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