So today, we watched back the neutral scenes we had filmed last Friday. OUCH! I think all of us were shocked, most of the scenes really sucked. Mine included, in spite of having worked well off each other. I was so timid and spineless in the scene, it was painful to watch. Even the last moment when, at the time, I felt like I'd shown some spunk, even that moment was pale and lifeless on film. And the way I was moving when I got up to leave towards the end of the scene, I wasn't even really walking, I was shuffling and my shoulders were slumped--it was HORRIBLE!!! After seeing that, I was thinking, how the hell am I going to be a TV/Film actor?? How the hell am I going to be cast in a play?? Granted, a lot of my performance for this scene had to do with my character choices, which were very much based in the insecure part of my personality. Blah. (And it just now occurs to me, oh yeah, I've already been cast in the Faery Hunt, and I was cast in a couple of plays last year.) But I can pretty much safely say that everyone in class felt the same way I did, it really took the group's morale down to watch those. And it really negatively affected everyone's performance in the new scenes we filmed today.
We only filmed the first few beats of the new scenes we got, we'll film the whole thing as the final performance next Friday. So, I read about half the script of Misery on the Internet Moviescript Database (IMSDb) last night, up through the scene we're performing, and then I got to school way early even to meet my scene partner (I arrived at 8:45, we were meeting at 9:30, traffic was really good this morning) so I took some time to think about my character, write out a little bit of analysis, and I changed my objective from "Get Paul to burn his book" to "I need to save Paul's soul." When my partner arrived, we did some straight repetition between us to help me feel more connected to him, because I still felt like I was in my head and unable to focus on him, then we did some repetition as our characters, which was interesting and got really weird after a short while, since my character is an obsessed Number One Fan.
When we performed the scene for the camera, I still felt physically akward and self-concious, unconnected. Afterwards, Carrie gave us feedback. I had been rushing my lines. She asked what my objective was, and I said "To save Paul's soul". Turns out my previous objective to get Paul to burn the book was better, because it's something I can actually do, as opposed to saving his soul. Saving his soul is an intellectual idea, getting him to burn the book is something active. Then Carrie asked me what I was doing to get Paul to burn the book. I said "I've been having a lot of trouble with that, other than getting in his face and yelling, I have no clue what to do." And at that moment, I realized that's what's been missing from the scene, that's why I've been feeling like I should be doing something instead of standing there like an idiot, that's why I've been having such a hard time feeling connected to him: I didn't have any specific tactics in mind as to how to go about getting him to burn the book. I could mother him, impress him, intimidate him, compliment him, those are all examples of specific actions I can play that will focus me on him, and not on my self or the outward manifestation of being psychotic. (By the way, after I wrote everything down a few days ago about the need to live up to expectations, I let it all go so I can make the role my own.)
So, we watched back about half of the scenes we filmed today, and they all sucked, mostly because we were all discouraged from watching the nuetral scenes. But Carrie told us to stop being so hard on ourselves, we're all in a very good starting place. We all totally understand our characters, what they want, the circumstances surrounding the scene, we all just need to learn to use tactics. She reminded us that most of us have only been acting for six weeks now, so we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves. And I fit into that category too, because even though I have taken many acting classes before, I was not really taught any of these skills previously, or at least not how to use them effectively.
But the thing that strikes me the most about all of this is that the scenes we filmed for the last day of Scene Study at the end of Boot Camp I weren't nearly as bad as these we just filmed for this class. But, then again, Carrie is making us do our own work this time, she's not simply handing us our objectives and actions the way they were handed to us in BCI. So I guess for me, remembering how well my scene at the end of BCI Scene Study turned out is something to hang on to, it's a reminder of my potential once I get more skilled at using these new tools on my own.
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