The Science of On-Camera Acting

by Andréa Morris

  A study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks at where in the human body people experience emotion.4 There were over seven hundred participants. Most people feel anger resonating in their upper torso, head, and fists, while depression feels like a cooling-off of sensation all over the body. These findings were consistent across cultures.

  You can participate in the experiment online by clicking on the link in the reference section of www.TheScienceOfOnCameraActing.com

  Using audition scenes, I read through a set of sides on-camera, firing up one emotion and keeping it going throughout the entire scene. I read through the first page of a scene twelve times, trying twelve different emotions. I then hooked up the RCA cables to the TV, sat back on my couch with my dog and pressed play. For the first few seconds I was relieved to see that whatever emotion I had put into my body was playing authentically on screen. But it didn’t take more than thirty seconds to see something else was happening. With each new emotion, as I allowed it to resonate without interruption, and sustained it throughout the page, a new character began to emerge. I watched as my body and my voice reacted to this emotion like a musical cue and surges of impulse flowed into some kind of polytonal score. Each sustained emotion, paired with the text, created a character as real as anything produced by the style of naturalism, but entirely unlike myself.

  Sifting through a pile of scenes before landing on a comedy, I jumped in front of the camera to experiment. Sticking to a single emotion as a character throughline meant there was no need to map or plan. The single emotion was a lightning rod harnessing something I didn’t have words for, other than it was working. I performed a scene repeatedly, and new, fresh, funny impulses would surface like a bubbling spring from depths so foreign and exciting it felt outside myself. By having this emotional anchor or focal point, suddenly other, much more creatively charged areas of my brain were unleashed and went feverishly to work. It was a shocking transformation. And paired with comedic material, either complementing or creating humor was effortless.

  Something unexpected had stemmed from an attempt to solve a contrived emoting problem. I set aside any emotional blocks, spontaneously overcoming them, and began to experiment with character studies. What solidified the experience is that emotional throughlines could be faithfully relied upon as catalysts for comedy as well as complex character work, for myself and every actor I shared them with.

  ***

  Dr. Ekman: “Some individuals have a particular emotion that dominates their life. It is the emotion that organizes a lot of their life, the emotion that they most often show, and that others know them by. One such person is the shy person, who’s very apprehensive. Sometimes you can draw them out, but that’s their personality. They are dominated by the emotion of fear. Some people are just hostile, and you keep away from them because they get angry so easily and so often about so many things and that’s what they’re known by. There are some people where the organizing emotion is disdain. They feel themselves superior to others and are somewhat arrogant in their nature. So there are a number of personalities where emotion plays a central, defining role. In a very well-adjusted person, context is going to be the sole or primary determinant. But in a person where a particular emotion dominates their life, like the shy person, or a disdainful person, then the context won’t matter as much. What matters is their underlying emotion, which colors and distorts how they react to the situation.”

  Author: “Can the organizing emotion be positive too?”

  Ekman: “Absolutely. There are people who are ebullient. They’re in such a good mood all the time, and it’s fun to be around them because they always see the positive side of things. They’re cheerful people. So that’s another personality, the cheerful person where enjoyable emotions are what dominate their personality.”

  ***

  Comedy requires the element of surprise. Watching a person have appropriate reactions, make appropriate decisions, decisions we ourselves would make when we are being most levelheaded, lacks any surprise. Nor is it very interesting. Watching someone with an original perspective, offbeat reactions, making unpredictable choices in keeping with the character’s perspective is funny or interesting and frequently both. Audiences enjoy watching interesting and amusing characters move through the world, attempting to overcome inner or outer obstacles over the course of the story.

  Chapter Endnotes

  1 Spolin, Viola, Improvisation for the Theater: a Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1963).

  2 King, Stephen, Good Reads, Inc 2014. www.goodreads.com/quotes/23315-a-tragedy-is-a-tragedy-and-at-the-bottom-all, accessed August 1, 2014.

  3 Greenfeld, Liah, “Modern Emotions: Aspiration and Ambition,” Psychology Today. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-modern-mind/201304/modern-emotions-aspiration-and-ambition, accessed July 7, 2014.

  4 Aalto University, “How Emotions are Mapped in the Body,” ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131231094353.htm, accessed July 6, 2014.

  Emotional Throughlines

  Experimentation distilled a list of emotions that can be relied upon to create great characters for the screen. I call them emotional throughlines. The emotions that appear on the right side of the less-than sign (<) indicate similar emotions of increasing intensity.

