I spent my Saturday morning at an acting masterclass hosted by Mark Weinman. The session was about getting out of your head as an actor. Not only was it super fun, I found it really useful, not just for as an actor, but also more widely as a creative.
Acting masterclass key takeaway
In the session we played games to loosen up, and towards the end we did some improv work and text work, and I feel like it couldn’t have come at a more suitable time, given that I was going to do some improv work with the guys on the short film in the afternoon.
One of the games was we had to point at someone in the circle and say a letter. The person who was being pointed at then had to quickly introduce themselves as someone with a name beginning with that letter, an occupation beginning with the letter, and being from a place beginning with that letter, eg my name’s Mark, and I’m a mechanic from Manchester. Then the person who just introduced themselves would then point at someone else in the circle and say a letter etc.
The idea of the game is to just keep everything flowing, and just fully committing to saying your choices, even if you’re coming up with absolute gibberish and it doesn’t make sense. I found that when I was drawing a blank and had to come out with some dumb stuff, I was apologizing for the suggestions I was giving.
The aim of the exercise was to convince the other people that you were that person from that place, with that occupation. Even if it’s complete gibberish, you just need to fully back what you’re saying.
For me, this really resonated as an important lesson that can be applied more widely to being a creative in general: That you shouldn’t apologize for giving suggestions, or voicing your opinion or saying something that could be perceived as stupid or ridiculous all dumb. You should always back yourself, and never have to apologise for any ideas you have.
Short film
Just gonna talk a bit about my reflections having shot the short, I talk more about idea of the short film itself in yesterday’s post.
I really felt good about the first few improvs we did, I think we probably over shot, and I let the improvs run a lot longer than they needed to – towards the end fatigue set in with the guys, and the arguments were getting a bit circular.
However, I don’t think this was a bad thing, because I needed to get as many different angles as I could on each of the guys to ensure I could cut the best moments from different takes together. In future, I’ll probably step in in the improv if I feel is going round in circles or isn’t going anywhere.
This time, I shot our heavily improvised short film with just one camera. I felt a lot more liberated to experiment with different angles than I did with our last improvised short.
Takeaways
Doing these improv shot films has made me realise the importance of prep in general, because although sometimes we came up with interesting shots/moments on the fly, I was basically shooting coverage for the scenes, the most vanilla ice cream flavoured type coverage you could get.
It’s made me realise that with short films where I actually have a script, shotlist, and rehearsal time, I need to play around with blocking and camera angles to tell the story in the most interesting way possible.
But also at the same time, it’s made me appreciate the power of improvisation and being in the moment with the other actor.
We got some really great performances, we’ll see if my intuition for getting all the pieces I need to tell the story in the edit was strong enough – I’m excited to see how it turns out.