smelled something funny. And now, of course, that's all I see. I've really got to work on this. I wonder how many jobs that expression has lost me? Or dates? Good god!