The Science of On-Camera Acting

by Andréa Morris

  Playback at normal speed gives the viewer the impression that the actor is good, but the performance isn’t grabbing them. In these situations the casting director is just going to pass. Often the suboptimal performance is attributed to the actor not being prepared, when in fact the problem is the actor is overly prepared and creatively hogtied.

  It takes time for memorized dialogue to root itself so you can retrieve it effortlessly. There are environmental and biological factors that go into determining how long this can take. So it’s not entirely in your control. While you may have memorized your lines by the time you have your audition, they may not be available to you in a way that frees you up creatively as much as you may think.

  But there’s a way of learning dialogue other than rote memorization, reading it over and over until it’s devoid of all meaning. Alternatively, you can passively pick up your lines through a process called acquisition. Linguist Stephen Krashen2 observed that people learn language better through immersion than sitting in a classroom. If you want to learn French you’re going to fare a lot better spending time in France interacting with French speakers than spending years learning vocabulary, syntax, and semantics in a class. Krashen’s model of acquisition learning is a good model for actors and dialogue. Acquisition involves passively learning your lines through meaningful interaction. In other words, it’s important that you learn your lines through naturally communicating them to the other character, by being immersed in the context of the dialogue—by getting on your feet and working on your scene.3 The best route for learning dialogue is to acquire the dialogue naturally and emotionally. Emotion enhances our memories. This is the case for better or for worse. The boredom or pressure you may feel when you’re working at memorizing your lines can actually affect how you retrieve them later on. The dialogue risks sounding contrived and you’ve saddled yourself with a new task of having to reanimate it. Multicamera comedies are ideal for acquisition because they’re the closest thing to the rehearsal time you get working in theater. You’re on your feet with your fellow cast members, having fun, working through the blocking, trying things out. You’re more likely to acquire your lines because the scene is in context: rehearsing all week and then taping at the end of the week.

  In the first section we discussed two kinds of trying: helpful vs. unhelpful trying. The constructive kind of trying is trying something new for experimentation and discovery. The counter-productive kind of trying involves struggling for results. A PLOS ONE study suggests it is more challenging for adults to acquire a new language than for children because once cognitive capabilities are fully developed, grown-ups often try too hard.4 “‘The most surprising thing about the study is that trying can actually harm learning outcome," Amy Finn, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.’5

  The best way to acquire your lines without the negative effects of effort is to first learn a good line-reading technique. A line-reading technique is a technique for reading dialogue cold off the page. It isn’t distracting to your audience, and you can focus on character and being in the moment instead of the lines. I recommend Margie Haber’s line reading technique. I’m sure there are others out there, but I learned hers and it’s been the single most useful skill I ever got from an acting class. She teaches weekend intensives in Hollywood, California, or you can get the formula from her book How to Get the Part without Falling Apart!6, which outlines the technique in a few pages in the chapter “Reading in Phrases.” It’s simple to learn and only takes a couple weeks of daily practice to master. Once mastered, the line-reading technique becomes an implicit skill, meaning it requires no conscious effort. It’s second nature. And your sides are there for you so you don’t risk the microflash of panic the camera sees when you’re reaching for a line in an audition and you have no backup.

  Actors with a solid line-reading technique who are trained on-camera are able to pick up sides cold and nail the audition in under fifteen minutes. I see it with every actor who works this way. Their work is full of fresh impulses because they haven’t tried to memorize. By working creatively on-camera, they pick up most of the dialogue meaningfully through acquisition, and only seamlessly go down for lines every once in a while, if at all. As you become more practiced with this process, your line-reading technique paired with the nonanalytic approach outlined in this book will allow you to be mostly or even entirely off book for auditions via an organic process that bypasses working memory.

  This comes back to the directive prescribed by cognitive scientist Sian Beilock: “Employ learning techniques that minimize reliance on working memory to begin with.”7

  There is, of course, an exception that proves the rule. Although you usually want to avoid the deadness of meaning inherent in rote delivery, with comedy deadening the meaning means deadening your reaction to the humor. This can be worked to your advantage. As discussed earlier, in a comedy you mustn’t behave as though you are aware that you are delivering funny dialogue. If you kill the comedy for yourself by repeating the dialogue while trying to memorize it, you may actually be affixing a more deadpan delivery.

  Sleep

  If possible, avoid working on your audition the day of your audition. Ideally, put a good night’s sleep between your preparation and the audition. While you sleep, your brain takes the important information and separates it from the noise and irrelevant stimuli from the day before. If you work on the material the same day as your audition, you’re reintroducing noise. This distracts and disconnects you from the moment, even in subtle ways that you may not be aware of. If you have a same-day audition, fitting in a fifteen-minute nap between the prep and the audition can really help. Of course, I encourage you to test this for yourself.

