The Science of On-Camera Acting

by Andréa Morris

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  “Most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they’re doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they’re doing. There is a craft.”

  Meryl Streep2

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  Placebo effect: when belief makes it so

  The placebo effect occurs when you do something you believe will benefit you and you experience the benefit because of your belief—but there’s no real benefit in the thing itself. In so many fields, and none more so than acting, confidence plays a pivotal role. Feeling like you have a good handle on your craft can positively influence the outcome. In contrast, self-doubt can have a crippling effect on performance. An elegant theory can soothe an actor with confidence and confer a sense of mastery, even when nothing inherent in the theory itself can be shown to produce results on-camera. Aside from placebic confidence, it’s sometimes tricky to determine if there’s really anything of value within the approach itself; something that isn’t merely correlated with talent but has a hand in helping you create great performances. If confidence were all that was required to be a great film actor, all actors could train at the “School of Placebo Effect,” submit to the placebic delusion, and go on to have wonderful careers. Confidence may be necessary for your wellbeing and it can go a long way toward pacifying your inner critic. But that doesn’t mean confidence is a sufficient condition for great performances. I’ve seen just as many bad confident actors as good confident actors. And some of the most memorable performances were those performed by an actor riddled with self-doubt. After wrapping principal photography on The Accused, Jodie Foster thought her performance so poor that she’d never work again. She went on to win best actress Oscar for that role. Paul Newman has said, “I started my career giving a clinic in bad acting…”3 Kate Winslet came away from shooting Sense and Sensibility feeling like she had made a horrible mistake. Winslet too went on to be nominated for her role in that film.

  Confidence is a conduit to mental health and happiness and has its value alleviating anxiety under pressure. But factors other than confidence are needed to generate strong performances. A danger of relying on an approach’s placebo effect is that it is highly susceptible to doubt. If a single element of the approach fails in even the most minor way, doubt may creep in that can undo the placebo effect. If a placebo was pretty much all you were getting from the approach, in an instant you could be left with nothing.

  Escalating irrational commitment

  Escalating irrational commitment may arise from the sunk-cost fallacy, a principle used in psychology, business, politics, and military strategy. It describes the common human characteristic of staying the course even though there’s likely a better way, because of how much you’ve already sunk into it. You have to ask yourself: is my course of study causing progress that the camera can see?

  Confirmation bias

  One of the tenets of science is to avoid confirmation bias—our psychological default tendency to seek out evidence that supports our views and beliefs and ignore evidence that might disprove them. An essential part of validating our beliefs is to try to disprove them. Applied to actors, this means you have to try the opposite of what feels right. Many of the experiments will feel wrong yet produce exciting results on-camera.

  Chapter Endnotes

  1 Adler, Stella, in interview, “Stella Adler on the Stanislavski Method,” YouTube.com video, posted by Orco Development, December 18, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvnBrE9wCI, accessed August 7, 2014.

  2 Streep, Meryl and Wendy Wasserstein, “Meryl Streep,” Interview Magazine, www.interviewmagazine.com/film/meryl-streep#_, accessed July 6, 2014.

  3 Newman, Paul, "Newman Gets Animated for New Film." Reuters - TVNZ. June 7, 2006, accessed August 6, 2014.

  The Camera: your teacher, best friend, and greatest collaborator

  Within a couple months of graduating university I was auditioning and working in films again, having effectively forgotten my acting training. I produced and performed in a short film, and my work was the strongest it had ever been. But since I was still running up against some of the same old acting problems I clung to the conventional notion that finding the right course of study rounds you out as an actor (escalating irrational commitment). This time though, another trek up the side of mount Sisyphus was averted by the acquisition of a video camera.

  I started experimenting. My friends and I would prepare for auditions just as we normally would. Once we were ready, I’d film us running through our auditions. During playback we bore witness to how many of our choices were way off base. None of us were spared this realization. We did our homework and our choices felt honest and true. We were grounded in character and in the moment. The scene might play exceedingly well in the mirror or to another actor or coach, but when we recorded it and played it back, the choices didn’t always work. The camera interprets human expression with a distinct perspective. Since the majority of auditions are on-camera, not checking in with the camera before showing up for our appointments was clearly putting us at a disadvantage.

