Hey Everybody,
Evan Williams here, I hope you're all loving life. I'm thrilled to be blogging for the folks here at Alloy.com -- any chance I can get to connect with all of you, I'm all over it. So I play Kelly on Degrassi: The Next Generation. Filming season eight has been crazy.

Here's what my first day was like: I am walking into a room full of people I'm used to seeing on my TV since I was young. They expect me to call them by their real names as opposed to their character names, which are ingrained into my head (basically impossible). Last but not least, they throw us up in front of the camera and tell me not to be nervous. Truthfully, I was only nervous for the first five minutes, but in that time I was tapping up a storm.

Quick explanation: I'm a musician as well as an actor, and something about having played the piano all my life leads me to drum my fingers a lot. I like rhythm, go figure. When I'm stressed, the finger drumming comes out big time, I have to catch myself and restrain. Alrighty, so as you can imagine, first day jitters, I'm waiting off-camera and I am tapping my fingers like a mad person, it's getting out of control. I've even got the foot going on the offbeat; I'm working up a sweat. Just as I'm reaching a kind of crescendo, the director walks over, gives me a sideways look, and asks me if I'm all right to shoot the first scene. I assure him that I am, thank him for breaking the spell I was under, and we proceed to shoot for the rest of the day without a hitch.

Once we got going, I forgot all about my nerves and really enjoyed working with my co-stars and joking with the crew. Everyone who works on the show is friendly, and knowing that we were all there to create something together made me feel like there was some sort of bond, like we were in a club or something. That may sound strange, but it's true -- there's some mutual respect flowing around, of which I am a big fan.

Until then my friends!
Peace
-e