Shadow Girl

So we are all, I am sure, familiar with this thing called ‘shadowing’. For those of us who survived even a single night at the Hard Rock Café in Illovo (yeah, OK, so I go way back but I swear I don’t look it) traipsing behind a waitress in a similar little white skirt and feeling like a fool, the word invokes nothing but horror. But still they come, youngsters, eager to participate in the glowing world of work, of infinite possibility, ready to observe a process completely foreign to them for many hours during which time people are too busy to tell them what the hell is going on. (Don’t be ridiculous, of course I knew what was going on at the HRC, I am talking about shooting a TV series here, it is Very Different.)

She arrived, a straight A student from some Bryanston school, blushing, smoke-free peach-skin with a gentle whisper that was difficult to hear over the drone of the city outside. The previous one puffed it up happily with the cast and the crew outside as soon as her parents hit the road, but then she was about to fail standard nine (or, I think they called it ‘not get into matric’) at the Waldorf School. Which, it just occurred to me, is also in Bryanston.

Hmmm.

Anyway.

The Girl arrived later than her requested 9am because her mother did not want to drive into The City and dropped her at HQ in Auckland Park instead. We had to fetch her, which we hate.

I sent e-mail to Cherry saying does the SABC know she is sending me all these white chicks to set, and do the white chicks know that they are more likely to get pregnant by a yeti than a job in production by the time they need to start to earn a living, or to get out of their parents house for their own sanity, or something. It’s almost as absurd as my mother dreaming she saw me sitting on HF Verwoerd’s knee, and deducting that her infant girl is sure to be president some day. Cherry had nothing funny to say about that.

But enough about me. So here she was in the production office, self-conscious and timid, and everybody immediately struck a pose indicating that they had no idea what to do with her. I took the lead, as I am expected to do, and suggested 1) we give her the scripts for the episodes we are shooting today and let her read them 2) Robert then explains the schedule to her, and how we break down the script to shoot it, and 3) we send her down to the set where she can hang with continuity, next to the director, so that she can see how it is actually being done. I felt very much in charge, which of course I am.

Seconds later she had no scripts and Robert and Ian were arguing about whose pen Robert was using. Ian said it was his. I inspire such prompt, precise action in my crew, I swear. Lesson number one, I said to The Girl, don’t leave your stationery lying around. She laughed. I don’t think she genuinely thought it was funny. Soon after that Robert was explaining the ‘sides’. I shuddered to imagine what he was telling her. What the hell, either she was going to get it or she was not. But she was going to be all right for now.