Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Missing Parts
- 1 The Moving Parts
- 2 All By Our Selves: Empathy and Acting
- 3 The Actor’s Three Empathetic Connections
- 4 Acting Culture and Audition Preparation
- 5 Empathetic Work Prior to Shooting
- 6 Empathy on Set
- 7 Conclusion: “Ready for my Close-up”
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Empathetic Work Prior to Shooting
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Missing Parts
- 1 The Moving Parts
- 2 All By Our Selves: Empathy and Acting
- 3 The Actor’s Three Empathetic Connections
- 4 Acting Culture and Audition Preparation
- 5 Empathetic Work Prior to Shooting
- 6 Empathy on Set
- 7 Conclusion: “Ready for my Close-up”
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
From Guesswork to Scaffolding
Once an actor passes the audition process and is hired for a screen role, she has a great deal of preparatory homework to do before she arrives on set. This work differs from the audition preparations because she will now have to navigate the performance affordances of narrative options across the entire screenplay. This means that the audition’s frantic preparation and narrative guesswork expands to uncovering and stockpiling a long progression of referenceable bodymind associations and appresentations along the situational character’s intentional throughline, as part of constructing the character’s cognitive scaffolding.
This extensive and overarching preparation is important because many film and television productions are filmed out of narrative sequence, which can mean that an actor may have to perform her most demanding scenes before shooting or even rehearsing the crucial scenes that set up these narrative climaxes. Actor/producer Lauren MacKinlay justifies this type of shooting schedule as a matter of industrial practicality:
As a producer, you need to decide where your money is going. What are the biggest visuals that can support the message and the theme, and what do we want the audience to walk away with? That’s how you structure your shooting schedule. You want the actor to be able to offer things and you obviously want the director to be able to realize their vision, but you also need to say “[…] Is this where our money needs to go? Is this shot the most important shot of the film? If not, we’re moving on.”
It is often more efficient for a whole film production to complicate the actor’s work rather than extend a shooting schedule to allow for creative exploration on set. These disruptive shooting schedules place a premium on the actor’s advance preparations so that the actor can establish some level of character creativity despite performing their scenes out of narrative order.
The disjointed narrative progression throughout the shooting process can pose a great challenge to actors who have not established a firm intrasubjective connection with their character, both on the scene-by-scene level and across the screenplay as a unified narrative progression. Although most of the pre-shoot homework is focused on the intrasubjective work that the actor can control on her own, she can also anticipate crucial intersubjective and performative work that will be of great help once shooting begins.
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- Information
- Screen ActingA Cognitive Approach, pp. 109 - 132Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022