Training Video pt1

One of the most stimulating jobs I have had in the last year or so I have just returned from. Evington Plastics selected me, based on price, to present ‘The Evington Way’, a training video for their new inductees, featuring health and safety, accounting practices and other sundry office procedures.

It is always a joy to help a young director, who was mainly in charge of the stationary acquisition, to get a foot hold in my industry. Young fellow me lad was quite confused at first, didn’t appear to know who I was, or what I was there for. But a word from his employer soon put him and the two guards back on the straight and narrow.

My brief was this; make a training video which inspires and informs, which enlightens and entertains. Obviously my consummate skills (juggling, comedianing and curious talent on a unicycle) would be called into play in a moments notice. The lack of things to juggle with or indeed a unicycle was shocking, but thankfully there were three items on my ‘list of skills’ and I commenced with my ‘routine’ as we call it.

After just three minutes the Director informed me they had a script, and I was furnished with the document and given coffee and a room to myself for my study.

Certainly the script had the rudimentary elements. Man in office. Talking about the hazards in that office which lay unseen. I started to picture this man in my head; I saw him as a frustrated man. A man whose marriage had long since lost its’ sparkle, whose teenage hopes had been crushed by the mundanity of the ‘machine’, whose spirit had withered with the years resulting in him seemingly spending his time talking to a flower pot on top of a filing cabinet for solace.

I started to dissect the script, as one does. That part about the stapler; obviously a metaphor for his relationship with his daughter, who, though errant and wayward, he still cares for, even if she won’t talk to him after that business in Altrincham with the refusal to buy her an iPod. His son, a deep, bookish boy whose introversion maybe hid a dark secret, a secret which would shock and perhaps revile those around him, only revealed when we get to the bit about the hole punch.

His wife, uncaring and scathing, causing him many late hours in the office, whose secret liason with a Vietnamese Sous Chef is reaching for want of a better word a climax. A woman who has long since lost interest in salvaging their relationship, a woman who wants something better or the illusion of it – this was plainly obviously to be as he demonstrated how to adjust a chair for optimum lumbar support.

I worked on this character. My pen flew across my notepad, almost guided by this mans’ spirit… I do find that sometimes, and a part I am playing will literally talk to me… I find myself talking to them and answering back in character sometimes. Which as you can imagine causes a little bit of a stir in Waitrose, as I argue with both the manager and a Nordic God over reduced sausages.

By the time I had finished I had fifty two pages of notes, detailing this mans’ life. His work, his employer, his friends, his colleagues, his family life, his internet browsing history and his car. I had them all pegged, laid out, like the post death revelation so many of us dread. We lay there, deceased, while people say ‘I never thought he was into that’ and all the time our useless corpse wants to reanimate itself just to say ‘No! It must have been mixed up with my stuff in the Launderette’.

And so the process begins. Over fifty pages of notes, a couple of drawings (although one of them was an angry Colonel) and some rudimentary blocking ideas.

Now I was ready. Now I was prepared. I entered what I call my receptive state. This is a state many actors and performers have; just before we go on stage, we put ourselves into a light trance. We clear our minds of everything that is not related to the job in hand and become what we have been asked to become. A Danish Monarch. A frustrated taxi driver. A seven foot talking hot dog. All require the same process. Although one can overdo and start snoring. You can pass that off as researching how the character would sleep. I know Joanna Lumley does.