Another great blog from one of our young acting students
By Solomon Wood
When acting in front of a camera, a big amount of pressure is put onto you to know your lines, know when to move etc. But did you ever stop to think that you need to be e extremely realistic? We want to see YOU and how YOU act, not how you think your character acts. So today, after learning some quite valuable things, I thought I would explain some basic and more complicated things. This way, we can understand everything!
The difference between Theatre and Film
This is something I have to think about constantly. Many of you that take drama in school or are taught drama outside of school more than likely will be taught Theatrical drama. And there is nothing wrong with pursuing theatre! But you can’t really use the same techniques that are used in theatre for film. In theatre, you are expected to be larger than life and as an actor you play a character and you take them on, become them. You become loud and over dramatic and when you come of the stage you feel good about what you did! In film, you take on the characters name but you put YOUR emotions into it, take being sad for example. In theatre you would wail and scream and be really large and dramatic, in film it’s toned down and you act upset as you would if YOU were actually upset. And when you come off set, you should feel proud but drained and even still feeling the raw emotion you made yourself feel. Film acting is all about you!
How to make your film acting more believable
What we worked on in class is something I feel needs to be discussed. It’s the problem of reacting before what is happening to make you react has happened. Take a falling glass, in real life, you would hear the glass shatter on the ground and there would be a split second where your realisation kicks in and you become shocked. But what happens when you are under the pressure of the camera is this: the glass falls and you react before it has time to shatter, breaking the performance. The best way to break this habit is to take a second to realise what has happened. I call it the Shock Second” as it’s that second where your mind thinks What the hell? after this second you begin to speak and assess the situation more, but the Shock Second gives that bit of reality to the piece.
The final thing we talked about was saying your lines before someone else has the time to finish theirs. This breaks the atmosphere that from the beginning of the piece you have been trying to create, the way to combat this is to say the person’s line in your head and then say your line. But this brings me onto an issue tied with this, the issue of pace. Pacing is all about making sure you don’t rush, if you rush then there is no atmosphere to the piece and it makes your group look nervous. Too slow, and the performance drags and becomes boring. So, how do we stop this? The simple way is to think how you would be. If someone said to you I’ve found a dead body” you wouldn’t wait 5 minutes to speak, would you? You would be shocked to hear this and so have one or two Shock Seconds but you would speak quickly to show you are nervous and a little scared. It’s all about making sure your reacting time isn’t too long, but you don’t jump in right after someone has said something. Think about what the person had said, then answer, this paces and slows you down a little therefore making it more believable.
Thank you for reading and a special thank you to Alyson, Richard and Charlie who helped tonight, for I got this information from them. Thank you.
Northern Film and Drama “The STUDIO”
LEEDS, Yorkshire.
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Pictures of this lesson Wednesday the 1st of November 2017.
