small miracle in West Hollywood. I thought to myself, âNo ticket! This is a miracle! This Robotech audition was a disaster but at least I didnât get a parking ticket. Iâm really thankful for that.â It was late afternoon and as I drove home I turned off Sunset Boulevard on to Laurel Canyon toward Studio City, I started thinking about a whole lot of âwoulda shouldaâs couldasâ that I might have done at the audition but now it was too late. I sucked and there was nothing at this point I could do about it. Robotech , whatever it was, was something I wouldnât be a part of.
Several days went by when I received a call from Intersound to show up for a session several days later. It wasnât one of those âcongratulations! You got the part calls.â The person on the phone routinely asked if I was available to work at a certain day and time. Of course I said yes and that was it. It didnât feel like I was offered a job. It rather felt like I was being invited to a party. My Robotech adventure was about to begin.
In a traditional setting, when you are cast in a project you usually are cast to play one role or if the roles are small, you play several roles within a total production. Robotech was different in the sense that (especially for me in the beginning) I never had an idea of what I would be doing until I arrived at the studio. I usually was called for âbits and walla.â When I showed up and looked down at the script, I would find out right there on the spot. That was not the case, of course in the third season, when I knew I was playing Rand. But even within that framework, I never really had an understanding of where my character was going within the storyline and how that storyline would influence my characters relationship with everyone else. One thing I wish we did in those early days was as an ensemble meeting to get a sense of the Robotech series as a whole. There was only one person who knew that, Carl Macek.
Carl Macek, like Da Vinci or Michelangelo always had an extremely clear idea of the total canvass he was working on. The Robotech television series was assembled from three diverse sources including The Super Dimension Fortress Macross , Super Dimenson Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada and only Carl Macek really had a concept of how it would all fit together. As an actor in the show, I never really had a sense of what that picture was. I wish that we could have all gotten together as a group and told the story so that we would all know what are part was in the whole piece. The very nature of the way animation is done, is compartmental. You have individual writers writing scripts and then actors coming in at various points separately to voice only the parts of the script that their character appears in. While it is nobodyâs fault, the problem with this process is you donât have a sense of the whole as would with a painting, a play or film. Each person, works on his or her own part of the mosaic and then it is put together. Letâs not romanticize filmmaking. It too is a compartmentalized process. I canât tell you how many times actors will show up the first day of shooting to learn that they are filming the their characterâs death scene at the end of the film. It would be like shooting Romeo and Juliet beginning with the death scene on the first day of filming. But I guess Iâm really thinking like a theatre person. In the theatre, usually at the first rehearsal, you would meet the entire cast and read the work in its totality aloud. At some point the director would discuss a point of view that they would take in the presentation of the production. If communicated effectively, everyone in the cast would at least have a general idea of the how the director chose to present the work, the storyline and how their character would fit within that structure. It would still leave room for creative interpretation but
Several days went by when I received a call from Intersound to show up for a session several days later. It wasnât one of those âcongratulations! You got the part calls.â The person on the phone routinely asked if I was available to work at a certain day and time. Of course I said yes and that was it. It didnât feel like I was offered a job. It rather felt like I was being invited to a party. My Robotech adventure was about to begin.
In a traditional setting, when you are cast in a project you usually are cast to play one role or if the roles are small, you play several roles within a total production. Robotech was different in the sense that (especially for me in the beginning) I never had an idea of what I would be doing until I arrived at the studio. I usually was called for âbits and walla.â When I showed up and looked down at the script, I would find out right there on the spot. That was not the case, of course in the third season, when I knew I was playing Rand. But even within that framework, I never really had an understanding of where my character was going within the storyline and how that storyline would influence my characters relationship with everyone else. One thing I wish we did in those early days was as an ensemble meeting to get a sense of the Robotech series as a whole. There was only one person who knew that, Carl Macek.
Carl Macek, like Da Vinci or Michelangelo always had an extremely clear idea of the total canvass he was working on. The Robotech television series was assembled from three diverse sources including The Super Dimension Fortress Macross , Super Dimenson Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada and only Carl Macek really had a concept of how it would all fit together. As an actor in the show, I never really had a sense of what that picture was. I wish that we could have all gotten together as a group and told the story so that we would all know what are part was in the whole piece. The very nature of the way animation is done, is compartmental. You have individual writers writing scripts and then actors coming in at various points separately to voice only the parts of the script that their character appears in. While it is nobodyâs fault, the problem with this process is you donât have a sense of the whole as would with a painting, a play or film. Each person, works on his or her own part of the mosaic and then it is put together. Letâs not romanticize filmmaking. It too is a compartmentalized process. I canât tell you how many times actors will show up the first day of shooting to learn that they are filming the their characterâs death scene at the end of the film. It would be like shooting Romeo and Juliet beginning with the death scene on the first day of filming. But I guess Iâm really thinking like a theatre person. In the theatre, usually at the first rehearsal, you would meet the entire cast and read the work in its totality aloud. At some point the director would discuss a point of view that they would take in the presentation of the production. If communicated effectively, everyone in the cast would at least have a general idea of the how the director chose to present the work, the storyline and how their character would fit within that structure. It would still leave room for creative interpretation but
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