  Admiration < Reverence Amazement

  Ambition Anger < Rage < Seething Fury

  Anticipation/Expectation Anxiety < Panic < Hysteria

  Assuredness/Confidence Awe

  Boredom/Weariness Compassion

  Contempt Courage/Bravery

  Curiosity Desperation

  Determination Disgust

  Dread Eagerness/Enthusiasm < Elation

  Embarrassment < Humiliation Envy/Jealousy

  Exaltation Expectation

  Fascination Fear < Terror

  Frustration < Exasperation Guilt

  Hope Horror

  Impatient/irritated/annoyed Indifference/Apathy

  Indignation Joy

  Lust Mischievousness

  Pride Regret/Remorse

  Revenge Sadness < Grief/Despair

  Serenity Shame

  Shock Smugness/Superiority

  Stoicism Suspicion

  Wonder

  On their surface, emotional throughlines may seem callow or two-dimensional. But they function as a sort of skeleton key unlocking aquifers of impulse. With this method there are three variables: actor, material, and throughline. Thousands of hours of experimentation proved again and again that any combination of the three produces vastly varying results:

  The same throughline paired with the same actor and two different scripts produced two distinct characters.

  Two different actors using the same script and the same throughline produced two completely different characters.

  Two different throughlines paired with the same actor and the same set of sides produced two dramatically different characters.

  Change one of the three variables and everything changes. This simple formula produces the opposite of anything simple or formulaic. There are some key principles in working with emotional throughlines or character throughlines. The twenty-one principles we will be discussing are listed below.

  Key principles

  1. Try what can’t possibly work

  Although actors talk about taking risks, in reality, most actors resist trying what feels wrong. Of course, I’m not advocating you decide upon a throughline that feels counterintuitive and march into a casting office performing it for the first time, untested. You must push boundaries within the safety of a learning environment to discover what plays best on-camera. Your lab is where you must commit to what feels wrong. The only way to surprise yourself, grow, and improve is by knocking yourself pell-mell outside your comfort zone. Then watch what that looks like on-camera. Write numerous emotional throughlines on the back of your sides, turn on the camera and read through the fi
rst page of a scene with one emotion, for example, ambition. When you get to the bottom of the page, check off ambition, then start at the top and try contempt. Check it off, then start back at the top and try rage, then anxiety, then joy, and so on. Try any and all throughlines that strike your fancy, no matter how odd the pairing of the emotion with the text. During playback you’ll see plainly within the first half page of dialogue which emotional throughlines work and which don’t for a particular role.

  A student once came to class with sides for a comedic feature film audition that was scheduled for the next morning. It was a character supporting role, a bellhop in a silly comedy. The script definitely fell into the category of mediocre to bad. So the job of the student was to bring the comedy to life, comedy that was only meekly suggested in the script. He experimented on-camera and the character proved amenable to a variety of different throughlines, but we settled on a favorite. The actor called me the next day to say that the audition went great. He committed to his throughline and got laughs. When finished the casting director said, “That was great, can you maybe try it another way?” The actor had about seven different emotional throughlines that worked for this role written on the back of his script from our on-camera session the night before. So he picked another throughline and read the scene again, committing to the new throughline. They loved it. When he was done, they wanted to see if he could do more. He knocked out five different throughlines, bringing five different characters to life one after another, delighting everyone watching. In the end, the movie fell apart financially, but the actor forged a great relationship with casting.

  2. Once you’ve settled on a throughline, stick to it

  Stick to one single emotional throughline as a character choice. Your character will still feel all their emotions, but stick to a single emotion as the character core influencing emotion. The temptation to vacillate between different throughlines throughout a scene or script never works. It creates schizophrenic characters. Literally, your character will come across as someone who suffers from schizophrenia. Actors place great value on range, but range needs to be rooted. Having range means having the ability to play a wide range of characters. Range is not the same thing as being emotionally disjointed. Being emotionally disjointed means fluctuating haphazardly between emotions while playing a single role. It is the throughline that keeps your audience identified with this person’s story and perspective. Let go of your kaleidoscope of ideas and focus on your throughline. Keep coming back to it. The focus leads to a deeper understanding of character.

  3. A character throughline only changes if it is the crux of the story

  It’s rare that anyone ever changes so dramatically that the only recognizable leftover is their physical appearance. Change this severe is so unusual and disconcerting it is often the marker of brain damage, multiple personality disorder, or an interpretation of alien or demonic possession.

