"What's the difference between acting for the stage and acting for the camera?" your theater school acting teacher invariably asks on Day 1 of your Acting for the Camera class. Fair question. Unfair paradigm.Framing the course in this way plants a seed in the actor, an insidious idea that their characters must behave differently in different mediums and that their instrument must therefore be used differently. That's not to say that there isn't some truth to adapting to the camera, but starting here focuses the actor on the result of the performance rather than on the rich underlying infrastructure of bringing a text to life. An actor approaching a film version of a play may be tempted to start by thinking about "reining it in" or "pulling it back" or otherwise diminishing their expression of the story moments. Beginning with that mentality disconnects the actor from the complex, organic, and potentially spontaneous process of acting.The more useful distinction between mediums is in that very process: The continuous, uninterrupted flow of theater versus the ironically named "continuity style" of on-camera work. For the actor, the fundamental difference in the job is living a story chronologically from the beginning to the end of a scene, as opposed to on set, where the actor repeats moments out of sequence while doing mental gymnastics trying to keep track of blocking, choices, tone, and gesture so the editing process pieces together something resembling a continuous scene. The common challenge in both instances is the artifice:...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Yesterday