DURHAM -- "Sound is rolling. Thirteen-eight point one."

"OK. Let's reset it please. Thirteen-eight point two."

"OK, I'm hearing people talking. Let's reset. You lost the energy."

With the director demanding silence and other technical experts admonishing offenders of filming protocol, Nuestro Barrio cast members awaited their cues backstage Tuesday in cramped quarters and chilled conditions, dodging power tools, paint brushes, coiled wires and scraps of wood left behind from construction of the colorful restaurant set.

With her hands cupping a crew member's hot mug of tea to take the chill off, former model Tica Gollob is learning that the glamour of stardom requires some rather unflattering sacrifices.

Vanity, she admits, has taken a beating in several forms while working on the Durham-produced soap opera set to air on television stations across the Southeast in January.

"I'm a Latino woman and I want to look beautiful," the ex-Spanish teacher of Colombian descent said in a candid moment of cultural confession. "But I have to play a woman twice my age."

The 28-year-old Gollob, clad in a cheetah pattern outfit, her long, curly black hair framing a cover page face straining under the indignity of detachable wrinkles, said acting is much more demanding than her past work on commercials or modeling. That includes stretching her role-playing ability.

"I had to make myself cry," she said of her most challenging part. "I had to think of a really difficult time in my life."

Where did she go to find that emotional recall?

"I'm not telling," said the Boston transplant, who operates a Durham translation business as her day job.

The long hours also take a toll.

"We did one take outside a night club in Durham, and we had to have security because we were there until 1:30 in the morning," Gollob said.

And, she said, Dilsey Davis, the creator, producer and director of Nuestro Barrio, is unrelenting in her pursuit of perfection.

"You have to know your lines. You have to show up on time. It's a job and it's serious," Gollob said.

Tania Morton of Holly Springs has a different set of challenges.

Unlike Gollob, who has a principal role, Morton is an extra who moves in and out of scenes as required.

It's hard waiting backstage for her minor parts to come up, said Morton, originally from Paraiso, Honduras. And redoing the scenes one take after another can be trying, she said.

As if on cue, the actor on the other side of the plywood wall repeated his line yet again as Davis pursued perfection in the scene du jour -- "Muchas gracias para invitarnos." ("Thank you very much for inviting us.")

But behind-the-scenes workers stay phenomenally busy, too.

Felicia Casey-Hicks of Durham is a member of the headphone brigade doing the technical monitoring in the backstage nerve center. Each time the camera rolls, they don their headphones, watch twin cameras of the action on the other side of the wall and keep an eye on audio levels and sound interference.

"I take notes on each scene that will help the editor when they cut it together," Casey-Hicks, the continuity technician, said as she penciled in her observations on a stack of forms. "It's kind of nerve wracking when there's two cameras and people are milling around."

Cast and crew all admit they are working extremely long and hard for little compensation on a low-budget endeavor. And they all seem to have the same answer why.

"What makes it fun is everyone wants it to be a success," Gollob said.