Working with Kim Coates

It's Sam again! Yesterday, I finally remembered to bring my vest back from tutoring. I was very proud of myself. The production wants to pull us out of tutoring as quick as possible, but we usually manage to convince them to let us have 5 more minutes so we can count our time. But one time when we couldn't, we had to do high knees all the way to set, and still had time to do 5 push-ups before the shot to count as P.E. We got our time in. But tutoring isn't what I'm going to talk about today. Today, I'm going to talk about working with another actor in The Adventure Club.

Kim Coates is awesome. When we first got here,and looked at the cast wall, we noticed a character was missing. The director told us they hadn't cast him yet. He had a fairly big role in the movie, and we were only 5 days from shooting! So the producer got a list of stars they had in mind, and found out who they could grab. They found Kim Coates, known for his role in Sons of Anarchy. He wanted to meet us before the shoot. So he came over and talked to us, then watched us do a scene. He's a really nice guy. He was really enthusiastic. He had to leave, but the next day, we had a full day of shooting with him.

He told us that he changed lines all the time, but our cue lines would stay the same. We were off to turtoring when we were saved by Kim, who wanted to run lines with us. So we switched them up a bit. They still got the same idea across, only better. We learned from him that sometimes, if it feels more natural a different way, you can change your line. But since we're only kids, we ask the director first. He often says yes. I think Kim's a really smart guy. Like Geoff said, he is a seasoned veteran in the ways of acting.

We all noticed that during the scene, he'd just pick something up from his desk and start tinkering with it while talking, which worked really well with his character. It was always something different. And when he did the scene, it was never the same. He said something different all the time. He said whatever was natural to him. Sometimes, when we had to laugh a bit, he'd change the line so it was funnier. And when we had to be scared, he'd change the line so it was scarier.

Before every shot, Kim got into character. He'd be talking to us even before the camera was rolling, and acting like he was his character. He was talking like we were still in the last scene. So when the cameras started rolling, it was like it was one continous scene, and we were all in character.

I found that he is very good at improvising. Sometimes, he would start a sentence without even knowing where he was going with it. But that just made it more realistic when he was searching for words. So he just made that sentence flow into the sentence from the actual script.

Kim gave us some good advice about acting. He told us as long as you listen, really listen, that's the only trick to it. He told us that acting is listening.

So, I'm running out of things to say here, and I got stuff to do. Gotta go now, but this isn't the last you'll hear from me.