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Saturday, January 12, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
True to herself
By MAK MUN SAN
Actress Tan Kheng Hua may be best known for her role as haughty Margaret in PCK, but she’s quite the opposite in real life.
For 10 years, she played a nose-in-the-air, somewhat insufferable woman on television.
In real life, full-time actress-producer Tan Kheng Hua is thankfully not quite like Margaret, that sister-in-law character she portrayed on the popular sitcom Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK).
She is unaffected and friendly as she welcomes you into her home – a beautiful three-storey restored shophouse in the East – with a warm handshake.
“I was just about to SMS you. I hope you’re not afraid of cats. I have two,” says Tan, who turns 45 on Jan 17.
The other occupants of the house are her 42-year-old husband, full-time actor Lim Yu-Beng, and their nine-year-old daughter, Shi-An. The family has just returned from a skiing trip in Japan and Tan is looking recharged.
Making you a fresh cuppa on her coffee machine– the attentive host quietly reheats the mug halfway through the interview when she discovers it has turned cold – she breaks the ice by prattling on about the “interesting neighbours” she has.
Later, when the photographer asks if she could explore the house for suitable spots to shoot, Tan flings both arms in the air in a dramatic fashion and cries: “Please feel free to do so. Set yourself free!”
Showing you around her “living museum”, she morphs into a seasoned guide, pointing out items in her home with great enthusiasm: a painting done by her mother; an old cabinet from her grandparents; a bed used by her father; a rocking armchair she found abandoned by the roadside.
When you marvel at what a photographer’s dream her stylish habitat is, she turns and exclaims: “It’s easy to make my house look good. It’s hard to make me look good.”
The punchline is delivered with perfect timing, and when you laugh, she grins, clearly relishing the moment.
The theatrics are reminiscent of her PCK screen persona, but it is also to be expected of someone who has spent over 20 years of her life doing serious theatre.
Tan’s resume is so impressive that if you name all the landmark plays in Singapore theatre, chances are she would have been a part of many of them.
Roles that this versatile and dependable thespian has tackled include a prostitute in Beauty World, a lesbian lawyer in Invitation To Treat and even a horse in Animal Farm.
And she has the accolades to show for it.
Displayed on a shelf outside the study is the trophy she won for Best Actress at the 2002 Life! Theatre Awards for her performance in Action Theatre’s Pillow Talk. She played a sick woman confronting her mortality.
And it’s not just the stage that has won her accolades.
In 2001, her work in PCK gave her the Best Comedy Performance By An Actress prize at the Asian Television Awards.
“If we can win awards and get paid twice the amount, that’d be great,” she quips.
Switching to a more serious tone, she adds: “But it does help when you are an ‘award-winning actress’. People know you are not a baby and they do have more respect for you.”
Task-oriented
Dressed in a white halter top from Singapore label M)phosis and three-quarter jeans from budget chain This Fashion, Tan is pencil-thin – a mere 45kg on her 1.6m frame.
It is possibly a result of her hyperactive personality.
With a laugh, she admits to being a “relentless sorter-outer” and cleaning out wardrobes.
“I can’t sit still. If there is no mountain, I will find a mountain to climb,” she says dramatically.
“I’m so irritatingly task-oriented and will always keep looking for the next thing to do or else I just don’t feel right. Blame that on my Mum. She’s exactly like that as well.”
One of the “mountains” she has chosen to climb this year is producing It’s My Life. Directed by her husband, this is a year-long project where teens aged between 15 and 19 receive theatrical and design training, culminating in a youth musical. It is sponsored by insurance company Great Eastern Life, with venue and production sponsor NUS Centre for the Arts.
“We’re committing one year of our lives to it because we feel that when we want to impart something to young people, we can’t and shouldn’t do it quickly,” she says. “Everything in Singapore always seems so rushed.”
Actress Pam Oei, 35, affectionately calls her close friend of 18 years a “kan cheong (Cantonese for anxious) spider” who likes to philosophise about life.
“She would like other people to think that she’s calm and collected, but beneath that cool exterior, she’s actually paddling furiously underwater,” says Oei.
“But she’s also very wise and understands human emotions very well. She can sit and talk to you for hours regarding matters of the heart.”
Long-time friend Valerie Lim, 44, who is co-producing It’s My Life with Tan, describes her as a “motivated person who is always two steps ahead”.
“Some people might find it hard to keep up with Kheng and could be a little intimidated by the way she works so quickly, but that’s the way she is, very focused on what she wants,” she says.
“She is also very true to herself. I’ve never seen her try to be someone she isn’t.”
Indeed, it is the uncensored Tan Kheng Hua who shows up at this interview – not bothered even when her tummy rumbles embarrassingly loud in the middle of our chat.
She tells you blithely that she is the sort who cannot remember important dates like wedding anniversaries, while “Yubes (her term of endearment for Lim) can remember even my old pager number”.
Not surprisingly, she does not know which year they met and had to SMS him to find out.
It was 1989, when she was working in Tangs department store as a marketing executive and he went to borrow some clothes for a play with actor Lim Kay Siu.
According to Tan, it was “lust at first sight”.
“He was leaning against a pillar near the information counter. I saw him and thought to myself how handsome he was. He was hot,” she recounts in her animated way.
Soon after, she happened to attend an acting class at TheatreWorks conducted by him, and they hit it off even though they were both seeing other people then.
Within a month, he moved into her family home, and they lived with her parents for about three years before they got married in 1993.
Fifteen years later, they are still happily together, although Tan candidly reveals they “drive each other up the wall” and have “tested” their marriage.
“Let it be said that, yes, like most married couples who have been together for such a long time, we’ve gone through some major ups and downs but ...” she pauses, searching for the right words.
Then, she looks up and continues in a tender voice: “They (Lim and Shi-An) are my favourite people, you know?”
And what has kept them together all these years, you ask.
“I can’t live without the man,” she says with the certainty of someone who has just stated a time-honoured fact like “I can’t live without air”.
“He knows me so well. He is so much a part of my history and I still have loads of fun with him. Man, that puts him waaaay above anybody else.”
Chasing the dream
Acting-wise, Tan was a late bloomer, having her first taste of it only when she took an elective course at Indiana University in the United States from 1981 to 1983.
Growing up, she was “a jock”, preferring outdoor activities such as canoeing and long-distance running.
The second child of a bank manager and a housewife, she remembers being caned and having chilli rubbed into her eyes whenever she or her two brothers misbehaved.
At Indiana University, she pursued a Bachelor of Science in public and environmental affairs, specialising in mass communication.
As fate would have it, she chose an acting elective class and “instinctively knew I could probably do this”.
After graduating, she started a marketing job at fashion company FJ Benjamin. She then moved to Tangs, where she remained for nine years.
During her corporate career, she juggled work and theatre, often rehearsing and having supper with her fellow actors till the wee hours. After a few hours of sleep, she would be up again, chasing yet another crazy day.
