Directing Actors

It's been a good week. Interesting, hard, fun, lots of work, frustrating and awesome all rolled up into one week. Kind of exhausting to experience all those emotions in five days.

This week was all about directing actors. It was honestly like learning to speak Icelandic or something. I never thought it was so complicated. Let's see if I can explain.

To tell an actor "in this scene you're angry and humiliated because she just insulted you" is to assume how a particular character is responding to the situation. It makes the actor focus on herself.... "Okay, so I'm angry. That's what I'm feeling. I gotta pull out some anger and humiliation... what does that even mean?"

Instead, you paint the picture of the scene and let the actor pull out an honest feeling that they can identify with themselves. Then you have the actor apply an action back to the person who did the insulting. So I would say, "She just insulted you in front of your friend. How do you feel about that? Now... you want to make her pay for that comment. Don't let her get away with it." According to actors, that much more "playable" action and it gets the focus off trying to force a reaction versus really responding to the situation. Does that even make sense? 

It's so hard to do! I have such a natural tendency to say, "okay, this line here, just be more happy." But have you ever tried to just be more happy? It's nearly impossible to force an emotion.

So it all makes sense... it just bends my brain a little to direct that way.

Here are a few pics from our shoot yesterday. I was directing for the first time ever. Hooray for firsts!

Our scene was set in a hospital.
It was just a little class assignment to practice some stuff we'd been learning in class
but it still took us eight hours to do!

Our actors. They were troopers!