Objectives Annotation.
I went in the church,/ I saw the bodies,/ I saw you/ and I took the shot./ I picked you up/ and I ran./
To inform/ To describe/ To recall/ to inform/to reassure/to admit.
Tuesday, 15 October 2013
Character Exercises
Character Exercises
You will create many different types of characters in order to flesh out your story. Obviously, the protagonist - hero or anti-hero - is your main character and deserves the most attention. However, most stories also include an antagonist, hopefully a villain that is complex and layered, and then there's the plethora of supporting characters - friends and rivals, even symbolic and nonhuman characters - that are essential to moving the story forward. When creating characters - main and supporting - it's helpful to explore them through writing exercises. These five character exercises are designed to help you develop and strengthen your characters.
1. THE MONOLOGUE
Objective: Learn a character’s insights, thoughts, and feelings.Exercise: Write a monologue that accurately portrays your character. What is he/she feeling at that moment? What is his/her hopes? His/her fears? What does he/she love? Hate?
Remember: The character is speaking to him/herself.
Hints: Use the character’s speech patterns and vocabulary - their voice.
2. THE SPEECH
Objective: Use exposition to learn a character’s past experiences.Exercise: Write a speech (1 page) in which your character describes, explains, tells, or preaches about a specific event, experience, or idea. Here are some suggestions:
- Explain his/her FIRST LOVE AFFAIR.
- Recall his/her experience of DISCOVERING A DEAD BODY.
- Describe the BIRTH OF HIS/HER FIRST CHILD.
- Lecture on a situation of INTERNATIONAL MILITARY CONFLICT.
- Preach about the PRACTICAL VALUE OF ATHEISM.
Remember: The character is speaking to someone or even to a group of people. Decide who your character is addressing. The specifics of your character’s audience will affect word choice and presentation.
Hints: Use the character’s speech patterns and vocabulary - their voice.
3. CHARACTER ENVIRONMENT (ROOMMATES)
Objective: Explore the things people surround themselves with that define character.Exercise: Describe a bedroom where two people live. They can be college roommates, siblings, lovers, husband/wife - it's up to you. You are to describe the room three times in script form (NO DIALOGUE - TWO PAGES MAXIMUM):
1) The first time the two people live in harmony.
2) The second, there has been a fight between the two roommates.
3) The third, one of the roommates has moved out.
Remember: The tricky part is you are to describe only the room. There are no people in any of these scenes. Use objects, furniture, clothes, etc… to differentiate between the two roommates. Don't just list objects. Write with a sense of discovery. The way in which you reveal information is important. It affects our understanding as well as our emotions.
Hints: Subtle, but clear, changes should occur to the room as their relationship dissolves. We should know from the descriptions who these people are, what happened, which one started the fight, what the fight was about and who moved out.
Questions that should be answered: Who are these two people? What are their ages? What do they
look like? How long have they lived together? What was the argument about? Who started it? How did they deal with it? Who moved out?
4. CHARACTER BIO
Objective: Dig deep with a character, discovering background history, personality, psychology, and current goals.
Exercise: Write a character biography (1 page) of a person who is unable to love. Base this on someone you know. Know everything about this character: looks, family, religion, childhood, etc. Use the details of real life - the life you know. Then select from what you know, and describe the character in dramatic, cinematic terms - that is, in ways that are of use to a screenwriter.
Remember: Most of all, you must know and articulate the reason why this character is unable to love. What is holding him/her back? What does he or she fear will happen if he/she fear will happen if he/she falls in love? Rejection? Certain disappointment, e.g., was there once someone he loved that no one can ever live up to? Finally, how does he imagine himself at moments when he has a chance to love someone but doesn't? Fragile? Tired? Protective? Noble? Wise?
5. CHARACTER INTRODUCTION
Objective: Make your character stand out.
Exercise: Write a scene (1-3 pages) that introduces your character. Use description, props, wardrobe and dialogue that give your character a unique voice.
Remember: Introduction scenes are often scenes of the “status quo” - the character living his or her everyday life before the inciting incident propels the character into a new conflict.
Hints: Action speak louder than words. If your character is in a group, have them do something specific and unique that makes them memorable and interesting.
Example: COOL HAND LUKE (1967) - The opening scene to the screenplay by Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson originally had two sections of dialogue of Luke talking to himself as he cut off the parking meters. What you will read here is the way we see the final edit of the film. Clearly, dialogue was unnecessary to illustrate Luke’s tragic flaw: defiance.6. PLAY THE PART OF YOUR CHARACTER
Objective: Discover details about your character by playing the part.
Exercise: Go to a location and make decisions as your character.
Remember: Truly be the character. Even the cold-blooded assassin needs to eat. Everybody goes to the grocery store, but not everybody shops the same. Choice – the act of selecting or making a decision – marks the difference between people. And how a person goes about making the choice is incredibly revealing.
