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People often say there are three kinds of singers:
one who sings beautifully,
one who sings terribly,
and one who sings with great passion—without realizing how much pain the audience is in.
Acting is much the same. Every actor believes they're delivering an Oscar-worthy performance, yet from the audience's perspective, it's pure secondhand embarrassment.
The equipment Henry prepared was indeed impressive and novel. But Charlize Theron quickly snapped out of that sense of amazement and turned to face her own painfully awkward performance on screen.
Meanwhile, Henry was busy adjusting his freshly completed setup, trying to fine-tune all the parameters and settings so it could be used directly in the future.
The camera he used had a very particular structure.
The front half was an old Hollywood film camera, the kind often seen in low-budget productions.
This was Hollywood—there was no shortage of scrapped film equipment. Through contacts at the Screen Actors Guild, Henry quickly found a decommissioned camera whose optics were largely intact, though everything else was a complete mess.
Apparently, it had been one of the casualties during the filming of stunt scenes in a big action movie. It hadn't yet been disposed of, which was how it ended up benefiting Henry the scavenger.
The rear half, however, had been transformed by Henry into something that looked like a crude metal monstrosity. Exposed wiring, brackets bolted or welded in place, and all manner of oddly shaped components were fixed behind the lens.
Henry hadn't given aesthetics a single thought.
First, this was a rush job.
Second, the device might still be modified or upgraded later, and enclosing everything neatly would only make that more troublesome.
This customized section essentially consisted of the image sensor and the encoder—converting what the lens captured into digital signals and storing them on Henry's homemade high-capacity hard drive.
He had considered buying commercial high-capacity drives and building a NAS server to serve as the camera's storage.
But compared to directly building a single high-capacity drive himself, that would take even more time and effort. So Henry simply went all in. Since this was just for his own use, it didn't really matter if the technology exceeded the era by a wide margin—no one else was going to care.
As for the output, he didn't bother with cathode-ray tube screens or the barely-out-of-the-lab LCD panels of the time. Henry went straight for a projector, using one of the white-painted walls in the apartment as a "screen."
He had long since given up on televisions. While the general public was still marveling at 32- or 38-inch "large" screens, Henry had already built a cinema-grade projection setup at home.
The apartment wasn't big enough for a full 200-inch screen, of course, but the wall he had reserved for projection still allowed for an image around 80 to 90 inches—more than enough.
Even when watching TV normally, he routed the antenna and decoder through the projector, simply reducing the projection size slightly so the image wouldn't look too coarse.
For electrical and mechanical work like this, Henry was already thoroughly experienced.
Now, connecting this projector to his homemade camera and displaying the captured footage was trivial.
If there was any downside, it was that the room lighting had to be dimmed while using the projector. Otherwise, the projected image would appear washed out, with muted colors.
Compared to commercial projectors, the one Henry built didn't require the room lights to be completely turned off to see clearly.
Still, Charlize voluntarily dimmed the lights to a soft glow so the image would be clearer.
This also allowed them to see their surroundings well enough to move around without bumping into anything. After all, this wasn't a movie theater where you sat still for two hours.
At first, Charlize Theron had been marveling at the equipment Henry built—especially the sheer scale of using an entire wall as a projection screen. Outside of movie theaters, she'd never seen images displayed at such a size.
Very quickly, however, she was reduced to speechless agony by her own casual performance captured earlier.
The scene was from a classic—Lady Macbeth's monologue from Shakespeare's Macbeth.
For a villain like Lady Macbeth, making the audience dislike the character already counted as half a success.
The other half required grasping the character's psychological state and expressing it through body language and subtle facial expressions consistent with the character's behavior in that moment.
After all, there are many different roots to why someone is hateful, and each comes with a different outward expression. Being able to convey those nuances—to make the character feel alive—that's true success.
But when Henry did the test shoot, all he'd said was, "Just do something casual. Relax. We're just checking whether the machine works."
So Charlize had pulled out one of the things she'd learned at acting school. She wasn't careless, but she also wasn't particularly serious.
And now she regretted it.
Henry hadn't built a home-use V8 camcorder—this was equipment approaching cinema quality. With every detail magnified and projected onto an 80- to 90-inch wall, Charlize was embarrassed enough to dig out a three-bedroom apartment with her toes.
Especially the moment when she broke into laughter mid-performance, then forcibly reset her expression and carried on as if nothing had happened.
That was peak black history.
Even being tricked into shooting Playboy photos hadn't made her feel this hopeless. Staring at her first on-screen performance, Charlize Theron's eyes reddened, and she felt a powerful urge to silence every witness.
"Burn the negatives!" she glared at the man standing beside the camera, laughing uncontrollably at the footage, and snarled.
"Oh? That's some industry jargon you picked up at acting school?" Henry teased. "Not bad—you actually learned something."
Film cameras used 35mm film. "Burn the negatives" was the most thorough way to destroy a movie or a performance—completely irreversible. It was industry slang.
But in reality, Henry hadn't used film at all, so there were no negatives to burn.
So now, faced with Charlize's reddened eyes, her claw-like hands nearly closing around his throat as she muttered, "Burn the negatives," Henry hurried to placate her.
"Alright, alright. This thing doesn't use film, so there's nothing to burn. But I'll delete the file afterward. Then there won't be any record left."
"Really?"
In an instant, the horror-movie atmosphere vanished. She transformed into a trembling little deer, looking up at him with watery eyes that stirred compassion.
That shift alone forced Henry to admit it—this girl's future Oscar win would be fully deserved.
He immediately went to the camera and began operating it. Since he was the sole user, he hadn't designed a simplified interface; all commands were entered through a keyboard.
A few keystrokes later, the previous file was deleted. The projected image faded to blank white.
Only then did Charlize finally breathe a sigh of relief.
It was a bit of a shame not to preserve footage of a future Oscar winner's awkward early days. But it also proved that the device Henry had spent days building truly worked.
Which meant the real acting training could now begin in earnest.
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