Acting for Camera
My background is theatre, but I’ve spent a considerable amount of time now educating myself about how to work with actors that are mainly focused on screen acting. And the first thing that I want to say is that nothing I teach at ACS, aside from perhaps Shakespeare, is any different for stage as it is on screen. The approach that we work from works equally well for the recorded arts and some say better, although I doubt that it troubles theatre very much.
It was during the Kahleen Crawford ‘Demystifying Casting’ Masterclass that I began thinking about this blog. I attended both masterclasses and I heard her say twice about how the camera registers every thought, and that was the main difference between acting for stage and acting for camera. Last week, the wonderful Mel Churcher gave us her perspective of the technical differences for the actor in a blog about thedifferences between stage and screen acting.
Today, and only briefly really, I want you to think about what makes good acting for camera.
First off, you have to look comfortable when someone has a camera in your face. You need to be at your most natural in a most awkward situation. Up to your knees in sludge, shouting lines you don’t like at someone who isn’t there, while looking natural on the camera, and then doing it again and again (in film) or again (tv). This naturalness is impossible to fake. And this leads me to believe (not a new thought, just a reconstituted one) that acting for camera is really about you. Not the character, not your method, but you being as authentic as possible. You simply can’t show, perform or act. You can only be and do. Without pretend, without performance. The moment you do that, you start telling a lie. And truth happens in every moment of the camera’s unblinking eye and it will catch you faking every time. So when you’re preparing to act for camera, we need to know how to get closer to our authentic self.
Second, there are camera skills to learn, but these are very simple and just take a bit of practice, but they’re likely to be similar things if you were to make a little movie of your own. So basically, you can learn a lot of the basics from scratch yourself. Of course there’s things that you can only learn working with others.
Third – you don’t get a warm up – you need to be ON, now, no one is going to wait for you and your precious preparation, method or whatever you need to ‘get in character’, that’s nonsense, you just need to be ready, and they’re burning daylight and dollar bills. All that character shit is nonsense anyway. the idea of the job of the actor is becoming someone else, or creating a character is built on a fallacy. On screen, there is no character, there’s you. Naked, vulnerable and captured for ever on tape.
Fourth and finally, you need to show a little bit of this you to the casting people. Because on camera that looks like gold, you look perfectly natural, totally authentic, beautiful even – but this is why, because you are, it’s no trick, it’s not magic technique, it’s a sincere and honest authenticity, coupled with script skills and the ability to work off even the most boring casting assistant reading like they’re a robot or like they’re a frustrated actor, complete with bombast. You need to show this if you’re self taping, or in a room with them. Because basically, all that performing and character crap, it doesn’t wash.
Acting for screen, is bringing the authenticity of you to each moment in front of the camera. You can’t do that pretending anything, you are your performance. Mull it over.