When I Was Allowed to Be in "The Atticus McLaren Mysteries"

 
 Despite my tasty showreel of shorts, for a forty-something actor who really likes film and telly I've done next to no film and telly acting, so I felt very lucky at the beginning of last year to be asked by Spring Horton (top row, second from the right) to come up to York for a week and appear in their passion project filming with an actual crew, playing a likeable supporting character with an actual arc, for actual money. I felt other things as well of course... trepidatious, is it? Can we not just say "trepid", the opposite of intrepid?... but that was in the lead up to the shoot. During and after, I simply felt lucky.

Spring: "Is the clock in shot?"  Amanda, DOP: "Big time." 

 That's Thomas Jennings on the left as the autistic and aromantic asexual hero Atticus, and me as his estranged brother Scout, (which I didn't twig was a Harper Lee reference until three days into the shoot). An autism-friendly adaptation of Spring's own book, The Atticus McLaren Mysteries: Murder at the Museum was the perfect job for a first timer like me. I think Spring was a first timer as well, producing and directing, but they betrayed no particle of the anxiety that they write about here for example, and the simple story of these two brothers reconnecting was so soundly plotted I felt that, for all my inexperience, there was no mistake I could make dumb enough to derail it.

 And I did make mistakes, that's clear when I watch the finished show, available to view on youtube HERE, which is one of the reasons I didn't share this until now (another reason being that Spring hinted they may want to re-edit). Don't get me wrong. I don't bring any lights down or anything, and all my clothes stay on, but my idea of naturalism tests the limits of how much one can pointlessly fidget in front of a camera, which turns out to be not at all ideally.

  That might be why I've got my hands in my pockets here, although looking at it, let's face it, this does seem a little disrespectful. 

 It's fine though. I was learning. And when the shoot was done I was no longer a first timer. I'd finally played a person on a show, and without any shadow of "impostor syndrome" hanging over the enterprise because there didn't seem a done way to do this; I was another of Spring's decisions, like putting the credits in comic sans. I'd been invited to work on something someone wanted to say, a dream they'd taken seriously enough to see realised with confidence and kindess. And I love doing that more than anything.

Spring talks more here.