The first play she performed in was John Bowen’s The Waiting Room, directed by Ivan Heng, who is her cousin.
When she turned 30, she decided to become a full-time actor, and tells you with a laugh that she left Tangs before she could receive a watch as her 10-year long-service award.
“I had earned enough for me to use as a buffer. For once in my life, I wanted to feel what it was like to devote one whole day to acting,” she says of her decision.
But in the first two years, she had to do a lot of freelance marketing work to earn some extra income. Then, the TV acting jobs came rolling in one by one, starting with the English drama serial Masters of the Seas.
She soon joined PCK, which “paid for a lot of things” in a decade. Other programmes she appeared in include the variety show Food Chain and the serial Beautiful Connection.
Throughout her TV career, she never gave up theatre, and is now one of the most respected thespians in Singapore.
In 2004, Tan presented her with a much-needed lift when she was facing a “midlife crisis”.
That “strange period” started when she was involved in playwright Eleanor Wong’s trilogy, Invitation To Treat, in 2003, in which she played a lesbian lawyer. The SARS epidemic was then raging, and Tan says she became “a basket case”.
“I was very scared stiff of the uncertainties brought about by the onset of Sars, and this was made worse by the fact that the role was also extremely emotionally challenging,” she says.
It was so bad that she actually cancelled two performances of the trilogy so that she could get herself together, the first time she had ever done so. Eventually, she did get back on stage and finished the run.
But after the play ended, she cancelled all her projects and stopped work for about a year, and travelled with the family.
Then Tan called to ask if she would produce The Revenge of the Dim Sum Dollies, the third in a series of six original satirical musical cabaret shows.
Prior to that, she had also said yes to acting in Cages, her first full-length film in which she played the lead role of a single mother of a blind child.
She says this of the Dim Sum Dollies experience as a producer: “Just standing at the back of the Esplanade Theatre, and watching a full house each night waving their Singapore flags up in the air with fervour and enthusiasm for a show you’ve helped put together brought new feelings in me for theatre. I could love the theatre in a different way.”
In a way, she has come full circle, as her newly acquired role as producer requires her to make use of her skills learnt in the corporate world.
“It’s great to be able to pick up the phone and offer jobs to actors, and write cheques to them,” she shares.
Besides It’s My Life, upcoming projects for this year include hosting a Channel 5 infotainment programme, Slurp; acting in a Peranakan TV dramedy; a performance art piece which might take her to Brussels; and performing in the Beatrice Chia-directed musical The Full Monty.
Towards the end of the interview, Lim and Shi-An return with lunch, and a ravenous Tan tucks into her bowl of fish ball bee hoon soup.
As they banter easily – sometimes noisily as each of them competes to be heard – you sit back and observe Tan in the midst of this picture of familial bliss.
The difference is barely noticeable, but she somehow appears happier and more at peace than at any point during the interview.
“They are my favourite people, you know?” she seems to be saying again, between mouthfuls of her favourite lunch. – The Straits Times Singapore/ Asian News Network
What an actor has to know about the camera?
THE CAMERA, THE LENS AND WHAT IT SEES
The camera is your Audience of One, It will almost certainly be more expensive than you, and probably more temperamental. Loving care and attention is lavished on it and quite rightly too, for without the camera there is no show.
A camera can pan, tilt or zoom. It can be put on tracks to dolly in and out or follow along; it can crane up and down, In a multi camera studio, it can do most of these most of the time. With single camera work, especially on location, it can do all of these at a time price. I can easily explain the technical terms.
Pan rotating the camera through an arc; pan left; pan right; named after the long shots in the early movie days that slowly looked round the scenery; a panoramic view- hence a pan.
Tilt tilting the camera to look down- just what you would expect.
Zoom changing the size of shot by making it tighter (or looser) in a continuous way; it works by using a complex lens that can continuously change its focal length.
Track moving the camera on a set of rails, or on a smooth floor; it is great fun to use, and directors use it to creep closer, back off, and crawl around actors.
Dolly can have the same meaning as track, but also means the carriage that the camera sits on when tracking.
Crane moving the whole camera up or down, often as an actor gets up or sits, so that the camera can remain at eye level.
Left & right The camera’s left and the camera’s right, as seen by the camera operator; because an actor’s left and right are wholly dependent on the direction they are facing, we must use the camera’s left and right, and this has the advantage that these are also screen left and right.
But all these terms only refer to what the camera does in a technical sense, and that is
not what this section is going to be about.
Now for what the camera does that affects the acting:
An imaginary acting exercise
Here is an exercise that I do with actors and students, either new to the camera or with
experience behind them after I have introduced them to the secrets of screen acting – both the once you have come across so far, and ones you will come across in later sections.
I ask an actor to sit on a chair and act for, oh, about thirty seconds while I record the results. He can either speak something he has previously performed, something he knows by heart like a nursery rhyme or song, or improvise something. The person he is talking to should be just to the side of the camera. (This is a good chance to test whether he understands what “ talk to some one camera left” means.) I use the microphone on the end of a boom to get sound, and I set up the camera to record a medium close up of everyone.
I then charge through the exercise, being rather brusque and demanding (just like an unsympathetic floor manager). I ask that the boom brought nearer, or put farther away, then rush the next person in after the first has finished (just like busy crews do to actors when they are trying to finish a shoot on time).
(You can do it yourself now, or imagine that you are doing it. Go on thirty seconds for the camera).
I then play back the results. Oh dear They all forget everything I have told them and go back to what they know stage acting. Except that they are all rather stiff and formal. The vast majority of performer sits or stand there like butterflies stuck in a display cabinet. There is minimal movement, the head is rigid, and if anything of interest is going on, it is often in the hand gestures that, alas, are out of shot.
When played back, you can see that many of these performers, faces are active only in the small area between the moving mouth and gesticulating eyebrows. The actor is only using about 10% of the screen to communicate with the audience. They tend, in fact, to do all those things they think screen acting is, the ones they have told me at the beginning of our acquaintance (do less; be still; keep it all on the face; etc.) and it is all very bad and very boring.
Whenever a camera is recording your performance, think in terms of how much of the camera view you can fill with good, interesting and entertaining information. It is surprising how many performers give themselves restrictions that are not there, as in the above exercise.
In real life if you have something important to say to someone in a room, you don’t say it from the hall outside the door; you go inside to give yourself a good position to deliver your message. In a similar vein, a stage actor does not deliver his best lines from the wings, nor from behind a sofa or another actor. No, often the only place for the actor is right in the center of the audience’s attention.
The camera should be dealt with in the same way. If you have something good to do or say, make sure it is on camera.
If you feel that this is such a truism that it is barely worth stating, then stay on for this next bit.
