Hi! I’m Eric Bates, a Montreal-based actor, circus artist and filmmaker. This page mostly shows my filmmaking and acting work, you can see more of my circus content at @cigarboxjuggler and @cirque_barcode_circus
My happy place.
100% humidity, condensation dripping off the camera, fiddling with a bunch of gear to make the shot work, then watching a couple of climbers throw down below me in intimidating (but cinematic!) conditions. Can’t wait to share the images from this day.
Thanks to @chadsilva for capturing this one.
Link in bio to watch FIVE DOT FUN, my submission to this year’s @theartofdocumentary One Day Doc contest. Thanks to @chadsilva for letting me stay at his house and peek into his world!
So for those that have never self-taped, they often ask to see your hands in case they need you to handle the product, which is still funny to me coming from a circus background. I figure the casting team has to watch a million of these videos so I try to make it fun for them when I can while still getting them the information they need.
Also the actual audition tape I sent was longer and included a second, more reserved take, but… it’s me standing around pretending to listen, not my wildest acting work, so I didn’t include the full video here.
Happy to have booked the commercial and had a great shoot with a fun, talented team!
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, blah blah blah, but at this point I’m starting to honestly wonder how anyone is supposed to crack into this industry. If they went with someone else, I want to meet them!
If I sound a little indignant or like the world owes me anything, that’s not the tone I was going for, more just flabbergasted because I thought I was such a good fit for this specific job.
I’m a circus performer, a filmmaker, an actor, a writer- I enjoy it doing it all and I don’t mind if someone else that only does stunts does this one, but for once I felt like I might very well be the most qualified candidate.
Is this how it is in this industry?!
I call this spray and pray because in the beginning I’m basically throwing everything I’ve got at my script, hoping something will hit.
Naturally this leads to having way too much material, but I like that at first so I can carve it down. Sort of like having a giant block of marble that will hopefully become a statue one day. But is currently just a massive rock.
In part 4 I’ll talk about how an editor comes in handy to help.
What’s a weird trick you use in your creation process?
Somewhere as I was writing my feature film I tried out this method, which in the @scriptapart podcast, Tom Schumann swears he uses on all his films.
Did it work for me?
Frankly it was a nice break from the computer, and I felt like it did give me some bird’s eye view vibes, but in general I don’t think I’ll be using this method again if I write another movie- it felt time consuming without adding much clarity.
That said, I absolutely believe in having physical copies of your writing at multiple points in the process- sometimes you need to get away from the screen so you can’t tinker while you work and just read through stuff as a spectator.
If I did something like this again I might do it at a phase where I was toying with structure and would move index card summaries of scenes around rather than notes & quotes.
To each their own process though, it’s all a big experiment for each of us to find what works for ourselves!
BTS for yesterday’s DIY photoshoot! I dont specialize in headshots, so it was fun to take the time to play and improve on both sides of the camera.
We used the 600x as our Key light through a softbox plus some extra material, then the f22c to act as a hair light. Lens was somewhere in the 70-130 range generally.
Excited to keep learning, it was fun once we got into it!
