So my in class Emerson film shoot thing was yesterday, and I felt pretty good about it! I've been super focused on theatre stuff lately, so actually besides Crooked Arrows and some auditions which were filmed, I haven't been acting a lot in front of a camera, I've been acting more on stage, and getting my creative jollies out that way. There is an interesting dichotomy between the two. Anyone who has done both can tell you they are very different in the kind of focus and energy you bring to them, but at the same time I also think the things that make for good work in either medium come from the same place: your craft. At the same time, I think the actor's craft or any artist's craft is just a way of accessing your interior life and in the case of the actor we use that to tell a story. This is a long way of saying that I think acting is all about heart. And if you can bring your heart into something, then it will be good and how good it is depends on how much of your heart you are able to bring into it. And that depends on your craft. And your craft depends on your preparation.
Unlike in theatre, in film you don't always have time to prepare. In the case of this project, we only had one rehearsal this past Saturday where the director tried to communicate his vision of what the scene was about and how it related to the script as a whole. I can dig that, I've had to do that kind of stuff for directing classes and the fact that he was in a position where he had to do that was partly why I agreed to do it. A lot of the opportunities in Boston to act in front of a camera are student films, most of which are not going to be very good. If you are reading this and are interested in acting on camera, don't let that discourage you (wherever your at, don't let anything discourage you). Some of them are OK, but writing a good script and telling an effective story with pictures and stuff? It's really, really hard. And frankly, a lot of kids major in film because they kind of don't know what else to do with themselves. Other times you meet really talented, committed film students, and that's fantastic. But that doesn't mean the material your working with is necessarily any good, or that they will necessarily understand it fully. When a film student goes to cast their student movie, they are doing so while wearing a director's hat, while other film students around them wear the key grip hat, or the AD hat or whatever job they are learning how to do. Most of the time, the director you are working with will not go on to be a director, they might have another job in the industry because the industry is full of jobs for people who can do them and will work for free at first. But while they are students, they learn a little bit of everything.
This is a long winded way of explaining why, in general, I've stopped auditioning for student films. Also film students can be kind of flaky, and even though it says in the audition notice "no pay, but meals, copy and credit will be provided" a lot of the time they won't actually get you a copy either because they don't finish it or you know their busy being 20 year old film students. The thing of working on something over a weekend or two or however long and not getting a copy kind of extends to the entire world of independent film, web series, etc, since often times money or time will just fail to come together in such a way that something can be finished. Other times you'll get it, and it just won't be very good. Such is life.
Where was I before that tangent? Oh yeah, preparation. We had some but not a lot. A general grasp of the scene, our relationship, intentions, given circumstances, etc. Lines? Blocking? Not so much. So when we got up at the top of the class and tried to run the scene, which were going to be filming on Emerson's rather nice sound stage with kind of a cool, simple but effective set it wasn't very good. Where the lines are concerned, I'd really hoped to get have a whack at the scene this past week but with being in two shows and Adia's wisdom teeth coming out it just didn't happen. So we tried to get through it and incorporate the various stage business that the screen writer had included, all this stuff with a carpet and shit, and it just wasn't very good. Which the professor called us out for, which pleasantly surprised me, because previously when I did a sort of similar assignment for BU the professor didn't really lean on the acting so much. This definitely pushed my scene partner and I, so we went outside and ran it half a dozen times then half a dozen more times on set with blocking while they finished lighting and rehearsed with the camera and we got feedback from the professor until we actually had a scene. And then we filmed it. We did so pretty quickly, and in fairly rudimentary fashion which is to say like half a dozen set ups (or individual shots) and then we were done. Overall, it was a good experience. The kids in the class knew what they were doing, we were shooting in a controlled environment with half decent material and hopefully when the kid who's project it was finishes cutting it, it's maybe usable, or at least a few seconds are, on my reel. Fingers crossed!
In the end, it felt good to flex those on camera muscles. Acting on stage, it's necessary to bring a certain volume to your performance both in terms of your voice and your level of expressiveness. Also often times material on stage is much more stylized, as is definitely the case with Swimming in the Shallows. Film less so, your acting choices have to be very focused and specific and every moment has to have a defined sense of that "interior life" because the camera picks up everything that happens behind your eyes. Even though I always wanted to be a stage actor, since I found my footing acting on camera which took a while, if you search on Youtube for Doctor Who and the Collectors you'll see a fan movie we did when I was in high school, my first time acting on camera, it's not very good, but since getting better I've wondered if actually I'm better suited to that kind of work. Crooked Arrows kind of reinforced that possibility. But also, something I wanted to get across is that I think acting on stage is the best training you could have as an actor. On film, time is always your enemy. You get a finite number of takes to get it right. People think it's the opposite, that on stage you have to get it right in the moment because you don't get another take. And that's true, but you get to try again and again, night after night. Whereas with film, you get it to place, that moment is captured and you move on. You don't get time to revisit, often you didn't really have time to rehearse or anything everything happens in the moment and that's that. Theatre you do it over and over again, finding what works and refining it in front of people. And you learn quick what does and doesn't work. Film is much slower, I think, to find that balance. But stage time helps. So if you want to do movies, get on stage. That's my advice.
End of blog post.
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