When two people are on camera speaking to one another, and the shot is a two shot (that is, both people are in the shot), it often happens that one of the actors cannot be seen well, because he is looking toward the other actor. I could, of course, also put the camera the other side of them and get a reverse matching two shot, but this takes extra time and effort that would be saved if the first actor had simply cheated his face toward the camera.
Cheating
There is a lot of cheating that goes on in front of the camera. Those who do it well know that it is necessary and do it even before being asked. They also provide a motivation for the “cheating” so well that the audience thinks that it is the character that needs at that moment, to bring his face to the camera, and so the “reality” of the scene is maintained.
Two pictures follow. One is of two people talking where the person nearer the camera is not cheating well. The result is that we cannot see her face clearly, so we either have to put in another camera shot extra time and effort or we are going to miss all that is happening on her face. Next is an example of a well-cheated face. Here you can see that although the impression is still given of two people talking together, the one nearer the camera has cheated her face around so we can see both faces, and so get messages and information from both expressions as the scene is played. To be able to do this, and to be able to do this so well that no one notices any artificiality, is the hallmark of a good and useful screen actor.
This idea of providing a motivation for the camera is quite easily understood when you think in terms of stage moves or gestures. A necessity (for example, a character needs to be got away from the door to clear it for an upcoming entrance) must be disguised cheated if you like as a character move, such as the character “discovering” that he needs to cross away from the door to examine a picture on the wall just before the other character comes through. The technical necessity is motivated so as to appear to be a character need. If you are cheating then it is necessary to make it appear that whatever you are doing, is exactly what your character would want to do at that time. In the picture the actor is disguising the fact of bringing her face to camera by looking at her teacup, she has motivated the cheat.
The camera also “needs” a motivation to move. For example, if the camera is looking at one person, and is then going to pan to another person, and is then going to pan to another person, then it looks a bit odd if the camera suddenly charges off on its own. Instead it looks much better if the first person gives a little look with the eyes or moves the head, to motivate the camera to pan from one face to the other.
The actor will often be asked to do these little camera-motivating moments. During a discussion between several people, the camera will repeatedly need to go from one person to another, and it works better if the cut occurs as the actors give an “eye-flash” to the other speaker.
Often, the director will want the size of shot to be changed, say by zooming in to a close up of a face for a climactic moment, but does not want the zoom to be so blatant. (They do not seem to mind about this so much in daily soap opera.) One way of doing this is to have a character crossing the shot (for example, a maid with a tray of drinks) just as the camera is zooming in, so the actor’s move motivates the camera to zoom in, the camera zooms as the actor moves, and no one notices the huge change of shot size.
Mirror shots
How many times have you seen on screen an actor facing a mirror, his face reflected in it? Many, many times, we directors, I am afraid, find mirrors completely irresistible. We are always arranging it so that the actor can be seen in many different angles and ways. But think about it for a moment. If the camera can see the actor’s face, then the actor is not seeing his own face, but is seeing the camera! So all those living looks and gestures into the mirror are not real, cannot be real, but are the usual cheats I have been talking about that make screen acting so very different from the realism some thought it was. Every mirror shot is by definition a cheat, and the actor has to pretend to be seeing himself some times you can see wildly angled mirrors that are held or come away from the wall (a matchbox behind the mirror can bring it. Out to get the correct angle). You can now see it looks so silly, but the job is to make it look real, to provide a motivation so that it appears that it is the character, your character, who wants to hold the mirror that way and allow the camera to see your face in the reflection.
During that lovely moment in “The Apartment” when Jack Lemmon’s character looks at himself with his new bowler hat and recognizes the crack in the mirror. He was not looking at himself but was actually looking at the camera, pretending to be having an emotional moment of seeing his new hat and then the cracked mirror: screen acting, good screen acting.
If you have a camera, try it out now; with the camera doing certain moves, and work out how the actors can help to motivate it.
A useful screen actor is one who understands the need to motivate camera moves and gives to the camera (all right, gives to the director, the editor, actually gives to himself) those little moments that allow the program to be cut together well (and so giving himself more screen time).
Speed of movement
A very common technique in starting a scene is to present a picture of a cup of tea (a glass of wine, a mug of beer) and tilt up with it as the speaker drinks, to reveal the scene. If a camera tilts (or pans) too rapidly, the effect is unsettling to the audience, so the actor will be asked to slow down that particular move. This leads to another “rule” Slow down moves so that the camera can follow them without bringing attention to it. There is such a thing as a “television rise” when, to get out of a chair, instead of doing it normally the natural thing is to lower your head as you start to get up you put one leg under the chair and use it to sort of smoothly glide up and out of the chair. This allows a camera that is on your face to follow you easily as you get up.
This changing speed of movement is particularly applicable when walking past the camera, since the camera must not pan too fast or the scenery rushes past on the screen in an unnatural way, and attention is brought to the mechanics rather than the drama of the movement. This means that the actor is often asked to walk at a normal pace as he approaches where the camera is lurking, but to slow down just as he passes the camera. Be very careful that in slowing down your moves you don’t slow down your speech. The rubric is:
Talk fast and move slowly
This is quite difficult if your character is in a fast mode, such as being very angry. It really feels so odd to walk slowly across the room to grab your antagonist while words cascade out of you. Yes, it will feel most peculiar but look natural and wonderful they may even say that the camera “loves you”.
This love that is ascribed to the camera really, of course, works the other way round. Those actors who really love the camera, who play everything to the Audience of One that they know the camera to be, are the ones who understand the true nature of screen performance. Don’t be confused, do not play to the cameraperson or to the director, just to that friendly little lens that soaks up all your best moments and is your gateway into the hearts and minds of your eventual audience. Just imagine that your Audience of One is nearer or farther away from you according to the size of shot and then act naturally.
Because you are acting to the special Audience of One, even when you are on a set, you cannot always see what a fellow actor is doing. Even the director cannot be sure. There are many stories from the business like how, for instance, Laurence Olivier thought Marilyn Monroe was giving a nothing performance in the film. The Prince and the Showgirl, which he was directing, he watched her performance from sitting under the camera could not see what she was doing and so thought her performance inferior. However, when he went to watch the rushes, all her wonderful talents were to be seen, and he realized that her skills included putting into her close-ups all those extra moments and thoughts that stage actors expect to do with their bodies. (In an earlier publicity shot of new starlets, you can already see this camera loving quality of all the starlets who were posing for a group of photographers, only Marilyn was quietly, confidently smiling right into the camera lens.)
Red carpet treatment
Because it is only an Audience of One, the camera has a very n arrow view of life, and the camera sees in depth, not in breadth. The problem here is that all actors who have had anything at all to do with stage acting think in terms of breadth, of moving apart to allow the audience to see another character, to make room for the other actors to breathe. “For a camera it is all different. Imagine that there is a red carpet stretched out from the camera and all you have to do is, wherever you are, keep on the red carpet. In real life and on stage when the group gets bigger we sort of stretch out sideways; for the camera, stretch out lengthwise--- always keeping on the red carpet.
