As part of the 25 Days of Sine Fine Films extravaganza leading up the 25th Anniversary I have decided to write a series of posts celebrating the 25 actors who have been the most dedicated by participating in the most productions.
Actor of the Day: Brittany Ann Whalen
Brittany joined the company in the Spring of 2001 when she took on the role of Eleanor Dare in The Curse. She has participated in 17 productions as cast and/or crew.
I met Brittany when she joined SPC-TV - the student programing channel at Southern University at Carbondale - in the fall of 2000 but I didn't really get to know her until the Spring of 2001. When I was desperately searching for someone to play Zandra in The Curse I asked her, but she declined the role because it would require too much time. She began to hang around more and more as the semester went on and admitted later that should probably should have accepted the role since she was spending so much time at the station anyway.
By the late Spring of 2001 I was able to convince her to take on the role of Eleanor Dare in Episode 6 of The Curse. It was a last minute thing because I - of course - had run out of people to kidnap "cast" to play the various parts in the show. She graciously agreed - on the same day she was needed - so I threw a costume on her and whisked her off to the set at Giant City State Park where they were filming. "They" being the other actors and the guy who was directing that episode. I was trying to let other people have experience directing without needing to do all the producing as well, but that's another story.
The point is that since I didn't have to direct I got to hang out with the actors and got to know Brittany more. She did a good job playing the terribly one-dimensional ghosty Eleanor and by the end of the shoot I was determined to cast her as a lead in the next TV show I made. By this point I knew that The Curse was doomed, mostly due to my insanity, and decided to write a whole new TV show about time-travel that would star Brittany as one of the leading characters. That show was - of course - T.O.A.S.T.T. It was bad, so I dropped it and wrote The Gift Bearer instead which was 100 times better than T.O.A.S.T.T would have been.
I wrote The Gift Bearer with Brittany in mind as the one playing Peri, and luckily she was willing to take the role when I asked her about it because I really can't imagine anyone else playing that part. Brittany was fantastic as Peri - dramatic as needed with perfect comic timing for the funnier moments. Both on and off the set she was hilarious and just an overall joy to work with.
Peri's a ditzy, wanna-be party girl who would rather eat bubblegum ice cream then read a book and acts proud but actually has low self-esteem. Although Brittany does have her ditzy side (don't we all) she isn't that much like Peri in real life. Although her acting was so natural you could easily believe that's how she really is. When she had ditzy points in real life she would say she was having a "Peri moment". That caught on and the rest of cast started using that phrase as well whenever they were acting ditzy.
Brittany brought so much to the character that she helped shape her into a very solid, multi-dimensional character that was spunky as well as ditzy, vulnerable as well as confident, and beautifully acts the slow transition that Peri takes from childish to mature. Peri didn't have as much to do in second season, which I do regret, but that didn't stop Brittany from showing up even when she wasn't needed to film and helping out where ever she could.
This was also the first production where she worked behind the camera as well as in front of it. Pretty much everyone rotates as crew members when not on screen - holding the boom mic or the script - but that's pretty much it, so even though they are crew it's not the same as taking on a larger crew role such as cinematography, directing, or editing. Most people don't have any interest in doing more but Brittany did. She volunteered to direct a few scenes that she wasn't in for Episodes 11 and 12 just to get a little experience and try out something new. She went on to direct her own productions later on.
On the last day of filming Season 2 of The Gift Bearer (in the spring of 2002), I learned something completely new about Brittany - she has naturally curly hair. I always thought she had straight hair because I had only ever seen her with straight hair before. If I had seen it (and had forgotten) then I just assumed she would have curled it that day. I didn't know that she actually straightened it with a flat iron hair thingy every day - including every morning before shooting. Apparently it took her 1-2 hours to do it so imagine how long it took her to get ready for an 8am cast/crew call. She must have been so tired during those all day shoots. That's dedication to continuity!
