Lecture: Jools: Between Action & Cut 5/11/10

• What is acting: when you portray yourself as someone your not, when you change your character's personality, for a certain role capture a recording, an entertainer, a form of visual art, ability to bring script to life, pretending something is real, recreating human behaviour.
• Acting is the natural process of hearing, thinking and responding in the unnatural environment of knowing what you are going to hear, knowing what you are going to think and knowing how you are going to respond.
• Three Requisites:
• Relaxation- the ability to react quickly and reduce tension
• Concentration: The ability to shut out all distractions
• Recall: the ability to recall experience in detail.
• Beats: are a moment of decisive realisation for any character.
• First step characterising the beats: gives each beat and each dramatic unit a purpose.
• Improvising an interior monologue: have the acts improvise their characters inner monologue.
• Some actors do a scene from memory: use tags as dialogue.
• Rehearsal: develop the cast and relationships, focus the thematic purpose, encourage actors to develop their character.
• Rehearsal is not performance but to get ideas that will work in front of the camera.
• 10 point plan:
• 1. Ideas of what film is about.
• 2. What is means to you personally.
• 3. Each scenes, facts, images and question it raises.
• 4. What the scene is about, how it fits the story graph of the script.
• 5. Possible character objectives and imagination back-story adjustments.
• 6. Beats of the scene, its characterisation and action verbs ideas of how you might work on the beat.
• 7. The Scenes reality and environment.
• 8. Research you have done and research you have left to do.
• 9. Your plan of what you wish to accomplish.
• 10. A blocking diagram (which means you are psychologically prepares to throw away your story board).
• Shooting Script Rehearsal: do not expect your actors to have learnt the lines, you provide the stage direction.
• Characterisation Exercises:
• Inner Monologue
• Tag lines
• Moral Positioning
• Back-Story development.
• If rehearsal is on your shooting day, set the crew off technically, this is where story-board, shot lists, mise-en-scene can pay off, sit with the actors, read lines, find some simple movements and objects, look for false moments and solve them.
• Discuss what the characters objective is for that scene- add stuff slowly in layers and beats, be wary of giving too much back-story all at once, when finishing one beat- deal with the next one in isolation and remember action verbs and images.
• Be aware of the value of bringing objects to rehearsal and be very aware of introducing it to the scene.
• Rehearsals should end with questions, with things for the actors to work on.

Over the weekend of the 5/11/10 to the 7/11/10

I watched two new films and thought I write a couple of notes on here about them, the first one I watched was called Frozen which was directed by Adam Green, is it about three skiers are stranded on a chairlift and forced to make life-or-death choices that prove more perilous than staying put and freezing to death.

I thought this film was extremely good, very good with suspense, bit cringe with some things that happen made feel sick, I was disappointed at the ending but they have left it open I feel for another continued piece maybe.

I also watched a film called Paintball which was directed by daniel Benmayor which is about a truck which is rumbling down a potholed track, in the back sit a group of passengers, their eyes blindfolded, they endure on a task to beat the other opposing team to all the different flags, when the game turns into a deadly life threatening situation, that people are playing with paint balls but real bullets. People on the outside of the game pay to watch people fight for their lives as this game is twisted and turned into a sick trap for these people who thought they were going to be playing paint ball.

I thought this film was fantastic, I liked how it got you to want to literally help the people stuck in there, it was a very good twist, a lot better than what I was expecting from it.