Try it out now as an exercise. Place three people next to each other, and look at them side by side on the screen. Then get them in a line, have the camera look down the line, and see the difference.
Experiment with positioning, and you will find that to get, say four people on the screen in reasonable proportion, we need to stretch them out in a long line ( all on the red carpet), or at least compose them in depth, so that the camera can see them all, nearest to farthest.
People stretched out sideways demand such a wide shot that we can barely see who’s. People stretched out in depth can all be seen well, the only difficulty being that the person nearest the camera has to cheat to make sure we can see his face when talking to the others.
Reference: “Secretes of screen acting” By: Patrick Tucker
The camera is your Audience of One, It will almost certainly be more expensive than you, and probably more temperamental. Loving care and attention is lavished on it and quite rightly too, for without the camera there is no show.
A camera can pan, tilt or zoom. It can be put on tracks to dolly in and out or follow along; it can crane up and down, In a multi camera studio, it can do most of these most of the time. With single camera work, especially on location, it can do all of these at a time price. I can easily explain the technical terms.
Pan rotating the camera through an arc; pan left; pan right; named after the long shots in the early movie days that slowly looked round the scenery; a panoramic view- hence a pan.
Tilt tilting the camera to look down- just what you would expect.
Zoom changing the size of shot by making it tighter (or looser) in a continuous way; it works by using a complex lens that can continuously change its focal length.
Track moving the camera on a set of rails, or on a smooth floor; it is great fun to use, and directors use it to creep closer, back off, and crawl around actors.
Dolly can have the same meaning as track, but also means the carriage that the camera sits on when tracking.
Crane moving the whole camera up or down, often as an actor gets up or sits, so that the camera can remain at eye level.
Left & right The camera’s left and the camera’s right, as seen by the camera operator; because an actor’s left and right are wholly dependent on the direction they are facing, we must use the camera’s left and right, and this has the advantage that these are also screen left and right.
But all these terms only refer to what the camera does in a technical sense, and that is
not what this section is going to be about.
Now for what the camera does that affects the acting:
An imaginary acting exercise
Here is an exercise that I do with actors and students, either new to the camera or with
experience behind them after I have introduced them to the secrets of screen acting – both the once you have come across so far, and ones you will come across in later sections.
I ask an actor to sit on a chair and act for, oh, about thirty seconds while I record the results. He can either speak something he has previously performed, something he knows by heart like a nursery rhyme or song, or improvise something. The person he is talking to should be just to the side of the camera. (This is a good chance to test whether he understands what “ talk to some one camera left” means.) I use the microphone on the end of a boom to get sound, and I set up the camera to record a medium close up of everyone.
I then charge through the exercise, being rather brusque and demanding (just like an unsympathetic floor manager). I ask that the boom brought nearer, or put farther away, then rush the next person in after the first has finished (just like busy crews do to actors when they are trying to finish a shoot on time).
(You can do it yourself now, or imagine that you are doing it. Go on thirty seconds for the camera).
I then play back the results. Oh dear They all forget everything I have told them and go back to what they know stage acting. Except that they are all rather stiff and formal. The vast majority of performer sits or stand there like butterflies stuck in a display cabinet. There is minimal movement, the head is rigid, and if anything of interest is going on, it is often in the hand gestures that, alas, are out of shot.
When played back, you can see that many of these performers, faces are active only in the small area between the moving mouth and gesticulating eyebrows. The actor is only using about 10% of the screen to communicate with the audience. They tend, in fact, to do all those things they think screen acting is, the ones they have told me at the beginning of our acquaintance (do less; be still; keep it all on the face; etc.) and it is all very bad and very boring.
Whenever a camera is recording your performance, think in terms of how much of the camera view you can fill with good, interesting and entertaining information. It is surprising how many performers give themselves restrictions that are not there, as in the above exercise.
In real life if you have something important to say to someone in a room, you don’t say it from the hall outside the door; you go inside to give yourself a good position to deliver your message. In a similar vein, a stage actor does not deliver his best lines from the wings, nor from behind a sofa or another actor. No, often the only place for the actor is right in the center of the audience’s attention.
The camera should be dealt with in the same way. If you have something good to do or say, make sure it is on camera.
If you feel that this is such a truism that it is barely worth stating, then stay on for this next bit.
When two people are on camera speaking to one another, and the shot is a two shot (that is, both people are in the shot), it often happens that one of the actors cannot be seen well, because he is looking toward the other actor. I could, of course, also put the camera the other side of them and get a reverse matching two shot, but this takes extra time and effort that would be saved if the first actor had simply cheated his face toward the camera.
Cheating
There is a lot of cheating that goes on in front of the camera. Those who do it well know that it is necessary and do it even before being asked. They also provide a motivation for the “cheating” so well that the audience thinks that it is the character that needs at that moment, to bring his face to the camera, and so the “reality” of the scene is maintained.
Two pictures follow. One is of two people talking where the person nearer the camera is not cheating well. The result is that we cannot see her face clearly, so we either have to put in another camera shot extra time and effort or we are going to miss all that is happening on her face. Next is an example of a well-cheated face. Here you can see that although the impression is still given of two people talking together, the one nearer the camera has cheated her face around so we can see both faces, and so get messages and information from both expressions as the scene is played. To be able to do this, and to be able to do this so well that no one notices any artificiality, is the hallmark of a good and useful screen actor.
This idea of providing a motivation for the camera is quite easily understood when you think in terms of stage moves or gestures. A necessity (for example, a character needs to be got away from the door to clear it for an upcoming entrance) must be disguised cheated if you like as a character move, such as the character “discovering” that he needs to cross away from the door to examine a picture on the wall just before the other character comes through. The technical necessity is motivated so as to appear to be a character need. If you are cheating then it is necessary to make it appear that whatever you are doing, is exactly what your character would want to do at that time. In the picture the actor is disguising the fact of bringing her face to camera by looking at her teacup, she has motivated the cheat.
The camera also “needs” a motivation to move. For example, if the camera is looking at one person, and is then going to pan to another person, and is then going to pan to another person, then it looks a bit odd if the camera suddenly charges off on its own. Instead it looks much better if the first person gives a little look with the eyes or moves the head, to motivate the camera to pan from one face to the other.
The actor will often be asked to do these little camera-motivating moments. During a discussion between several people, the camera will repeatedly need to go from one person to another, and it works better if the cut occurs as the actors give an “eye-flash” to the other speaker.
Often, the director will want the size of shot to be changed, say by zooming in to a close up of a face for a climactic moment, but does not want the zoom to be so blatant. (They do not seem to mind about this so much in daily soap opera.) One way of doing this is to have a character crossing the shot (for example, a maid with a tray of drinks) just as the camera is zooming in, so the actor’s move motivates the camera to zoom in, the camera zooms as the actor moves, and no one notices the huge change of shot size.
