The Text Message pings are either from your Mobile company selling you a special deal on midnight to morning call-packages or from a company trying to sell you aluminium guttering for your third floor bedsit. The phone rings less often, WhatsApp boings & tinkles no longer disturb your shivery doze. . . . unless fellow actors are asking whether you’ve been to Auditions they haven’t been “Requested” for….
Yup, sounds like a Cape Town Winter!
When the Season starts again you are going to be fat, lazy, despondent and out of practice at what you fought your parents to be allowed to do… Acting!
Unless of course you use the Winter months to take an acting refresher course. If you’ve done those worth doing, or dare not dip into the Rent money, there are things you can do to keep your Acting Craft “hot” during winter.
First, find a like-minded “acting-buddy” – someone who, like you, understands that reading a script, studying a scene, recording it – even on a cell-phone – playing it back and judging each other, then doing it all again is not boring, but an exciting way of keeping yourselves “acting fit”. A good acting buddy doesn’t leave their audition sides to clutter up The Room, but keeps them to work on again, whether or not they “book the gig”.
Let’s step back a little.
Of course you’d like to get that supporting role in some Studio Picture opposite Somebody Famous – the four-page audition scene where you confront the hero/villain and put them in their place…
Get real…
Unless you already have a considerable track record in international television or film – which implies that you have either a flawless American or a solid British accent as judged by either an American or British Director/Producer/Studio – your best shot is a smaller role with only one or two scenes. The good news is that, given the way scripts are being written these days, the chances are high that the scene will be with one of the “leads”, so you won’t want to embarrass yourself on the day.
On-Camera Practice
You never see your own auditions and the time-lag between a day on set and seeing the blink-of-an-eye scene in the released movie can be more than a year, so you need to find a way to get immediate feedback about what you feel and do in front of a camera compared to what is captured on screen – it is absolutely the quickest way to learn.
Collect your audition Sides for those roles, swap copies with your acting buddy and other actors of a similar “Type”. Choose a scene to start with, PRINT IT OUT and study it thoroughly, NOT on your phone or computer! Make performance notes on the Sides as you go, Google-search unfamiliar names or references in the scene and write brief reminders on the page.
Record a few takes of the scene, even on a cell-phone, then transfer it to a computer with a larger screen for review if you possibly can.
Then do it again. Yes, the same scene.
The minimal dialogue in these day-player scenes presents a trap that almost every actor falls into. Of course the dialogue is important – it may reveal something new to a major character in the story which will affect their actions. You need to understand that as best you can from the Sides and the Synopsis in order to deliver the lines in an appropriate way. The information you have may be inadequate or ambiguous – that is one reason to explore variations of the scene. If you get more information from the Audition Director at the audition you will be in a position to trot out one of those variations easily and modify it if necessary. That is fairly obvious.
The real trap is that many actors concentrate on the dialogue (and accent!) so much that they don’t think about what they need to do before the dialogue, between the dialogue and after the dialogue. To arrive at those answers, you need to ask several questions:
- Who is your Character as a person?
What is their status in relation to others in the scene?
What is their attitude / state of mind at the beginning of the scene?
How does their dialogue affect the status / situation of everyone in the scene?
What is their attitude to any change in status / situation?
How has their status or the situation changed by the end of the scene?
These are a few fairly obvious “Scene-Study” questions – and they are your guide to almost endless variations of any scene you choose to record as an exercise. To be useful, an on-camera acting exercise is a four-step process:
- Finding the valid variations
Attempting to convey them to the screen
Judging your success at achieving your aim by critically reviewing the video and audio
Fine-tuning and doing it again
You should discover new subtleties simply by repetition and review. Keep the video for a day or so and review it again, which will give you a more detached perspective.
While you can work on your own, I think it is always better to have another trusted opinion – assessing someone else’s performance is also a useful exercise in judgement.
I would suggest that you and your Acting Buddy separate your sessions, even if only by a lunch break, rather than swapping roles as Reader / camera and Actor within the same session. You can’t fully concentrate on acting if you’re fussing with the camera between takes. If possible, get together again for your second Review a day or so later. I strongly suggest copying the video to a device with a larger screen than a mobile phone, the larger the better. To minimize confusion, sort the destination folder by Date/Time or Date Taken and rename the clips with names that make sense to you. For tips on reviewing your exercise, see the WAG page for “Reviewing your video clips”