  Certainly people change. People mellow out as they get older or become even more eccentric. But we all have a temperament, a mood, an attitude, a core essence, an emotional energy that underscores our personality. This immutable element endures no matter how much our values, views, and demeanor may change over the course of our lives. Science has examined personality changes in lottery winners juxtaposed to victims of horrible accidents who are now in wheelchairs. Within just a few months following life-changing events, people return to their general disposition. Those who were happy before the accident returned to being happy, and those who were miserable before the financial windfall returned to their state of discontentedness.1

  When watching characters in film and television, observe how often they change and grow, their perspective shifting and evolving, yet there remains a character essence. A film that best exemplifies this is Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. (Spoiler alert) When Joel and Clementine (played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) have important memories erased, they remain the same characters that the audience has identified with and cared for over the arc of the film. And the characters are still drawn to each other even though they have no memory of each other and may be doomed to make each other miserable all over again. Enduring character essences can be seen in many great films: The Shawshank Redemption, Casablanca, The Silence of the Lambs, Chinatown, Winter’s Bone, and Inside Llewellyn Davis.

  When a character evolves and their perspective and demeanor shift over a story arc, the changes are flavored by the underlying and constant emotional throughline. As an example, we like to see a curmudgeon fall in love. We enjoy observing how intense feelings of love, joy, and hope comingle and sometimes fight for supremacy over the character’s surly disposition.

  There are of course occasions where a character experiences a drastic personality shift that might necessitate adopting a new throughline. An example of this is Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The one-hundred-and-eighty-degree character shift at the end drives the plot as the entire story is about a man changing from dark to light. Another example of a drastic personality change is the David Sumner character in the Sam Peckinpah film Straw Dogs. Sumner, an American academic staying with his wife in a quaint English village, is taunted and tormented by the locals whom he fruitlessly tries to befriend. Eventually Sumner is forced to defend his home by killing a mob of locals so that he and his wife can survive. The dramatic transformation tracks Sumner from a civilized, docile, nonconfrontational, and reflective man to a brutish, desperate, primal animal.

  Another example of complete character change is Walter White on the AMC series Breaking Bad. Over the course of five seasons Walter goes through the transformation from cancer patient, high-school chemistry teacher and father to drug kingpin. The show is about this transformation. The expression “changing hats” is taken literally as he wears a trademark hat as his new self and goes by a new name, Heisenberg.

  When a character’s core essence changes it is usually because their life depends on it, it is often disturbing or the crux of the story. Changing a character’s emotional throughline is something that should be done only if there is a clear need in the plot. Otherwise, most great characters, no matter how complex, begin and end the story with the same core essence, the same emotional throughline that they started with.

  4. Once you’ve settled on a throughline, commit to it

  Once you’ve chosen a throughline, you must thoroughly commit to feeling that throughline. One way to think of this is that if your throughline were your spouse, sticking to it would mean staying loyal and vowing not to stray, and committing would be infusing the marriage with passion.

  To push this metaphor to its brink, experimenting with an unintuitive throughline is like sticking and committing to a marriage that feels doomed. Naturally, actors are apprehensive when I tell them to commit to an unintuitive throughline. They will often botch their attempt by reluctantly appeasing me. Actors will only sort of commit to the emotion, while being slightly detached and dispassionate, judging it in their heads, telling themselves it won’t work. If you’re going to experiment, experiment like a scientist. Try to disprove your own assumptions. Sticking and committing to the most unintuitive throughline often works beautifully on-camera, and the choices aren’t obvious to boot.

  5. Feel it. Never indicate. Don’t push a throughline

  Do not push artifice. Don’t force the expression of the throughline. Simply amp up the emotion, feel it resonate in your body, keep coming back to the emotion, the single word, through the course of the scene and the entire script. It’s no more complicated than honoring impulse. Feel the emotion and it will come out of your pores. You mustn’t indicate or show anything. Just feel it. Let it reveal itself without effort. Trying to indicate the emotion in anyway produces dishonest, cringe-worthy results. The honesty of your experience will broadcast itself.

  6. Let the throughline flavor the array of emotions dictated by the scene

  Your character must evolve according to the script, as
well as experience a full range of emotion; but the essence of the character endures. Think of your emotional throughline as the key ingredient in a recipe that mixes with all the other emotional ingredients to create new flavors. Emotions, whether enduring or fleeting, filter our perceptions, ignite our reactions, influence our opinions, and help form our worldview. An emotion that underscores your day-to-day existence adds a conviction of character. If your throughline is joy and another character insults you, joy will filter your impulse and reaction. You would not react with joy. Reacting with joy to the insult is no more credible than a bipolar backflip from joy to rage, unless your character is psychotic. If you’re a naturally happy, joyous person, your reaction will most likely be on the spectrum of surprise and hurt. You may become temporarily besieged with confusion and sadness as you struggle to recenter yourself and get back to your nature. It is imperative you don’t overthink this or try to control it. By committing to your emotional throughline your impulses will react intuitively, in keeping with the character. Focus on your throughline, on that one word, and keep coming back to it as you make your way through the text. The throughline takes care of everything. Your character spontaneously reacts in ways that are always exciting and surprising but grounded in a strong identity.