Mirror shots
How many times have you seen on screen an actor facing a mirror, his face reflected in it? Many, many times, we directors, I am afraid, find mirrors completely irresistible. We are always arranging it so that the actor can be seen in many different angles and ways. But think about it for a moment. If the camera can see the actor’s face, then the actor is not seeing his own face, but is seeing the camera! So all those living looks and gestures into the mirror are not real, cannot be real, but are the usual cheats I have been talking about that make screen acting so very different from the realism some thought it was. Every mirror shot is by definition a cheat, and the actor has to pretend to be seeing himself some times you can see wildly angled mirrors that are held or come away from the wall (a matchbox behind the mirror can bring it. Out to get the correct angle). You can now see it looks so silly, but the job is to make it look real, to provide a motivation so that it appears that it is the character, your character, who wants to hold the mirror that way and allow the camera to see your face in the reflection.
During that lovely moment in “The Apartment” when Jack Lemmon’s character looks at himself with his new bowler hat and recognizes the crack in the mirror. He was not looking at himself but was actually looking at the camera, pretending to be having an emotional moment of seeing his new hat and then the cracked mirror: screen acting, good screen acting.
If you have a camera, try it out now; with the camera doing certain moves, and work out how the actors can help to motivate it.
A useful screen actor is one who understands the need to motivate camera moves and gives to the camera (all right, gives to the director, the editor, actually gives to himself) those little moments that allow the program to be cut together well (and so giving himself more screen time).
Speed of movement
A very common technique in starting a scene is to present a picture of a cup of tea (a glass of wine, a mug of beer) and tilt up with it as the speaker drinks, to reveal the scene. If a camera tilts (or pans) too rapidly, the effect is unsettling to the audience, so the actor will be asked to slow down that particular move. This leads to another “rule” Slow down moves so that the camera can follow them without bringing attention to it. There is such a thing as a “television rise” when, to get out of a chair, instead of doing it normally the natural thing is to lower your head as you start to get up you put one leg under the chair and use it to sort of smoothly glide up and out of the chair. This allows a camera that is on your face to follow you easily as you get up.
This changing speed of movement is particularly applicable when walking past the camera, since the camera must not pan too fast or the scenery rushes past on the screen in an unnatural way, and attention is brought to the mechanics rather than the drama of the movement. This means that the actor is often asked to walk at a normal pace as he approaches where the camera is lurking, but to slow down just as he passes the camera. Be very careful that in slowing down your moves you don’t slow down your speech. The rubric is:
Talk fast and move slowly
This is quite difficult if your character is in a fast mode, such as being very angry. It really feels so odd to walk slowly across the room to grab your antagonist while words cascade out of you. Yes, it will feel most peculiar but look natural and wonderful they may even say that the camera “loves you”.
This love that is ascribed to the camera really, of course, works the other way round. Those actors who really love the camera, who play everything to the Audience of One that they know the camera to be, are the ones who understand the true nature of screen performance. Don’t be confused, do not play to the cameraperson or to the director, just to that friendly little lens that soaks up all your best moments and is your gateway into the hearts and minds of your eventual audience. Just imagine that your Audience of One is nearer or farther away from you according to the size of shot and then act naturally.
Because you are acting to the special Audience of One, even when you are on a set, you cannot always see what a fellow actor is doing. Even the director cannot be sure. There are many stories from the business like how, for instance, Laurence Olivier thought Marilyn Monroe was giving a nothing performance in the film. The Prince and the Showgirl, which he was directing, he watched her performance from sitting under the camera could not see what she was doing and so thought her performance inferior. However, when he went to watch the rushes, all her wonderful talents were to be seen, and he realized that her skills included putting into her close-ups all those extra moments and thoughts that stage actors expect to do with their bodies. (In an earlier publicity shot of new starlets, you can already see this camera loving quality of all the starlets who were posing for a group of photographers, only Marilyn was quietly, confidently smiling right into the camera lens.)
Red carpet treatment
Because it is only an Audience of One, the camera has a very n arrow view of life, and the camera sees in depth, not in breadth. The problem here is that all actors who have had anything at all to do with stage acting think in terms of breadth, of moving apart to allow the audience to see another character, to make room for the other actors to breathe. “For a camera it is all different. Imagine that there is a red carpet stretched out from the camera and all you have to do is, wherever you are, keep on the red carpet. In real life and on stage when the group gets bigger we sort of stretch out sideways; for the camera, stretch out lengthwise--- always keeping on the red carpet.
Try it out now as an exercise. Place three people next to each other, and look at them side by side on the screen. Then get them in a line, have the camera look down the line, and see the difference.
Experiment with positioning, and you will find that to get, say four people on the screen in reasonable proportion, we need to stretch them out in a long line ( all on the red carpet), or at least compose them in depth, so that the camera can see them all, nearest to farthest.
People stretched out sideways demand such a wide shot that we can barely see who’s. People stretched out in depth can all be seen well, the only difficulty being that the person nearest the camera has to cheat to make sure we can see his face when talking to the others.
Reference: “Secretes of screen acting” By: Patrick Tucker
Saturday, January 5, 2008
THE JOB OF THE ACTOR
MANY PEOPLE think that the stage is the actor’s chief medium, and in many ways it is. At the acting school and for the first few years after he joins the profession, he will try and concentrate on the theatre. There are several reasons for this. In the first place his acting is not polished enough to be seen by a large audience or in a big London theatre, and he will be forced to work in some provincial repertory company. The pay here will be very small and at first the parts will only be a few lines. A good deal of his time will be spent in acting as assistant stage manager, in helping the designer and wielding a paint brush, and doing any odd jobs which are too humble to be done by any else. If he is a wise young man, he will do these jobs willingly and as efficiently as he can. One cannot know too much about the practical side of the theatre, whether one is going to be an actor, a writer, or a director. The theatre is, in fact, a very practical place and one never knows when some piece of knowledge will come in handy. But there is another important reason why the actor should work in repertory, and that is that the contacts he makes will stand him in good stead later on. The directors, only a few years older than himself, may later on be directing in an important theatre, or even in the West End, and it is amazing how young men (or women who have done a small job well and willingly are remembered. (This, of course, applies in all walks of life. But an actor who inevitably goes from job to job throughout his career relies much more on his personal reputation than most people.)