Hints: Clearly, this exercise can be applied in any location: order a burger as your character would, pick up some books in the library that only your character would read, walk through the mall and go into stores that your character would shop in.
Character Creation Exercises
Character Creation Exercises
Researching Character/Play
Historical, Cultural, Social, Political
Finding given circumstances
Hot Seating
Improvised Scenes
Create the previous scene
Working with physical objectives
Playing objectives
Finding useful physical objectives
3 Line Scenes
Taking Direction
Working on a prescribed set
Acting Skills
Voice Warms Ups
Sirening
Breathing
The tip of the teeth and the lips
Peter picked a peck of pickled peppers
Physical Warm Ups
Cat stretch
Rolling down the spine
Pull and Pressing Exercise
Shoulder Rolls
Energy
Status
Emotional State
Physicality
Evaluation
Skills Audit 1
Skills Audit 2
Evaluate what learnt already
Evaluate your ability to communicate character using voice and body.
Evaluate your awareness of audience and space.
What makes you a great actor
Character building and what makes a truly great actor
What makes an actor truly great? The actor's job is to bring a scripted character to life. RADA's Dee Cannon outlines 10 questions that must be addressed in order to create a fully-realised three-dimensional person
Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest Photograph: HO/REUTERS
Acting technique is paramount to anyone wanting to be a serious actor. It's quite easy to imitate a character or even an emotion, but where's the depth in that? How can you sustain or repeat again what you might have found intuitively? Do you even know what you did or how you did it?
The technique, however, will help you find a character, which in turn informs how you approach the text/script/written word. How do you bring the dialogue alive? How do you know what choices to make? The goal of a trained actor is to become a fully realised three-dimensional character, with a rich backstory. I must believe the character you play is truthful and not a cliche, a caricature, a thin external representation of someone who barely resembles a human being. I must believe what you say is real and that you're not reciting, spouting or commenting.
In order to help you understand, I will lay out the backbone of what I teach at RADA and around the world to professional and student actors alike. This is based around Stanislavski's acting technique and his seven questions which, over the years, I have adapted into 10 key acting questions every actor should answer in order to be a fully rounded and connected actor.
1. Who am I?
2. Where am I?
3. When is it?
4. Where have I just come from?
5. What do I want?
6. Why do I want it?
7. Why do I want it now?
8. What will happen if I don't get it now?
9. How will I get what I want by doing what?
10. What must I overcome?
1. Who am I?
The first question is dealing with the type of person you are. I'm sure if I asked you that question, you would be able to tell me about your family background, your parents, grandparents, siblings. You would be able to describe them in detail. Also the house you grew up in, what it looked like, inside and outside. Your favourite room, what you could see out of your bedroom window, the smells you remember. Your earliest childhood memories, the kind of games you played, family holidays. Your education, favourite teachers, best friends, times you got into trouble. Your first kiss, first job, your likes and dislikes, influences, attitudes, anecdotes. All these good, bad, funny, interesting experiences shape us into who we are today. Most people don't walk around with all these memories on their shoulders like baggage. They've seeped into our being, our muscles, our subconscious, allowing us just to be, to exist.
When you play a character in theatre, TV or film, you should know your character as well as you know yourself, so you can just exist and live. Of course that doesn't just magically happen, nor does it evolve just from rehearsals. As an actor you have to plant those memories, anecdotes and backstory.
So how do you build a character? Well, first a good script should give you some initial information about your character, and also what other characters say or think about your character can be very revealing. All this should be extracted and written down in a separate notebook. The next stage is research. You need to find out through detailed research what the history, economics, politics, music, art, literature, theatre, film, foods, fashion, religion might have been at the time the play was written, in order to know how you would have lived and what and who your influences were, just as you know these things in real life. Possible sources include the internet, films of the era and finding images of landscape, as well as going to museums, art and photographic galleries. Fill your mind with images - not facts and figures. The more visceral your understanding, the better.
The final stage in building a character, once you've filleted the script and completed your research, is to use your imagination to flesh out the details you've gathered and bring them alive. Don't underestimate the power and the necessity of your imagination in the acting process. You can't use your imagination without the backup of research and reading. Nor can you use your imagination alone.
2. Where am I?
You might find in the script a description of the room you're supposed to be in, including details such as the style and period of the furniture. What does it mean to you though? Is your character supposed to be familiar with the surroundings? Is it the first time you've entered this room? Is it a cosy cottage? A freezing barn? A familiar street? We usually behave differently depending on our surroundings. You need to establish your relationship with your environment because this affects the way you use yourself. For example, you wouldn't start walking around, touching ornaments and putting your feet up if it wasn't your home. The geography will have an impact too: playing someone from very cold northern climates such as Norway or Russia will be different to playing someone in a baking Mediterranean climate such as Italy or Spain.
