What’s the difference between an actor and her character?  One thinks she is the character and the other wishes the actor would stop saying she is the character. The idea that “you are the character and the character is you” is insufficient on camera. Actors are taught to approach characters this way for the purpose of responding honestly and without prejudice as they play the scene which they see as great acting. However, all of their great acting is wasted on camera because it’s not happening to a recognizable human being. It’s happening to an actor. What’s the difference between
Read More

Here’s one of the biggest problems most actors don’t realize they have. They use a very thorough scene analysis process to make choices that reflect the way the scene is written. The problem is those are the choices the camera finds the least interesting. They mirror what the scene is already doing leaving the scene flat and one dimensional. They are the right choices but not interesting choices. In auditions, most actors will be using the same scene analysis process to make the same right choices and at the end of the day none of them will stand out. Actors
Read More

Creation is a physical activity not a mental one. The body can create better and faster than the mind. The actor’s process entails a lot of analysis using their minds, and it’s a big reason actors don’t pop on camera. They’re stuck in their heads so they don’t pop on screen. Next time you’re about to start working on a piece of material and before you do any analysis, try this… Everyone and so every character is a product of their environment. Imagine the environment of the story. Imagine the lighting, mood, temperature, textures and feel. Now create a human
Read More

What makes award-winning performances so memorable, so powerful, and so award winning is because the actors entertained us as serious artists. Most actors are good at the part about being serious artists. What they forget at their careers’ peril is the part about being entertainers. The difference between an artist and an entertainer is the artist does it for the art and the entertainer does it for the audience. What makes great actors great and filmmakers want to cast actors is when actors are both. As film artists, it’s all of our jobs to entertain our audiences so that we can
Read More

The first character ever created was a hero. The first story ever told was the story of a hero’s journey. The main reason audiences have been watching and reading stories ever since is because the hero’s story is the story we all imagine we are living. It is the story we dream. What all heroic characters have in common is a mission to save. Even independent dramas about characters struggling to relate are peopled with every day, emotionally flawed heroic characters trying to save someone or something. It is their overriding characteristic. It dictates how every moment in every scene
Read More

Actors ask “What’s my frame” or “What’s my framing?” because they want to know how much room they have to move in the film frame. The answer to the question is “Why would you want to move?” You’re not going to move any more in the wide shot than you are in the medium shot or else the shots won’t cut together. If you have to move on camera, move back and forth and not side to side. Side to side movement makes an actor look less experienced because side to side movement is harder to edit. Back and forth
Read More

Directors and casting directors can tell if an actor’s self-tape audition took the actor a couple of takes or many. The way they can tell is whether the scene and the actor look well rehearsed. Rehearsing for camera is dangerous because it’s very difficult for the well rehearsed actor to fool the camera into thinking something spontaneous is happening. We’ve all heard the phrase “You can’t lie to the camera”. Over-rehearsing can also be problematic on set. Actors tend to think about scenes as a whole instead of a collection of pieces. Filmmaking is the process of creating pieces which
Read More

Actors love to cry. They also love to play anger but if they can create genuine tears, that’s the holy grail. It’s a right of passage. It means they’re a real actor. An actor shedding tears, however, is usually the least effective way to make an audience shed them. What will? When your character’s involved in an argument, don’t argue against the character with whom you have a relationship, argue for the relationship you have with the other character. The character that struggles to achieve something positive while engaged in a conflict scene is the character that makes the camera
Read More

Actors, on the whole, are the most loyal members of the film business. They’re probably too loyal for their own good and definitely more loyal than the rest of us often deserve. They are especially loyal to writers. They give writers the benefit doubt even when they have a feeling a writer hasn’t written something very good. Actors assume writers know best when everyone else in the business assumes they don’t. If actors knew what writers know about writing, they might not be so loyal, and that would be just fine with writers and the film camera. Actors assume everything
Read More