What's the key to working with film?
As an extension of the CLEO bachelor thing (and Kenny Sia's take on it), I was asked to be part of Deal Or No Deal. As a model. Yes, holding one of those briefcases. No, not in a dress.
Contrary to popular opinion, it is not as easy as it looks. It was a rather painful experience as we had to stand there, look good and smile for hours. What looks good on TV isn't necessarily comfortable, so we had a rather awkward standing pose that was neither here nor there for me, and a horrendously wrist-breaking position to hold the briefcases while we stood and waited.
(click the image to try out the game at your own leisure)
Over the course of those hours, I had numerous people mention - oh you must be used to this, you must work with TV lots - and I had to reply numerous times that I wasn't, in fact, and this is one of the harder things about TV that I'm still learning to cope with. Basically, it's the annoying chunks of time between shooting that you hang around and wait for. Especially annoying because you don't know if it'll be 5 minutes or 50 minutes. Or 5 hours, if shit hits the fan.
With a different character to play, it's worse - what do you do, stay in character and try not to piss everyone around you off? Get out and rest, and resummon the energy and character when the time comes? Work harder and build on the character?
The problem is that of balancing character and energy. For a particular scene, your character is this way - and for the overall show, your character is this way (a superset of the scene, ie not radically different to that of the scene). Yet, a scene can be shot multiple times and in multiple times of the day - so you have to remember what your character was like at that time. Then comes in the energy part: your energy will fluctuate over the day, yet it has to be consistent throughout a particular scene and of course congruent over the whole show. And for an intense bugger like me, I burn up tons of energy every segment of "action" and "cut".
So my dilemma is this - what is the key to acting with film? How does one effectively manage the triangular scale of time, character and energy?
Contrary to popular opinion, it is not as easy as it looks. It was a rather painful experience as we had to stand there, look good and smile for hours. What looks good on TV isn't necessarily comfortable, so we had a rather awkward standing pose that was neither here nor there for me, and a horrendously wrist-breaking position to hold the briefcases while we stood and waited.(click the image to try out the game at your own leisure)Over the course of those hours, I had numerous people mention - oh you must be used to this, you must work with TV lots - and I had to reply numerous times that I wasn't, in fact, and this is one of the harder things about TV that I'm still learning to cope with. Basically, it's the annoying chunks of time between shooting that you hang around and wait for. Especially annoying because you don't know if it'll be 5 minutes or 50 minutes. Or 5 hours, if shit hits the fan.
With a different character to play, it's worse - what do you do, stay in character and try not to piss everyone around you off? Get out and rest, and resummon the energy and character when the time comes? Work harder and build on the character?
The problem is that of balancing character and energy. For a particular scene, your character is this way - and for the overall show, your character is this way (a superset of the scene, ie not radically different to that of the scene). Yet, a scene can be shot multiple times and in multiple times of the day - so you have to remember what your character was like at that time. Then comes in the energy part: your energy will fluctuate over the day, yet it has to be consistent throughout a particular scene and of course congruent over the whole show. And for an intense bugger like me, I burn up tons of energy every segment of "action" and "cut".
So my dilemma is this - what is the key to acting with film? How does one effectively manage the triangular scale of time, character and energy?
Labels: film
posted by Jo at 2:01 am
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