3. When is it?
We need to know what season it is, what year, what time of day. We tend to carry ourselves differently in the colder months than we do on hot, muggy summer days. We would also hold ourselves differently if the piece was set at the turn of the century. We must be aware that we can't bring our modern physicality to a play that is of another period. People expressed themselves differently then and didn't slouch or use modern gestures.
4. Where have I just come from?
You need to work out what your character has been doing, where they've been. When you make an entrance on stage it shouldn't look as if you've just stepped on stage from behind the curtain. Even if that's true, you should have worked out during rehearsal where you would be coming from - the bathroom, having just brushed your teeth? The kitchen in the middle of baking an apple pie? The car after being stuck in traffic? Shopping? What is your state of being supposed to be on your entrance? Does it tell you in the text? Has your director informed you of what they would like it to be? Or do you have to invent it? What's just happened in the scene before? Have you just had an argument? Have you just been proposed to? Whatever the situation, you should always know your previous circumstances at all times. It can be good fun inventing it, and no entrance should ever be the same. Just think about real life: do you always enter your house in the same way every night? No. Where you come from will have conditioned your mood.
5. What do I want?
This is a key question. "Want" means what do you need, what is your intention, your motivation, your action? You should never walk on stage just to play a scene. You should always have an objective. Often in a good script, an objective is written into the scene: to end the affair, to propose, to move out. Your action can change from scene to scene but you should always work out what you are meant to be doing.
You may be in a scene, for example, where you have very little dialogue. Instead of sitting doing nothing, give yourself a physical action, which can be anything that fits your reason for being in that room, from making a salad to polishing your nails. Even if you are pulled away from what you're doing, so long as you're doing something, you've always got something to return to once you're no longer engaged in conversation. The importance of this is so that you don't look or feel silly on stage doing nothing. You must have a life on stage, you must have a purpose for walking and talking, otherwise you are in danger of "just acting", which is fake. Don't forget you're trying to be truthful and three-dimensional, and in real life, no one ever comes into a room and stands with their hands by their sides or sits with their hands in their lap and just talks.
6. Why do I want it?
You must always have a strong justification for your action. All right, perhaps in real life we don't always have a strong justification for everything we're doing but, particularly in the theatre, you always need one. Most plays present a heightened version of reality (this can be different for the naturalistic performances and stories we see on television, particularly in soap operas). Having a strong justification means you have a strong motivation.
7. Why do I want it now?
The "now" gives you an immediacy that is crucial in acting and in any drama. You must know why your motivation has to be right now, not before, not later but now. Why should we sit through two hours of this play if you're not that bothered about getting the money or the house or the power?
8. What will happen if I don't get it now?
The stakes should always be high. Otherwise so what? The consequences of not getting what you want should always be very important to you. If the high stakes are not clear to you in the play, you need to invent them, otherwise it will come across that you're not bothered at all about the outcome.
9. How will I get what I want by doing what?
This question brings us on to how you break down a script. How do you know how to play the line as opposed to how one should say the line? There's a big difference.
Once you've worked out what your action is (question 5) you then have to work out your smaller action, which is called an "activity". You need to work out how you are trying to affect the other person with what you are saying.
One way of doing this is called "actioning" your text. Break your script up into chunks: every time you have a new change of thought, you need to find a transitive verb, a verb that is active, such as to beg, to entice, to charm, to get sympathy (a good thesaurus is very handy here). Remember that this technique is not about the emotional content of what you are saying or feeling but about what you want the other person to feel psychologically. By playing these chosen activities you are trying to make the actor that you are playing opposite feel something specific in order to further your action.
So, you have to think: how can I affect the other character by doing what? At this stage you should know who your character is, and your choice of active verbs should be informed by your character choice and not your personal choice. If my character was a loving, open, sweet, sensitive young girl and my dialogue was: "I don't love you anymore, I think you should go", my verb will be determined by my above characteristics and not by the actual line itself. Therefore verbs such as to plead, to get sympathy, to reason, should be chosen, as opposed to verbs that might reflect another type of character, such as to demand, to threaten, to hurt. If in the rehearsal a choice doesn't work then you can change your choice. Nothing should be initially set in stone.
I like to call this process "scoring" your text. Just as a musician or singer would rely on their score to know how to sing or play their song, an actor works out how to play the monologue, scene or play. Once you've done it, you have to play it fully, otherwise it's pretty pointless. The challenge is the execution of it. It's time-consuming initially to find the right verbs, but once you have them and tested them in rehearsal, not only will you have given your performance light and shade but also depth. It also means you do not have to fall into a dreadful cliche performance by thinking of how to say the lines and what you should be feeling and emoting. This technique allows you to be free and truthful without playing external emotion. It's really about what you don't say and trusting that actions will speak louder than words.
