Introduction
This site in no way pretends to be an on-line course in acting for beginners. There are thousands of web sites claiming to teach acting skills or audition skills, many written by Americans about auditioning or acting in America – while they themselves wait to get a real acting job… or even another audition!
I have no such pretensions… I’ve done just enough acting on stage and film, spread thinly over many years, to know that:
A) Acting is Work, often hard, emotionally draining work.
B) I’m not an Actor, so I’m not competing with actors.
I have, however, seen and studied a lot of acting in extreme detail over the years, either as a Director of Photography, as a Director, or as a Writer – months or a year after I’ve handed my “family” to a Producer in the form of a Television Script. I’ve also elicited performances out of actors that they never knew they had in them – in a bare grey Audition Studio.
I do not call myself a Casting Director – I am an Audition Director. The line between Audition Director and Acting Coach is a thin one, involving overlapping skills, but it is not my place to coax or bully an actor into my preferred interpretation of a scene or character. If an actor is reasonably prepared and competent, their intended interpretation should be self-evident, but may not be entirely successful. It is then up to the Audition Director – wearing diplomatic velvet gloves – to help the actor toward an audition the actor feels good about.
After all, it is the actor’s audition!
Any observations, hints, tips and advice I publish here will be triggered directly by observations and experience in our Cape Town Audition studio, or by Christa’s observations in our Johannesburg studio.