  Work on your audition the night before using the approach outlined in this book until you’re happy with it on-camera. Don’t touch it the day of, and that’s it. It’s simple but it’s not easy. It probably won’t feel like you’re working hard enough. And you might feel more confident and comforted working on your audition right up to the point where you’re going over your lines in the waiting room. But just because it feels better doesn’t necessarily mean your performance will be better for having done this.

  Having worked with innumerable actors, watching and editing their on-camera work, Krashen’s acquisition model and the cognitive science behind how we learn is pretty consistent with everything I’ve observed. Even if it feels counterintuitive you may still want to give this a try.

  Music stand

  Years ago, when filming auditions in a medium shot or close-up, I began using a music stand with a large piece of foamcore. I set the stand at a thirty-degree angle and laid the foamcore down where the sheets of music go. Foamcore is an inexpensive, lightweight piece of polystyrene foam sandwiched between sheets of glossy-white, thinly laminated paper. Foamcore below your face bounces available light, preventing the camera from picking up exaggerated and unflattering shadows of the face cast by unbalanced overhead lighting. A single piece can compensate for the horrible fluorescents in so many offices where auditions are held. Like a musician, the music stand also allows you to perform hands-free even if you don’t have your lines memorized. Many actors I coach fold the top of their sides and place their lines over the foam core, as seen in the image below.

  When you need to grab a line, your eyes won’t disappear off-camera if you simply give a casual glance just below frame to the top of the foamcore where your lines are waiting. The stand also has the additional benefit of keeping your feet rooted on your mark so you don’t drift off-camera right or left.

  This tip works when you are self-taping auditions to be submitted to casting. I’ve also used it on set when going in for an actor’s coverage. My students have said they wish they could bring a music stand and piece of foamcore to their auditions, but it is not socially or professionally accepted in that capacity.

  Field research

  Passively acquiring your dialogue through a solid line-reading
technique is validated by a number of real-world audition and on-set observations and experiences.

  Being more relaxed about your audition is the style in Los Angeles, where a working actor is often auditioning multiple times a day and isn’t likely to have time to memorize pages and pages of material each day. A prominent manager in Los Angeles told me that being off book risks sending the subtle signal that you probably aren’t going on many auditions, and aren’t really in demand.

  One actress I worked with went for the final round with the casting director and creator of a show. She was reading for the role of an irreverent character and there were pages and pages of sides with long speeches. About three-quarters of the way through the audition the actress got to the end of a page and was in the middle of a speech when she looked up, shrugged, and said that she had to stop there because she’d run out of printer paper and couldn’t finish printing all the sides. After a beat, the creator and casting director laughed, and she got the part. So here was an instance where what helped this actress get the job was not only being cold, and not even having all her sides, but owning the character.

  Before I knew of Krashen’s acquisition model, I had an unusually long speech to deliver for a TV series. I think of myself as a professional so I put a lot of effort into it. I worked the lines over and over so I could be off book and loose on the day. I performed the scene in one take and the entire crew stood up and applauded when I was done. You may have heard the old expression, if the crew liked it you sucked. Of course if you pull off a scene in one take, the crew loves you because they get to go home and they regard you as a professional because you regurgitated a mouthful of words without a glitch. Of course too, the crew is also watching your performance with their naked eye, and what works for the naked eye often doesn’t work on camera and vice versa.

  When this particular episode aired, my work was okay, but it was nothing special. Even though by the time I performed the speech the lines were coming without effort, it still wasn’t as good as the first time I rehearsed it on-camera, cold. And this is because the way I memorized, going over and over the lines, actually narrowed my creative impulses with that particular sequence of words.

  I’ve worked with actors who would be considered pretty unprofessional. They’d show up to work and have no idea what scene we were shooting that day or what their lines were, and they’d trip all over themselves while we’re shooting. But when the episode airs, their performance cuts together beautifully. I’ve asked friends who work in film and TV, both in front of the camera and behind, particularly editors, and this is often something they’ve observed too, especially with series regulars on single-camera episodics. These actors, the stars of the show, are tossed pages of new dialogue every week or two, and then rewrites. They usually aren’t off book even by the time the camera is rolling.

  I shared this with my students, but they were clearly skeptical. Two weeks later one of my students guest starred on an episode of The Mentalist. This actor came back to class and told us that Simon Baker, an Emmy and Golden Globe nominated actor for his work on The Mentalist, was almost totally cold on-set. If you’ve seen The Mentalist, Baker’s performances cut together exquisitely, and his choices and creative impulses are beautiful.

  Along these lines, James Dean believed one of the keys to good acting was to never know your lines too well. Dean was off book as little as possible and never did a scene the same way twice. Marlon Brando wouldn’t memorize either. He had an assistant feed him his lines through an earpiece. This sort of raises the question, is it really professional to be off book, and is an actor’s job really to memorize?