That last day of filming was long and everyone was already exhausted before showing up. Brittany called me and asked if it was okay for her to not straighten her hair and just wear it up so it would be less noticeable. I said sure, not knowing how curly her hair really was and was quite surprised when she showed up. I thought she had gotten a perm or something, but no that's just how it is. I was fine with it being that way since it wouldn't mess with continuity too much for the scenes she was filming that day and even if it did I (like everyone else) was past the point of caring.
In the fall of 2002 I returned to SIUC and SPC-TV and directed several short films for the show Tape & a Stick. Brittany directed and filmed one of the shorts on her own in the spring of 2002, but wasn't in any of the ones I directed until I did the absurd short film Attack of the Cookie people where she played the vivacious tomboy Vicki. Tough, strong, smart, and snarky she is a bad ass who is failing biology and needs extra credit to pass the class.
She and two other students go into a vast forest for their assignment and get lost, running into a group of lost not-so pygmy mimes and another group of lost British exchange students who are secretly part of the Cookie Cult. It's stupid but somehow still funny. Brittany did an excellent job kicking ass and being suspicious of everyone and eventually nearly getting sacrificed. The character was pretty one dimensional but Brittany managed to bring Vicki to life and make her more of a bad ass then just a bitch.
Another one of the Tape & a Stick short films was the sequel to The Adventures of Lucifer Jones called The Return of Lucifer Jones. Brittany played the ditzy villain's sidekick who did all the work eventually took over as the main villain. I wrote the script by hand at two o-clock in the morning on the day we filmed it. I never typed it up and both the script and the tape we filmed the whole thing on disappeared long ago, so the movie can never be finished or viewed. It was pretty terrible so it's not a huge loss, but I will say that Brittany stole the show with her portrayal of...um...I have no idea what the character's name was...the sexy-sidekick-turned-main villain. The R of LJ is truly and literally the most lost of all Lost Productions.
I don't know if it was the way she played the villain in R of LJ that inspired me to write Zoey Zurrell or if I would have created the character anyway but when I wrote the part of Zoey in Dream Chasers I immediately wanted Brittany to play the part. Luckily she agreed. I wrote it with Brittany in mind and she exceeded my expectations in bringing out the complex layers of Zoey's personality.
Zoey is a ghost hunter - she literally hunts and captures ghosts. On the surface she is a sexy, bad ass bitch who doesn't care what anyone thinks about her. She does what she wants when she wants and no one can stop her. Her introduction in Episode 3 emphasizes that but by Episode 4 we start to see the cracks in that facade. She is in love with Namtaru, the God of Nightmares, and in her very twisted relationship with him we see her lose her sense of self. Her fears and flaws are exposed and exploited and we see all layers of her personality emerge. After working with the people she used to hate (the heroes Maria and Marion) she began to see a different side of things.
Eventually she realized how toxic her relationship with Namtaru was and broke away from him. Unfortunately it was too late and she had already sold her soul to him in exchange for magic. He tricked the heroes into the a nightmare that mixed dreams and reality and Maria ended up killing Zoey and her soul is left subservient to her ex-boyfriend. Everything about Dream Chasers is messed up and confusing and it's fun to watch but hard to understand or describe.
It's a character driven show and Zoey is one of my favorite characters of all time. That is largely thanks to how awesome Brittany was in the part. Her acting was a perfect balance of bravado and vulnerability, sassy and sexy but also sensitive and caring. It was a tricky line to walk because the character could have easily come across as nothing but a tacky bitch with the wrong person in the role. Brittany was the right person and did an amazing job. Honestly, I can't picture anyone else playing that part.
We filmed Dream Chasers in the late fall of 2002 shooting 8 episodes in about six weeks. Obviously the filming was fast and furious with lots of long days and late nights. It was exhausting by fun. There was a ton of drama happening off set, but on set everyone had a blast despite a slew of shoots that ended up with the actors in the Survivor's Club. Brittany (willingly) jumped backwards into lake at the end of November and (unwillingly) froze during more than one shoot included the Coldest Day in SFF history. She braved the elements with her co-stars while still keeping her bright and sunny attitude, and shockingly did not get pneumonia! Yay!
