Through The Screen: Behind the scenes with Poppy (Rosie)

The first time Lilly suggested perhaps getting the gang back together for a zoom play, there was laughter and some silly suggestions for ideas. Trying to think of plausible, practical ideas for three women to perform is a bit of a task, but it did (eventually) morph into a more serious, performance-orientated discussion.

The basic structure of having three friends from university was decided on fairly quickly, but the characters and the plot took a little longer to coalesce. Originally, Jess was the good girl – an A-star student and angelic friend who was a direct foil for Paige’s nastiness.

Eventually, the characters became a little more complex – each with her own good and bad traits, and her own ideas on the situation (and I may be slightly biased, but I personally believe Rosie was left with the majority of good traits, and a viewpoint that most of the audience could see and agree with).

Coming up with the idea meant that we actually had to start filming, which came with all its own difficulties. I know one thing that we all struggled with was watching ourselves during the zoom filming. Whenever possible Lilly and I turned our own cameras off (this was unfortunately impossible for our main ‘camerawoman’ Annie, who had to have hers on as she was the one recording). But we still had to watch the scenes back and decide whether we were happy with the result. As none of us had ever acted on ‘camera’ before, this was an interesting experience to say the least.

Also, the fact that we have all been friends since we were 11 did, occasionally, mean that a scene took a while as we had fits of laughter, or one of us said something wrong and we couldn’t quite recover gracefully. Most of the time this just added to the fun, although Annie and I did have a particularly awful time filming the beginning of the final scene. For some unknown reason we couldn’t seem to get past the first few lines without devolving into hysterics (sorry Lilly, for making you watch it a hundred times before we managed it).

Aside from this, and the horror of watching yourself back on screen, it was so much fun to be able to try out film acting. We got to learn our lines and then forget them just as quick (sometimes halfway through a scene which was not quite the goal we were aiming for). We got to play around with little bits of improv, and we got to add fun little extra moments that you only get when you’re talking to people on Zoom or Skype. I know that overall I would absolutely love to do something like this again, so if anyone from Hollywood is out there reading this and is considering a multi-million dollar zoom film – sign me up.