From a purely acting point of view, these first years in rep. are invaluable because the actor is playing to a live audience night after night. He can learn to “play to the audience”, as we say, sense its mood and experience the wonderful communication which flows to and fro across the footlights. Sometimes the audience will be big and responsive; sometimes it will be small and unresponsive. Sometimes it will be quiet and need drawing out of itself; sometimes it will need dampening down. And by playing night after night, and learning how to treat each kind of audience, the young actor or actress gradually becomes more polished in his craft. He can acquire the wonderful gift of timing, which is the mark of all good actors. Another point is that he will be playing in dozens of different plays. Dramas, comedies, farces, costume pieces, thrillers and even pantomimes and musicals. He may even have to learn to dance and sing. In Elizabethan times, actors were very versatile; they could not only act, sing and dance, but could also do acrobatic tricks, juggle, fence and conjure. In modern times, performers have tended to specialize, possibly because most people can only reach a high standard in one or two fields. But with the changing taste of the Theatre, actors again have to acquire a whole range of skills. They can nearly all fences, and a good many can dance and sing. As they will probably appear in films sooner or later they also have to learn to drive cars and lorries, ride on horseback and swim. A few learn foreign languages so that they can act abroad or take parts as foreigners.
These first few years in an actor’s life are very hard indeed, and he will have little time for rest, sleep or outside interests. Good health and strength, apart from acting ability, are absolutely vital to an actor. Very rarely will he have long periods of rest, except when he is out of work and then he will be occupied in the search for work.
Sooner or later the actor decides he must break out of rep. and come to London to seek his fortune and make a name for him self. Perhaps he hopes to land a part in a long running West End play, or in a film, but the chances are that his first job will be in television. There are about twelve thousand professional actors in this country and only about a thousand to fifteen hundred are employed in the theatre at any one time. By far the bulk of their work is in television. Apart from the B.B.C, there are now fifteen independent companies, and they all do plays, drama documentaries and other programs using actors. I do not suppose that there is a day in the year when a hundred to a hundred and fifty programs are not in rehearsal.
How does an actor get into television? He may know a producer or director, either through having worked with him in the theatre, or because of meeting him at some social engagement. If he does not, then he reads the Radio Times and the TV Times and studies carefully what is going on. Then he writes to producers asking for an interview or audition and encloses a photograph. All actors must have large numbers of photographs because they send out dozens and only a few come back. Some directors will not reply. Only a few will reply quickly, and most will reply in a few weeks. This is not because they are lazy but because while they are rehearsing, they are away from their offices and it is only between productions that they can catch up with correspondence. Even when an actor gets an interview or an audition, the chances are that no work will follow immediately. This is hard but inevitable. There are so many actors for each part that the majority is bound to be disappointed. With actresses the position is much worse. Often what happens is that a director will remembers an actor’s face and, when a suitable part comes up, get in touch with him. Occasionally, of course, very occasionally, an actor walks into an office, reads a part, and is told he is just what the director is looking for. If this happens he should thank his lucky starts.
However, sooner or later, by luck or persistence, the young actor gets his first job in television. The fee is agreed with either him or his agent (if he has one), the contract is sent out and signed, and he receives a copy of the script, with the name of his own part underlined. What every actor does, of course, is to thumb through the script immediately to see how many lines he has got and whether he or she give him the chance to create a character. Actors do not mind a part being small if it is what they call “a part” this is, the character they are playing is not just a doctor or detective or railway guard, but a particular doctor, detective, or railway guard. If thee are one or two ”good lines” that is, witty or effective lines which give him the chance to shine, then the actor is delighted.
His next step, if he is a wise actor, is to study the whole script to understand what sort of play or documentary it is. He will not study it in the all round terms of the director, but will concentrate on the question of the style of acting required. Whether the script is modern or period, realist or poetic, or fantastic, he can spot at once. But each play has its own tone, its own atmosphere. If the subject of the play is new to the actor, he will spend a few days before rehearsals trying to learn something about it. If, for example, it takes place in a Turkish bath, then he will go to one, talk to the attendants, watch how they go about their job, watch the people taking baths to see how they behave. It is not enough, in fact, for the actor to understand only the character he is playing, he must understand to some extent the sort of world in which that character lives. At the same time, the actor will keep reading his part to become familiar with it. He will ask himself why the character behaves as he does, why he says what he does say. He will study what is known as the “character motivation”. It is quite probable that some things will puzzle him, even after study, and he will note them so that he can ask the director later on. If he can afford one, the actor should use a tape recorder and record himself acting the part. Often actors get together in small groups, read their parts, and criticize ech other. This is a very helpful arrangement. Like the writer when he is creating a part, the actor who is interpreting it must try to make every line, every movement, consistent. Whether the character is cold, hot, angry, resentful, jealous, surprised or contemptuous, he must still remain unmistakably the same person. A hundred characters may be angry, but each will be angry in his own way. Perhaps you have noticed how some people go red, others go white; some shout and others talk quietly; some remain frozen and others weave their arms about. The actor in studying the part must consider all the thousands of ways of portraying emotions and select those which are applicable to the part.
By the time the outside rehearsals start, the actor should know a good deal about the part, and the relationship between it and the other parts. But his ideas should still be flexible; he should be able to modify them and fit them into the director’s conception of the whole play. Sometimes it happens that an actor brings something out of a part which is immediately recognizable as true and exciting. This may have a great impact on the performances of the rest of the cast. They may realize that their own interpretations are conventional or unexciting. And immediately they must set to work to improve them.
When the moves are set and the actors have learned their roles, thee comes the business of polishing the production. Pieces of business are worked in to fit the words and movements together; more and more props are brought in by the A>S>M. so that the actors can get used to them. If the play is a period piece, for example, the actresses will wear long skirts to practise moving in them. The actors may wear swords or helmets.
As time goes on, the actors re left more and more to themselves as the director watches the action through a view finder to work out his shots. Occasionally he will ask an actor to vary a movement to improve a shot. He will ask him to note that a certain position is “critical”. This means that only a slight error will mask a fellow actor, so ruining the shot. The actor must make a mental note of any such instructions and not forget them even in the heat of his performance. It is this process which is one of the great difficulties of television acting. To show you what I mean, let me give an example. Suppose an actor has to make a long speech like this:
“ It’s not what you said that worries me, it,s what you did to her. You knew she was poor; you knew she had no means of defending herself… and yet you cheated her out of the small thing that was hers. The thing which by law and right and decency she was entitled to. You may think I,m stupid making a fuss about nothing. But I,m warning you –I,ve never been so upset in years. I’ll never forget this, and I,ll never forget you”.
In the theatre it is possible that the actor could recite this speech standing in one position, but on television he would probably have much more to think about. It might go like this:
It,s not what you said that Actor stands at the corner of the
Worries me, it,s what you table. Faces slightly left.
did to her.
You knew she was poor, Moves round table keeping clear
You knew she had no of chair. Actor is on Camera 2 -
Means of defending her must edge right slightly. Make
self… and yet you sure he is not masking second actor.
Cheated her out of the Turns to fire-place. Rests arm on
Small thing that was hers. Mantelpiece. Wait till other character
Comes up to him.
The thing which by law Turns and moves towards window.
And right and decency Makes sure that he keeps well to
She was entitled to. Left of cupboard.
