While Michael was busy with the camera and lighting Jin was filled with stress and anxiety. He had never acted before and the thought of messing it up was ever present.
The fifteen-minute time allotted by Michael also did not provide any comfort to Jin and instead added even more pressure upon him.
Normally it would have been fairly easy for him to memorise the script since Michael had tasked him to cover only a single scene which was barely a full page. However, under the constraint of time, pressure bore upon his mind and he started getting more and more nervous with the passing of each second.
He could only resort to speaking the lines again and again to memorize them. He did that for the next 15 minutes under the constant gazes of Michael and Tyler who looked at him with a weird expression.
'Is it so tough?' They both thought when they saw him repeating his lines. The latest_epɪ_sodes are on_the novel※fire.net
The fifteen minutes soon passed and Michael asked Jin.
"Are you done with it?" Michael asked.
Jin, who was immersed in repeating his lines again and again, stopped the moment he heard Michael's words, a couple of seconds later he replied timidly.
"Uh-uhm yes…yes I am,"
'Is this the same man who fought with the terrorists yesterday?' Tyler thought as he saw Jin's timidness.
Similar thoughts were going around in Michael's mind as he sighed.
'This won't do…at this rate, he won't even be able to say his lines properly much less show the vivid expressions the scene requires.'
"Come in front of the camera," Michael said. He just wanted things to get over with. Even the slight feeling that Jin might turn out to surprise him faded after he saw this timidness in him.
Jin soon walked to the front of the camera.
Beside him, there was a small dummy which was to be used as a prop. It lay there on the ground with its back leaning on the wall. Jin was going to address his dialogues to it.
'I'll at least give him some tips since it's his first time,' Michael thought after a while in exasperation. He wanted to get this job over with but his conscience was not allowing him to do so.
"Do you know what's the most important thing for an actor while acting?" He asks Jin
"Uhm.. script?" Jin said with a hint of doubt.
"Wrong, it's immersion." Michael said and continued, "Just like how the audience gets immersed in a movie while the actors are performing on the screen, the actors too need to get immersed in their characters,"
Michael stopped and took a breather as his words sank into Jin's mind.
"You must become the character you're acting, to the point that it's no longer about acting like it and only about being it.
In your scene, you're playing the role of Paul, a character who saw his only parent, his mother lying lifelessly on the ground when he returned from his office. He is now confronting the thug who robbed his house and killed his mother.
Flesh it all out. The sorrow, the anger and the anguish he is feeling right now. Imagine that it was not Paul's mother but yours who was killed. Invoke that emotion of extreme anger within you and say those lines out, not as Tyler but as Paul for he is you and you are him."
Jin listened to everything that Michael had told him with rapt attention. After listening to Michael Jin realized that he had been putting more effort into memorizing his lines rather than understanding his character.
"You understand?" Michael asked Jin after finishing his words.
"Yes," Jin nodded. He looked a lot more confident than before. Michael felt satisfied with this response and started the camera.
"Let's begin then. Action!"
Hearing Michael's words the first thing Jin did was to close his eyes. He placed himself in Paul's place and saw his mother being killed. The anger, the anguish, the sorrow. It wasn't long before such emotions welled up in him as well. The most probable reason for that was the fact that Jin's parents were killed as well.
He soon imagined himself confronting the killers of his parents and used those emotions as he started his lines.
"Does being stabbed hurt?"
Jin crouched down on the ground as he stared at the dummy.
"Looks like it does," Jin grinned as he pressed a spot in the dummy's stomach.
"But do you know what hurts even more?" A look of anticipation appeared on his face as he said those words.
Jin took out his phone from his pocket and placed it in front of the dummy's face.
"Your son looks cute, right? I took that when I bought him an ice cream. This one was taken while we were at the amusement park. He loved it!"
Jin said as he kept sliding his phone's screen as he showed it to the dummy.
"Hey, why do you look horrified? Look there are more photos of your son having fun with me. We truly had a lot of fun that day," The feeling of anticipation on Jin's face seemed to be growing with each swipe.
"Finally the last pic, I asked your son his favourite number before I took this one. Do you know what he replied? He said 99! If only he would have chosen a smaller number…it took me around fifteen minutes to stab him 99 times you know?" Jin said with an inhumane grin plastered on his face as he swiped his phone and showed the final picture.
"Why are you crying? Is it because you feel hurt that your son's no longer here? Don't worry I'll send you to him soon. As his father, it's only right that I stab you 99 times as well right? right?..."
Jin was out of his character the moment he heard Michael's words. He didn't seem to have realised what he had just done but it was not so the case for others.
Michael had both eyes widened from surprise as he stared at Jin's figure and as for Trey, he had his jaw opened.
The next moment they looked at each other and shared a similar feeling with their gaze. They had found a diamond in the rough!