Although she did not participate behind the camera in Dream Chasers, she did supply her car as the main mode of transportation (sorry I drove it over that rock and cause serious damage. My bad. Thanks for not suing me!). She also allowed us to use her place as Zoey's apartment which we filmed in quite a bit. I don't think we got fake blood on the floor but we might have. We also included her cat, Luz, in one of the episodes.
Although I swore never to film again after Dream Chasers that didn't last long. To be fair it lasted longer then the other times I've sworn off filming, but that's not saying much. It was over a year before I filmed the next production and I almost got it out of my system, but not quite. I kept thinking about all the unanswered questions in The Curse and Dream Chasers and started playing around with ideas on how to answer them.
I shared these ideas with what I affectionately call the Southern Trio, three of my best friends I met at SIUC and still hang out with whenever I can. Which is usually when I'm filming. Which is why I continue to film. Anyway, the Southern Trio consists of Morgan Thomas, Brittany Ann Whalen, and James McKinley. In talking things over with them I realized that I really did want to film the Curse sequel. Like an alcoholic or a crack addict I couldn't deny the sweet siren's lure of my expensive addiction and decided to film what would eventually become Eidolon.
All three were co-producers on the project and even wrote some scenes for it. I got a lot of help from the Southern Trio with the characters they were going to play.
In order to answer questions about where Zoey ended up after her death, I decided that her soul was reincarnated into Zelda, the daughter of Zandra - the main character from The Curse. Zelda, like Zandra, could also see ghosts and like Zoey was a ghost hunter. Brittany did a huge amount of character work on Zelda. She was already a complex character due to being a reincarnation of another character (but not knowing it), as well as having issues with her mother, but Brittany was able to fill in a lot of background information and come up with events in her childhood. I used a lot the information she created to motivate the character's actions and create better dialogue.
Zelda went through some changes as the series plot changed (many times) but her core character remained the same. She starts out a jaded, arrogant, and rebellious teenager and ends up as a mature adult who has worked through all her numerous issues and settled into a new and better sense of self. Brittany did a beautiful job playing both a spoiled teenager and the more mature version and handled the transitional changes the character goes through perfectly. I am just now realizing it's similar to how Peri changed in the Gift Bearer so Brittany already had experience acting through that kind of character arc. However, Zelda was a much darker and more complex character than Peri.
Before Eidolon, Brittany had dabbled in working the behind the scenes. As stated she directed a few scenes in The Gift Bearer. She also wrote, directed, filmed, and edited her own productions and worked to develop her own comedy skit show that aired on SPC-TV in 2002. Although she had already done more diverse crew work than most actors, she hadn't fully immersed herself behind the camera on an SFF production. That changed during Eidolon.
She directed multiple scenes in several episodes, filming a lot of them in her own town far away from where I lived. She did all the production work for those shoots including casting the actors, finding the locations, scheduling everything, choreographing fight scenes, and finding a camera person to film the scenes she was in. That's a lot of work and she did a fantastic job coordinating all of it.
Each one of the Southern Trio either wrote or co-wrote a few scenes. Brittany wrote a set of scenes that take place in the final episode. She felt that Zelda needed to confront her past - and her mother - more directly in order for the character to truly have closure. So she wrote and directed one of the scenes and I directed the other half (since I had the other actor needed where I lived). I didn't realize how important that scene was until after it was edited. It was a much needed scene and I'm really glad she wrote it.
Of her many MANY contributions to Eidolon both in front of and behind the camera, one of the crew roles she took on that I am most thankful for is editing. She became the co-editor for the whole production and not only directed most of the scenes for Episodes 4 & 5, she also edited them almost completely by herself. This is the first (and I think only) time someone else did the editing with me. There were so many scenes and so much footage that if I had done it all by myself it would have taken a whole other year to finish the production. As it was we finished filming the last big shoot in March and had it completely edited by June. Considering that's 13 episodes and at least 100 tapes of footage - an we both had full time jobs - that's very impressive.