You may think I,m stupid- Moves back to table. Slowly puts
Making a fuss about noth- left hand forwards towards scissors.
ing. But I,m warning you- Picks these up and moves forward
I,ve never been so upset in towards the other character. Makes
Years. I,ll never forget this, sure to keep well to left so that he
And I,ll never forget you. is not masked.
From this you can see that the actor has to do three things at once:
1) Speak the lines
2) Produce the necessary meaning and emotion
3) Keep control of his movements
If rehearsals go well, (1) and (2) should be taken over by his sub-conscious mind should be concentrating on his performance, that is, the business of producing emotion and meaning. He must also detach a small part of his mind to deal with sudden emergencies. A fellow actor may give a wring cue, fluff or forget his lines; a door may jam or perhaps a piece of furniture or a prop may not be in its exact position. When this happens the actor must, while carrying on with his performance, do what is necessary to put things right and carry on again.
But I have leapt ahead a little. By the time the outside rehearsals have finished the production is usually going fairly smoothly. Then it is moved into the studio. The early work-through, as I have already mentioned, are long and tedious for everyone, but especially for the actor. The director is not interested in his performance at this stage, being solely absorbed with the business of cameras, lights and all the technical aspects of the production. If he is wise, the actor will use the time to get the feel of the sets and the furniture. For instance, the chairs will be different to those he has been rehearsing with, as will the desks, tables and other items. They may be bigger, which means that thee will be less space for him to move round them. So he must practise moves to make sure that he can execute them smoothly and without bumping into anything. Often you see actors practising the simple business of sitting down into a chair and getting up again.
As the work-through goes on, the actor will be given instructions on his movements and positions. Some effects may not be coming over and he will be asked to emphasize them; others will appear overdone and he will be asked to modify them. All these instructions he must retain in his head – it is impossible to write them down. Sometimes, movements rehearsed carefully for a fortnight or more will look wring before the cameras, and he will have to change them or dispense with them altogether. But he must not let these last minute alterations upset him. He must realize that they will be necessary for the good of the show.
There still remains the question as to what is the basic nature of television acting. How does it vary, for example, from stage acting? The first thing, as you have no doubt realized already, is that the actor must work with great precision and produce his movements, time after time without any variation. On the stage, movements are varied night after night (within limits) and this does not matter.
The second thing, and a much more important one, is that the television camera is much closer to the actor than the theatre audience. He does not have to project himself across great distances. The camera can reach his most fleeting thought and the microphone can pick up the merest whisper. This means that the television performance must not only be on a different scale but it must be of a slightly different texture. It must be thought and felt as well as acted. Eyes and faces become much more important than they are in the theatre. Every living movement can be clothed with significance. Emotions can be seen in such detail that they must all be registered exactly. No rough and ready gestures to portray, for example, anger, hatred or despair, can be tolerated. Effects, which would look satisfactory at a distance, are shown up as crude and artificial by the cameras.
In view of these factors the television actor must therefore above all things be sincere. He must search his heart for the truth and reproduce it as faithfully as possible. To do this, and at the same time to respond to the one hundred technical demands of the medium, needs talent, training and long experience. Many people think that actors have an easy life. I hope that you can see that if they are to do their job properly then they must work very hard indee.
From a purely acting point of view, these first years in rep. are invaluable because the actor is playing to a live audience night after night. He can learn to “play to the audience”, as we say, sense its mood and experience the wonderful communication which flows to and fro across the footlights. Sometimes the audience will be big and responsive; sometimes it will be small and unresponsive. Sometimes it will be quiet and need drawing out of itself; sometimes it will need dampening down. And by playing night after night, and learning how to treat each kind of audience, the young actor or actress gradually becomes more polished in his craft. He can acquire the wonderful gift of timing, which is the mark of all good actors. Another point is that he will be playing in dozens of different plays. Dramas, comedies, farces, costume pieces, thrillers and even pantomimes and musicals. He may even have to learn to dance and sing. In Elizabethan times, actors were very versatile; they could not only act, sing and dance, but could also do acrobatic tricks, juggle, fence and conjure. In modern times, performers have tended to specialize, possibly because most people can only reach a high standard in one or two fields. But with the changing taste of the Theatre, actors again have to acquire a whole range of skills. They can nearly all fences, and a good many can dance and sing. As they will probably appear in films sooner or later they also have to learn to drive cars and lorries, ride on horseback and swim. A few learn foreign languages so that they can act abroad or take parts as foreigners.
These first few years in an actor’s life are very hard indeed, and he will have little time for rest, sleep or outside interests. Good health and strength, apart from acting ability, are absolutely vital to an actor. Very rarely will he have long periods of rest, except when he is out of work and then he will be occupied in the search for work.
Sooner or later the actor decides he must break out of rep. and come to London to seek his fortune and make a name for him self. Perhaps he hopes to land a part in a long running West End play, or in a film, but the chances are that his first job will be in television. There are about twelve thousand professional actors in this country and only about a thousand to fifteen hundred are employed in the theatre at any one time. By far the bulk of their work is in television. Apart from the B.B.C, there are now fifteen independent companies, and they all do plays, drama documentaries and other programs using actors. I do not suppose that there is a day in the year when a hundred to a hundred and fifty programs are not in rehearsal.
How does an actor get into television? He may know a producer or director, either through having worked with him in the theatre, or because of meeting him at some social engagement. If he does not, then he reads the Radio Times and the TV Times and studies carefully what is going on. Then he writes to producers asking for an interview or audition and encloses a photograph. All actors must have large numbers of photographs because they send out dozens and only a few come back. Some directors will not reply. Only a few will reply quickly, and most will reply in a few weeks. This is not because they are lazy but because while they are rehearsing, they are away from their offices and it is only between productions that they can catch up with correspondence. Even when an actor gets an interview or an audition, the chances are that no work will follow immediately. This is hard but inevitable. There are so many actors for each part that the majority is bound to be disappointed. With actresses the position is much worse. Often what happens is that a director will remembers an actor’s face and, when a suitable part comes up, get in touch with him. Occasionally, of course, very occasionally, an actor walks into an office, reads a part, and is told he is just what the director is looking for. If this happens he should thank his lucky starts.
However, sooner or later, by luck or persistence, the young actor gets his first job in television. The fee is agreed with either him or his agent (if he has one), the contract is sent out and signed, and he receives a copy of the script, with the name of his own part underlined. What every actor does, of course, is to thumb through the script immediately to see how many lines he has got and whether he or she give him the chance to create a character. Actors do not mind a part being small if it is what they call “a part” this is, the character they are playing is not just a doctor or detective or railway guard, but a particular doctor, detective, or railway guard. If thee are one or two ”good lines” that is, witty or effective lines which give him the chance to shine, then the actor is delighted.
