My Acting Breakthroughs

I feel like I've finally made breakthroughs in my film/drama acting inquiry. I'm listening more closely to my scene partner. This greatly changed the way I act as it's much more like a real conversation. Acting and real life have one main difference; acting has the words all planned out and most of the time in real life you do not. The other breakthrough I felt I have is acting more like myself. I'm not trying to be someone else. I'm reacting as I would in the scene and bringing something to the scene rather than attempting to be something else. Of course as one problem is solved and a breakthrough has been reached, another problem opens up so the learning continues.

Movement in a Scene

I further examined how movement is related to the relationship between the people on stage. I knew the two were related but I was not sure how exactly they were. To my surprise, I understood the concept completely. There's only a few concepts. If one person is "attacking" the other, one person is getting up in the other's face, closer, while the other is probably going away to avoid being attacked. Another concept I learned when two people are flirting or confessing to each other or something along the lines of that. The two people that would most likely be a lot closer as the scene would be more intimate. Or the final concept, both people are going away from each other; they both do not want anything to do with the other. The movement combined with the mood of the scene greatly improved the way the scene looked and felt much more natural.

Establishing Beats

I analyzed the scene I'm working on by dividing it into beats. I found this really helped me understand the scene itself and build a better chemistry with the other character in the scene. I have a better idea of what she's trying to do and her intentions and it helped me better understand my character and his intentions. Each beat revealed something new that helped me in a different way. I feel like I may be getting tactics and beats confused but somehow they're intertwined because the mood of the beat will lead to how you react and that reaction has a tactic whether it's intentional or not. Hopefully the more I learn new things about this style of acting, the easier it will get.

Identifying a Problem

I've learned that one of my main problems is that I'm too focused on being correct. I'm not letting things happen spontaneously in a scene. I'm searching for a particular way for something to be done and that simply doesn't exist. Every scene is done differently. Everyday you will bring something different to the scene. A different director may have a different view from another director. There are so many variables that there can't be one set way to do something. Part of me has always wanted to make sure I'm doing whatever I'm doing correctly and since there is no correct way of doing a scene, it's making this film/drama type of acting very difficult for me. I've made progress but there is a lot more to be done. What I have to do exactly, I'm not exactly sure as I'm still trying to process everything. I'm moving one step at a time and trying to look ahead and plan everything out like I usually do.

Repeating Exercise Struggles

Today we did the repeating exercise and I was completely off on what I said yesterday. I have no idea what I'm doing. I am completely lost. I'm lost in trying to explain why I am lost. That's how confused I am and it's frustrating me. I'm told I'm close to not acting in the scene and acting like myself. I don't know what that feels like when I'm in the scene. I can't tell. If I can't tell when I get it, how will I know when I've succeeded? I'm a very organized person. I always know what I need to do get from Point A to Point B and I know when I've reached Point B. There is no Point A or Point B here. I don't know how to get there and I won't know when I do so this is why it's extremely frustrating. I expect to get more and more frustrated in the upcoming days and even though I'm close to this next breakthrough, I won't know when I do. From what it seems like, it's so simple that when I actually get it, it will feel like nothing so again I won't know I did anything. This frustrates me even more. Essentially, all of this is really frustrating.

More of the Repeating Exercise

I've learned why this exercise slowly gets more and more tedious and boring. I've finally reached that state. But even through the boredom, the exercise still helps. I continued the exercise again today with my partner and it went very well. It came very easily and I'm understanding the concept of it. We applied that to our Odets scene. We went through the scene and if we felt that our partner was either acting or simply saying the line, we repeated what they said until they got it right. I found this extremely helpful. I started to realize even more the difference between actually feeling an emotion going off that as opposed to acting an emotion. This is another major step in my film/drama acting breakthrough.

Bad Art Project

I decided to change what I'm doing for my Bad Art Project. My original idea was to cut up the Foreigner lyrics we were given and put them into a hat and use them in an Improv. The line you picked from the hat would be the only thing you could use in the improv but I wasn't feeling it would work out too well because not everyone enjoys improv. So I decided to change it to a video. The video will be me speaking in the perspective of someone video chatting with another person. I will rip off the audio so you can't hear what I'm saying and in the background, the Foreigner song will be playing. You will be able to tell whether I'm happy, sad, etc based on how I look rather than by the words I'm saying which ties my Acting Inquiry and the Bad Art Project together perfectly as this helps me learn that in a drama/film, the words are nothing but words.