She lived in Chicagoland and I lived in CU so we had to divide and conquer, assigning specific scenes or even whole episodes to one or the other. This also required splitting up tapes which did prove to be a problem when we discovered that footage we needed for the scenes we were editing were on a tape the other one had. In order to finish everything up and put it all together we decided to have an editing marathon at the end of May. I traveled up to her place in Chi-land and we spent five days and nights in a flurry of editing. A lot of the scenes were already edited, we just needed to put the episodes together, add music and sound effects, credits, and whatever else was missing.
We had to film a few scenes with Brittany we had forgotten to film before - such as the demon bowl scenes - and while she was filming I was editing. We tag teamed the editing because there was only the one computer - hers - and although we could edit together (and did for some scenes) it was more efficient to do it separately. We were literally editing around the clock trying to get as much done as we possibly could. I would sleep while she would edit and vice versa. Was I there five days or only three? It might have just been three days. Or maybe four. I can't remember. But we were editing down to the wire of when I had to leave to take the train back to CU.
In the end we had completed ten or eleven of the thirteen episodes and the last two were mostly done, they just needed music and credits and such added. It was a super fun, exhausting but unique experience and I got to spend so much time hanging out with Brittany and sharing our love of editing. I will also remember that weekend fondly and I am still so proud of my student since I taught her how to edit. Brittany is amazing in every way.
Brittany actually ended up being a co-executive producer for Eidolon since she put almost as much money into filming as I did with gas, hotels, food, props, and more. She gave rides to the other actors in the north, picked up some on the way down to CU and was the lead driver when we went all around the state to film. It was an expensive show and without her financial assistance and ability to produce, direct, and edit on her own it might not have been completed. Thank you SO MUCH Brittany for everything you did to make Eidolon happen. I literally could not have done it without you.
We finished Eidolon in the spring of 2005 and it was almost a whole year before we filmed again. In the spring of 2006 I wrote and filmed the 10th anniversary production The Cursed Destiny of Pandora's Gift Box. One of the characters was a combination of Diyara from Pandora's Box and Peri from The Gift Bearer - named Periara. Naturally I chose to cast Brittany in the role and she eagerly agreed to participate. She traveled down to CU for the weekend shoot and provided transportation as per usual.
Being the combination of two sweet, young ingenues -with a dash of the bitchy Zelda - Periara was an easy role for Brittany to play. It was a satire of two characters she had played before after all. She was hilarious and looked like had a lot of fun. Honestly, filming CDPGB was one of the best shoots ever in my opinion and I think everyone had fun with it.
After filming was over we got to hang out at the MacLeod Farm which is always awesome. She returned a few months later for the theatrical world premiere of CDPGB (we actually got to see it in a movie theater) and the 10th Anniversary reunion which was mostly celebrated at the MacLeod Farm. Because the MacLeod Farm is awesome.
The next production she was involved in was Quatrain, which began pre-production in 2007 but wasn't actually filmed until the summer of 2008. Quatrain was the only experimental production that actually worked (unlike Frumpy Gets It and the Villains Workshop), probably because it's the only one that was actually scripted.
Quatrain is made up of four writers, four directors, four main actors, and four different scenes with four different rules/scenarios that resulted in 16 short films. Brittany took on two roles - Director A and Actor 3. She directed Scenes 1A, 2A, 3A, & 4A, and acted in scenes 1D, 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D, 3B, 3C, and 2D. It was a variety of characters with similar or the same dialogue and she did a great job playing all the different roles. There were a lot of laughs on sets and some really fun bloopers too. It was challenging for her to direct the scenes she was acting in but she had done it before and had no trouble doing it again.
Brittany is amazing and is also the most devoted crew member as well as one of the best actors!
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