  In the early 2000s I was sitting in a small waiting room that smelled like pine air freshener mixed with new paint. Framed posters of the casts of TV shows graced the foyer. Folding chairs were lined up next to each other, each occupied by an actor or actress flipping through their sides1 and running over the last of their lines with their lips moving slightly, or trying to relax by disappearing somewhere inside themselves. From just behind the door a voice invigorated by relief suddenly exclaimed, “Thank you!” A moment later the door opened and an actress skipped out, telling everyone to break a leg as she beat it for the parking lot. A woman came out of the office, checked the call sheet, looked up and said, “Sarah?” Sarah jumped to her feet, greeted the casting associate and followed her into the room, where stood a small camcorder on a tripod. I scanned those actors remaining in the lobby, recognizing most from this or that film or show, or other waiting rooms like this one. A tall actress arrived, flipped her freshly blown-out brunette hair, teetered over to the sign-in sheet in her four-inch heels, and exclaimed, “Good God, the traffic!” Everyone nodded. An actor in a smoking jacket, jeans, and Keds tried to assert his status by recounting how difficult it was to get to all his auditions that day. Another actor with the beginnings of a soul patch sprouting beneath his bottom lip made a quip to cut the tension that hung in the air. A second later we all sat uneasily, pretending not to pay any mind to the voices echoing clear as a bell through the paper-thin walls. Sarah spoke with the casting director about how much fun she was having recurring on a popular NBC show, then launched into an audition that made two-thirds of the actresses in the waiting room realize they’d misunderstood the subtext of the scene. The other third either already understood the subtext, or still didn’t.

  My inner chatter reflected on an actor’s turn at bat. One artistic swing. Athletes have targets to focus on, a clear objective. A means of measuring. A more perfect execution. But perfection isn’t a goal for actors. Perfection is too clean. You swing, absent the focal point of a ball, allowing impulse to surprise even you. Sarah was still in the room. It must be going really well. A lot better than the actor before Sarah, who was in there less than two minutes and came out looking pretty dejected. Or maybe that was backward. Maybe the actor who was in there before Sarah nailed it and the casting director is trying to work with Sarah because she’s physically right, if nothing else. Either way, in a moment Sarah will be walking past studio hangers, trying to find her car in a football-field-sized, blue-cement parking lot that looks like a massive dugout swimming pool, because when it’s not used for actor parking, the studio floods it and blows at it with giant fans, creating a proxy for an angry sea during multi-million-dollar scenes with Tom Hanks. Then Sarah will have a careful conversation with her agent, “It went great…I think…What was the feedback?” Followed either by relief
or defensiveness, while she assures her agent that it went well because she’s a consummate professional, or that the poor feedback has some crazy explanation. In any case, she’ll have no real idea, as casting was the only one who actually saw it.

  Actors are told not to think about this. The host of reasons someone gets a callback or cast are too many and confusing to try to guess at. You must simply let it go. The audition process, an occupation of rejection, doesn’t allow you to stand by your work. Nor does it give you the opportunity to gain insight from most of your mistakes, because you never see them. And your agent is even more removed. I didn’t mind being vulnerable but I didn’t care for being weak, and the entire situation seemed either deliberately or repercussively set up to keep actors suppliant. Actors who are great at auditioning aren’t necessarily the best actors for the job either. Auditions are an entirely different beast. Neither actors nor casting directors consider the process ideal. I started daydreaming about a way to knock out prereads, and maybe even book jobs by simply submitting a prerecorded audition that could also serve as a visual-learning aid for feedback.

  Instead of calling my agent as I walked past the studio hangers I called my father, a robot-building hobbyist from whom I inherited a love of technology. I explained my vision of setting up an online-audition-streaming platform and he was intrigued by the challenge. These were the days before YouTube–the video-sharing site came online in 2005. Flash had yet to emerge as a video-browser plug-in. Most videos were small, pixelated, and suffered from chronic buffering. In 2004 we managed to create the first online-audition videos that were clean and played smoothly.

  It took a couple years for the platform to catch on. At first agents and managers in Los Angeles insisted no casting director would be interested. When I finally met an agent who thought it was cool and started using my online audition for pitching, casting directors paid attention. It was something they hadn’t seen before and they were intrigued by the new technology, which has since been mainstreamed. Because it was new, they were forthcoming with suggestions to help refine and tailor the process.

  Necessity begot self-reliance. Frequent filming meant even a reader became something to dispense with. I started using a piece of gaffer’s tape stuck to the wall just off-camera as my eyeline. I’d then perform my audition, leaving dead space for the other character’s dialogue, which I’d record later in GarageBand.2 Once I’d recorded the other character’s lines, I’d export them as a separate audio track and lay it into Final Cut Pro editing software. Export, upload, send. I’d always thought acting was a strictly social art form, but independence and isolation gave way to a new depth and fearlessness while experimenting on-camera. Working alone was suddenly both unavoidable and indispensable.3

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  “A classic study of musicians compared world-class performers with top amateurs. The researcher found the two groups were similar in every practice variable except one: the world-class performers spent five times as many hours practicing alone.”

  Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code 4

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  Soon I was testing5 for series out of my soundproofed, tungsten-lit walk-in closet, sending streaming auditions to the creators on location, getting notes, and making adjustments. A Showfax.com membership6 allows downloads of twenty-four sides a day, so in-between auditions I worked on-camera with sides on the far outer reaches of my range, which got me called in for stuff against type. Auditioning for a variety of roles and getting feedback from everyone involved in the casting process, as well as feedback from the camera, allowed for a kind of training afforded screen actors in the 1930s and ’40s who cut their teeth on B movies.

  With this process I began spending a good deal of time behind the camera. An interest in directing developed as I filmed auditions for friends and then referrals, sharing with them the tips and tricks I’d been acquiring. I felt a profound allegiance toward actors who were bogged down in the morass by vagaries and confusions between so many competing acting theories. I was sure what we do isn’t rocket science, yet somehow science has managed with routine success to send rockets into space.

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  “While we teach, we learn.”

  Seneca, mid-first century AD7

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  The Camera and trust

  You may be born with creative instincts that happen to translate on camera (i.e., you may be a “natural”), but to be a natural does not guarantee mastery. Even natural talents interested in expanding their range cross into unfamiliar territory. Whether you’re honing instincts or developing new skills, appreciation for the camera’s perspective on your work can only be cultivated by watching yourself on screen. This is routinely evidenced by how many actors stop themselves in the middle of their best take saying, “I’m just not feeling it.” There are times when what you’re feeling and what the camera’s seeing will be in accord, but the frequency of this happening appears almost random, particularly in the beginning of on-camera training. Moreover, working on-camera offers objectivity that may become clouded if you are either completely new or have been mollified by success.

  Almost everyone recoils when they first begin appraising their work on screen. It can take time to psychologically adjust to seeing yourself through the camera’s eye, a perspective reversed and linearly removed from the experience of looking at your reflection in the mirror. I tell actors to allow time for the emotional reaction. This is a part of adjusting your perspective. It will only take a handful of work sessions for the initial impact to wear off, and then you will be able to get down to work without distraction. At the other extreme, if you’ve achieved a fair amount of success as a screen actor, being able to see what the camera sees may present a challenge. There are many reasons for this, some more obvious than others, but a recent study out of Cornell University suggests more experience could lead to less rational assessments because of a reliance on a feeling of expertise.8

  Of course, when talking about good and bad performance, we must grant that aesthetic preference will differ. When dealing with talented actors, however, these differences usually reflect style, not ability. If the actor is experiencing success blindness, I don’t expect they’ll trust me if they can’t evaluate the quality of their work on-screen. So I’ll ask them to bring a sibling, trusted friend, or significant other to be their reader during our work session. Those closest to the actor usually have no qualms bluntly offering something along the lines of, “Are you crazy? That sucked.” At which point I can begin to unpack the details about what and how certain behaviors can be adjusted for the camera. Once adjustments are made, the actor is able to see the improvement by comparing the problematic take with the newly improved one.

  Trust is earned

  Actors are told they must “trust the work,” “trust the process,” “trust the director,” “trust themselves.” How many teachers have insisted you trust the work and then looked on like a disappointed parent when you failed them? Your inability to will yourself to trust is not a deficit. It’s an asset for a thinking mind. It is the teacher’s responsibility to earn your trust by showing that the work produces positive results. Trust is not part of the work, it’s an effortless by-product that arises from the work, if the work is worth anything.

  Three vulnerabilities of working without a camera

  The experiments in this book are designed to reveal three vulnerabilities when working without the perspective of the camera.

  1. Creative control

  Actors already have very little control. Why give up more by putting yourself in a position where you’re forced to take other people’s word for your work? This is especially the case if others are assessing your work with their naked eyes and without the perspective of the camera.

  2. Expert bias

  At schools in Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York, I’d watch someone with fresh impulses get on a stage in front of a class and get coached into a worse performance. The instructor would say, “Great job,” everyon
e would courteously applaud, and the actor would hop off the stage none the wiser. Putting your trust in someone else without your own ability to verify your work leaves you open to the logical fallacy of arguing from authority, or expert bias. Expert bias occurs when our brains stop judging situations rationally, after a perceived expert weighs in on the subject. Researchers in a PLOS One study discovered that the area of the brain that controls decision making had a marked decrease in activity when test subjects were given expert advice. The study’s conclusion: “These results support the hypothesis that one effect of expert advice is to “offload”…decision options from the individual’s brain.”9

  Marilyn Monroe couldn’t go anywhere without her acting coach Paula Strasberg, wife of Lee Strasberg, founder of the Method.10 Fame afforded Monroe the luxury of bringing Paula everywhere she went—a total dependence that no doubt added to her deep insecurity, and a problem only money can buy. At any stage of your career, independence is the best investment.