People often ask me about teaching acting for camera. They
often mistakenly ask me what technique or approach I use.
If anyone ever comes to you and says they have a technique
they have developed for working in front of the camera run far, far away from them
and don’t listen.
They are selling you snake oil.
There is no magic, no secret pill that will make you better
in front of the camera other than being a good actor.
Yes, it’s true you have to adjust things for working in
recorded media be it in film, television, commercials, or new media. You need
knowledge about sets, the language, the people, how things are shot and the workflow.
But there is no replacement for good acting.
There are only two things I am concerned with when working
with students, Truth and No Truth; and I call the camera The Great Barometer of
Truth.
When the camera is recording there is no place to hide, you
are either in the moment being spontaneous and truthful or you are schmacting.
Believe me there is nothing worse than watching yourself schmact. When it’s on
a big screen in a movie theatre, it’s humiliating.
99% of working in front of the camera is being comfortable
and confident there. Feeling like you are free to do your job and god forbid,
be an artist.
Most students of acting spend years on stage and back stage,
in acting classes and in scene studies where the focus is about being on stage.
You spend years working on your voice and speech to be clear, heard, and
resonant. Think of how many plays or musicals a student actor has been in or
been involved with and compare it to how many live sets the same student actor
has been on. See the discrepancy?
I remember my first time working on set as an actor. It was
disorienting. I felt stupid. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing and
much of what was going on around me was foreign and strange (even though I was
more prepared than most). I never want a single student to feel as dumb and
useless as I felt that day. I think back to early jobs and say, “Oh, my gosh!
If only I could have felt like I was free enough on set to act.”
That’s my job, that’s my technique, and that’s my point of
view as an educator. To remove that fear, and make sure you have the knowledge
and the skills to feel confident and competent so that way, when you hear the
word, “Action,” you can actually be free to act, be creative, and be brilliant.
What’s wild is that as actor’s we have a limitless amount of
accessibility towards watching recorded media from network television, to
cable, to the Internet, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube, and Vimeo; programs are
all around us. As actors we can watch all of the work on-camera that we want,
but we get little experience doing it, whereas with theatre, most of us, once
we get the bug, have spent more time in front of an audience on stage than
being in the audience. Weird huh?
What’s even weirder is when one thinks about how much money
one earns in front of the camera versus being on stage. The salary discrepancy
is disgustingly large between the two. How strange is it then, that so many
programs put their entire emphasis on theatre and make the camera the after
thought?
Not that I am saying that we should stop training for the
stage. On the contrary it is essential to the development of an actor. The
roles, stepping out on stage night after night, the language, the sheer skill
involved is amazing, but to ignore the camera as a performer seems like a
terrible idea. It seems like an injustice and since we are solidly in the
digital age, where web series can be shot on an iphone for very little money –
I know it is time to rethink the tools we are sending our students out into the
world with.
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