His next step, if he is a wise actor, is to study the whole script to understand what sort of play or documentary it is. He will not study it in the all round terms of the director, but will concentrate on the question of the style of acting required. Whether the script is modern or period, realist or poetic, or fantastic, he can spot at once. But each play has its own tone, its own atmosphere. If the subject of the play is new to the actor, he will spend a few days before rehearsals trying to learn something about it. If, for example, it takes place in a Turkish bath, then he will go to one, talk to the attendants, watch how they go about their job, watch the people taking baths to see how they behave. It is not enough, in fact, for the actor to understand only the character he is playing, he must understand to some extent the sort of world in which that character lives. At the same time, the actor will keep reading his part to become familiar with it. He will ask himself why the character behaves as he does, why he says what he does say. He will study what is known as the “character motivation”. It is quite probable that some things will puzzle him, even after study, and he will note them so that he can ask the director later on. If he can afford one, the actor should use a tape recorder and record himself acting the part. Often actors get together in small groups, read their parts, and criticize ech other. This is a very helpful arrangement. Like the writer when he is creating a part, the actor who is interpreting it must try to make every line, every movement, consistent. Whether the character is cold, hot, angry, resentful, jealous, surprised or contemptuous, he must still remain unmistakably the same person. A hundred characters may be angry, but each will be angry in his own way. Perhaps you have noticed how some people go red, others go white; some shout and others talk quietly; some remain frozen and others weave their arms about. The actor in studying the part must consider all the thousands of ways of portraying emotions and select those which are applicable to the part.
By the time the outside rehearsals start, the actor should know a good deal about the part, and the relationship between it and the other parts. But his ideas should still be flexible; he should be able to modify them and fit them into the director’s conception of the whole play. Sometimes it happens that an actor brings something out of a part which is immediately recognizable as true and exciting. This may have a great impact on the performances of the rest of the cast. They may realize that their own interpretations are conventional or unexciting. And immediately they must set to work to improve them.
When the moves are set and the actors have learned their roles, thee comes the business of polishing the production. Pieces of business are worked in to fit the words and movements together; more and more props are brought in by the A>S>M. so that the actors can get used to them. If the play is a period piece, for example, the actresses will wear long skirts to practise moving in them. The actors may wear swords or helmets.
As time goes on, the actors re left more and more to themselves as the director watches the action through a view finder to work out his shots. Occasionally he will ask an actor to vary a movement to improve a shot. He will ask him to note that a certain position is “critical”. This means that only a slight error will mask a fellow actor, so ruining the shot. The actor must make a mental note of any such instructions and not forget them even in the heat of his performance. It is this process which is one of the great difficulties of television acting. To show you what I mean, let me give an example. Suppose an actor has to make a long speech like this:
“ It’s not what you said that worries me, it,s what you did to her. You knew she was poor; you knew she had no means of defending herself… and yet you cheated her out of the small thing that was hers. The thing which by law and right and decency she was entitled to. You may think I,m stupid making a fuss about nothing. But I,m warning you –I,ve never been so upset in years. I’ll never forget this, and I,ll never forget you”.
In the theatre it is possible that the actor could recite this speech standing in one position, but on television he would probably have much more to think about. It might go like this:
It,s not what you said that Actor stands at the corner of the
Worries me, it,s what you table. Faces slightly left.
did to her.
You knew she was poor, Moves round table keeping clear
You knew she had no of chair. Actor is on Camera 2 -
Means of defending her must edge right slightly. Make
self… and yet you sure he is not masking second actor.
Cheated her out of the Turns to fire-place. Rests arm on
Small thing that was hers. Mantelpiece. Wait till other character
Comes up to him.
The thing which by law Turns and moves towards window.
And right and decency Makes sure that he keeps well to
She was entitled to. Left of cupboard.
You may think I,m stupid- Moves back to table. Slowly puts
Making a fuss about noth- left hand forwards towards scissors.
ing. But I,m warning you- Picks these up and moves forward
I,ve never been so upset in towards the other character. Makes
Years. I,ll never forget this, sure to keep well to left so that he
And I,ll never forget you. is not masked.
From this you can see that the actor has to do three things at once:
1) Speak the lines
2) Produce the necessary meaning and emotion
3) Keep control of his movements
If rehearsals go well, (1) and (2) should be taken over by his sub-conscious mind should be concentrating on his performance, that is, the business of producing emotion and meaning. He must also detach a small part of his mind to deal with sudden emergencies. A fellow actor may give a wring cue, fluff or forget his lines; a door may jam or perhaps a piece of furniture or a prop may not be in its exact position. When this happens the actor must, while carrying on with his performance, do what is necessary to put things right and carry on again.
But I have leapt ahead a little. By the time the outside rehearsals have finished the production is usually going fairly smoothly. Then it is moved into the studio. The early work-through, as I have already mentioned, are long and tedious for everyone, but especially for the actor. The director is not interested in his performance at this stage, being solely absorbed with the business of cameras, lights and all the technical aspects of the production. If he is wise, the actor will use the time to get the feel of the sets and the furniture. For instance, the chairs will be different to those he has been rehearsing with, as will the desks, tables and other items. They may be bigger, which means that thee will be less space for him to move round them. So he must practise moves to make sure that he can execute them smoothly and without bumping into anything. Often you see actors practising the simple business of sitting down into a chair and getting up again.
As the work-through goes on, the actor will be given instructions on his movements and positions. Some effects may not be coming over and he will be asked to emphasize them; others will appear overdone and he will be asked to modify them. All these instructions he must retain in his head – it is impossible to write them down. Sometimes, movements rehearsed carefully for a fortnight or more will look wring before the cameras, and he will have to change them or dispense with them altogether. But he must not let these last minute alterations upset him. He must realize that they will be necessary for the good of the show.
There still remains the question as to what is the basic nature of television acting. How does it vary, for example, from stage acting? The first thing, as you have no doubt realized already, is that the actor must work with great precision and produce his movements, time after time without any variation. On the stage, movements are varied night after night (within limits) and this does not matter.
The second thing, and a much more important one, is that the television camera is much closer to the actor than the theatre audience. He does not have to project himself across great distances. The camera can reach his most fleeting thought and the microphone can pick up the merest whisper. This means that the television performance must not only be on a different scale but it must be of a slightly different texture. It must be thought and felt as well as acted. Eyes and faces become much more important than they are in the theatre. Every living movement can be clothed with significance. Emotions can be seen in such detail that they must all be registered exactly. No rough and ready gestures to portray, for example, anger, hatred or despair, can be tolerated. Effects, which would look satisfactory at a distance, are shown up as crude and artificial by the cameras.
In view of these factors the television actor must therefore above all things be sincere. He must search his heart for the truth and reproduce it as faithfully as possible. To do this, and at the same time to respond to the one hundred technical demands of the medium, needs talent, training and long experience. Many people think that actors have an easy life. I hope that you can see that if they are to do their job properly then they must work very hard indee.
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