  Reading to an eyeline

  Actors enjoy acting with other actors. Many actors are extroverts and part of the joy of the job is collaborating with others. I’m not saying don’t work with other actors. What I am saying is learn how to act to a mark on the wall as your eyeline and discover you no longer need a real person to react off of. No doubt this sounds completely counterintuitive. It’s advice that is met with the most resistance at first. An eyeline is either another actor, a tennis ball, a piece of gaffer’s tape, or any real or imagined mark just off-camera designated to deliver your lines to. It takes no time to get comfortable acting to a mark. The only block is your own resistance. Every actor I’ve ever worked with, no matter how resistant initially, has come to embrace acting to a mark.

  * * *

  “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.”

  Albert Einstein8

  * * *

  An actress I was coaching couldn’t stand this idea. She was a screen acting veteran and the mark was unsettling. She resisted it in every class, but I insisted she get comfortable with the mark and showed her that it made no difference in her on-camera performance. She went on location for a movie shoot in which she played James Caan’s wife. One day they were shooting a scene in a pool. She was lying in a bikini on a raft in the middle of the pool talking to Caan who was standing on the deck. After shooting Caan’s coverage,9 he was rushed off set to prep for the next scene, leaving the actress lying on a raft in the middle of a pool for her close-up. The director asked her to speak her lines into the air somewhere above the pool, just off-camera. Usually this would have been a problem. But like so many actor problems, it actually wasn’t. She put an imaginary mark in the air and acted her coverage to it without incident. She came back to class embracing the mark.

  Experiment acting to a mark: have your reader sit wherever they are comfortable so long as the mike can pick up their lines. Place the mark anywhere that allows your face to open up to the camera. In this photo the mark is a tennis ball but it could just as easily be a piece of tape stuck to the wall.

  The tennis ball in this photo is the eyeline closest to the lens (an iPad camera). The tennis ball is the character you will be speaking to most. If there are more characters in the scene, place imagined eyelines according to their character height. For example, if a character is a child, make sure the eyeline is placed low, but not so low that your eyes fall too far below frame. This is called an eyeline “cheat.”

  I recommend placing all the characters in the scene on either camera right or left, to avoid having your eyes cross the camera, putting you at risk of spiking the lens.10 The exception to this is when your character is speaking to a large group, in which case don’t bother with any marks. For large groups, it often works to simply imagine people spread out just below the bottom of the camera’s frame. Scan the imagined crowd as you speak.

  The mark can be anything. Practice with a tennis ball, a piece of tape, or better yet, an imaginary mark you can line up so it gives you the best eyeline in any situation you find yourself. Mastery of this means you’ll be the compassionate co-star letting your fellow actors go home after their coverage. This is especially useful when you’re guesting on a show. The star (series regular) who works long days every day, is often shot out first so they can go home. It’s a courteous gesture letting them go home if you don’t need them to stick around to read with you off-camera for your coverage. And they may be unintentionally returning the favor by leaving.

  How often have you heard an actor leaving an audition talk about how the reader wasn’t giving them anything? Perhaps you’ve thought or said this yourself. Worse than the bored, deadpan reader is the overly zealous reader. In auditions, I prefer just about anything to a reader off-camera who is acting their heart out and distracting from the audition. Overzealous readers are usually actors interning for the casting director for the valuable experience of observing the casting process, while trying to snag a small role in the film. This sort of reader will often try to give you the stars and the moon to work off of, but really the effect is overdoing it and can become quite distracting. If you must act to another reader in an audition scenario who is not giving you much to work with, or giving you an avalanche, their head can easily be substituted in your mind with a mark, and it won’t matter what they are doing.

  I rec
ently heard the story of an actress who tried to sabotage another actress (let’s call the victim of the subterfuge Mary) by rehearsing in their trailers one way and then mixing it up when they were on-set doing Mary’s coverage. It was apparently effective. Mary was thrown and had a hard time recovering during her close-up. Mary wouldn’t have been shaken had she graciously suggested this thespian saboteur go relax at crafty while they finish Mary’s coverage. I was once on-set with an actress positioned on a mark behind me who decided she wanted to steal the scene and went to work with laser focus, trapping imaginary moving specks in the cracks of the floorboards we were sitting on while I delivered my lines to a character off-camera. I didn’t realize what was happening until the cinematographer pulled his head out from behind the camera, pointed to her and said, “I know exactly what you’re doing, you’re trying to steal focus.” I turned around and the actress reddened. At this point in my career I was still struggling, finding my way through the art and politics of acting, and was rattled. But the allegiance of the cinematographer emboldened my confidence and I offered to help the actress with her imaginary task. Instead, she opted to abandon it. You’ll be immovable when you’re self-reliant, handling political pettiness and insecurity with grace, because no one will be able to take your scene from you.