On Tuesday, November the 11th an Actors workshop which was held in studio G12. The workshop was lead by professional director NG Bristow.
We were taught directorial methods, such as;
Rehearsing a scene where the actor is playing somebody blind, then the same performance was repeated except this time the actor was blind folded, this resulted in the performance appearing more genuine.
We were shown a video reel of the comparing two scene from the T.V. pilot L.A. Takedown and its movie remake Heat. It demonstrates how one of the actor delivered the performance unconvincingly and how they attempted to save the scene with quick edits and an added sound cue.
The scene is Heat corrected the mistake and revised the two character's relationship. Al Pachino's character LT. Vincent Hanna and Robert DiNero's character Neil McCauley find that they have more in common than they realises, whereas before that wasn't the case.
On Wednesday, November the 12th there were two actors brought in to rehearse a scene which introduced a method called the ranking.
We were shown a scene from the film Out of sight where George Clooney's character Jack Foley accompanied by Ving Rhames's character Buddy Bragg clash with Don Cheadle's character Maurice Miller and Keith Loneker's character White Boy Bob.
The characters display a persona of dominance and attempt to undermine the other character's rank, this allowed for a wide range of intense emotions to be conveyed by the actors. This technique was implemented the scene that our actors rehearsed.
They were playing two characters in an argument. The actor was playing an the adulterous doctor who's struggling to offer hush money to his maid with whom he had an affair with and is pregnant with his child.
The actress was playing the woman, an immigrant maid whose carrying the child of the doctor.
The doctor attempts to pay her enough so that she'll leave and have enough to raise the child and his wife will have no knowledge of his affair. Outraged by the small amount of child support he's offering she threatens to tell the doctors wife if he doesn't succumb to her demands.
This was a most informal workshop, it presented directing techniques that seemed unconventional but had effective results. I learned a polite way to communicate with actors and to provide the direction needed to achieve both the desired performance but also allow them to express and idea which may in fact be better than what I had in mind, contributing to the film on a creative level.