10. What must I overcome?
Every actor should always have an inner and an outer obstacle. The outer obstacle is the resistance (usually the other character) to obtaining your action. The inner obstacle is your inner conflict, which you must always plant in a scene even though it can change. There must always be a problem you are trying to overcome. If you think of yourself in life, you're never without an inner obstacle. You'll have seen scenes on stage or screen where the inner obstacle has not been properly planted: you get a load of actors just shouting, over-emoting and sometimes just playing the aggression. If the inner obstacle is there, the anger, fear or hate, for example, then you've got something to fight against in the scene. Much more interesting.
Actors may believe that they can do without formal training. But I have worked with untrained actors, who have landed a film or a TV series on the basis of their looks, and seen them struggle to be able to reproduce what they were able to do in the first take. Natural ability will get you so far, but it's the trained actors who know what they're doing and how they're doing it and can produce that emotion take after take.
To fully transform into a character, to be truthfully and emotionally connected needs hard work, technique, good direction. But the audience should see none of this. They should see nothing other than the fully realised three-dimensional character right in the truth of the moment.
• Dee Cannon teaches acting at RADA
What makes an actor truly great?
Great acting, like great writing, is often in the eye of the beholder, but audiences almost always know when they are in the presence of something special. Talent may be enough to get by on screen and TV, but with a few notable exceptions such as Kelly Reilly, the untrained actor often fares badly on stage. The performances that most often thrill us are those where instinct and technique are both in perfect balance but also opposition, and flamboyance and inner life collide head on, transforming feeling into thought and words. When this mixture of abandon and control ignites, what happens is as mysterious as alchemy; the theatre crackles; it leaves the spectator reeling. It makes you believe Eric Bentley's thesis that "the purpose of theatre is to produce great performances."
Many actors have tricks to help them along the way. Laurence Olivier liked his putty to mould a nose, or a costume department hump as much as the next actor. But it wasn't these external props that made him a great actor; it was something that he mined from deep inside himself, something that perhaps the poetic might call soul. You can teach people timing, you can teach them how to stand; you can give them the infrastructure that allows them to take risks, but you can't teach them to be in touch with their own spirit. All great actors are, and it is what makes them distinctive. Fiona Shaw, Clare Higgins, Michael Gambon, Judi Dench: it's as if there is something coiled but restless inside them struggling to get out. When it does, the stage ignites.
•By Lyn Gardner, Guardian theatre critic
:)
SKILLS AUDIT
SKILLS AUDIT
STUDENT NAME: Emily
Performance skills
· Voice (projection, control, accents, singing confidence)
· Characterisation
· Rehearsal skills
· Movement/physical skills
· Different styles of acting (Comedy? Shakespeare? Emotional work?)
· Confidence in working with text
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Out
of 10
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Current skills and experience
· Characterisation
· Rehearsal skills
· Movement/physical skills
· Different styles of acting
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Areas to improve
I need to improve on my voice, know where to make it lauder or high pitched thn lower and not as that pitched.
I need to be more confident with my text I'm working with.
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Do you have skills or experience in any of the following?
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Out of 10
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Current skills and experience
Skills to develop
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Other skills in the workplace
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Current skills and examples
Areas to improve
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Friday, 11 October 2013
Nominations for best blog.
Nominated Blog: nicolefarahactingskills.blogspot.co.uk
Blog Author: Nicole Farah
Why do you think this blog deserves the Excellence Award?
Nicole's blog is very clear and easy to understand.
It's explaining about how to improve and what to do to be better.
Nominated Blog: laraaroqundade.BlogSpot.co.uk
Blog Author: Lara Arogundade
Why do you think this blog deserves the Excellence Award?
It's very explaining and clear, the concept is great, that's why I chosen this blog.
Friday, 6 September 2013
Good/Bad Acting
What is good acting?
- >‿‿◕
First, have a clear understanding of the motivation of the character you are playing in each scene. You need to understand how each scene connects together so that you have a good idea of what is going through your characters mind.
- Never do the same as the actor or actress in the movie did. Make YOUR character unique.
- Make body movements!
- Try to do actions someone would really do.For example,if you're sad,show it in your eyes,not only your mouth and your voice.
- Study your lines. If you don't know them, you will freeze up onstage!
- What is bad acting?
(ﾟДﾟ|||)
- When The emotions may be too big or it may seem as though the actor isn't really feeling anything, but is just repeating lines they memorized without understanding why they are saying them.
Don't yell when trying to be heard in the back of the theatre.
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1. Try not to cry 2. Lie on the floor 3. Cry a lot