The Science of On-Camera Acting

by Andréa Morris

  Sliver of space

  An effective communication habit you may want to experiment with and adopt for the camera is not letting your lips close completely once you’ve finished speaking your lines. Maintain the slightest sliver of space while you’re listening to the other character. This is body language that compels in close-up. It’s almost like your relationship with the other actor is connected via a gossamer thread flowing from your lips to theirs. If you close your mouth you sever the connection. When top and bottom lips touch, closing off any space, it can appear as though you are broadcasting the nonverbal message, “I’m done speaking now, and have somewhat checked out until my next line.” Watch how this reads on-camera.

  Of course, when you’re playing a character who has checked out, perhaps someone who is less interested in communicating than dictating, or a narcissist who is dismissive or indifferent to those around you, closing your mouth when you are done speaking can be a wonderful choice. A bevy of dismissive activities while your lips lightly touch, like checking your phone, then asking how someone is doing in monotone while looking away says, “I’m engaging in social niceties but I don’t care about you.” These characters are really entertaining jerks.

  Never overlap lines when shooting coverage

  Established actors—and anyone who’s ever directed—know how important this rule is, but I’ve seen less experienced actors ruin shoots and burn their own best take in independent films by a sheer lack of technological understanding. Do not overlap lines when you are shooting coverage. Overlapping is when you’re trying to play the scene naturally by cutting off the other actor just a moment before they’ve finished speaking. You can overlap lines on a master shot where every character is in the frame with you, but you must never overlap lines when going in for close-ups. Natural overlapping in close-up shots is accomplished in editing. If you want your best close-up used in the final product, your director needs a clean take with no audio overlap so that they can match shots in editing.

  Let’s say a director and editor are in postproduction cutting a scene. Your co-star is just about to finish their last line when you start speaking, cutting off the last half word out of your co-star’s mouth. The shot now has to cut away to you, but your close-up doesn’t match the way you said your line when you overlapped your co-star’s best take. The director loves your co-star’s best take. So the director now has to choose to either remain on your co-star’s face while you speak off-camera instead of cutting to you, or rejecting your best take in favor of one that matches.

  Another note buried in this tip is to hang out in an editing bay. You can PA, intern, shoot and direct your own short—whatever it takes to observe this process. You learn all your mistakes in editing, when you see how shots should fit together but can’t because of something silly that never occurred to you while you were shooting.

  Chapter Endnotes

  1 Cera, Michael, “Clark and Michael – Episode 10” YouTube video, 0:40, posted by CBS, April 21, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnS_YRCaJGI, accessed July 6, 2014.

  2 Schütz, Ricardo. "Stephen Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition (Assimilação Natural - O Construtivismo No Ensino De Línguas)," June 12, 2014, www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html, accessed August 9, 2014.

  3 You don’t need another actor for passive acquisition of your lines. It’s just as effective to acquire dialogue on your feet, working out your scene to a mark on the wall. Your imagination will suffice to create the other character. Simply leave space for the other character’s lines. Read through the whole scene so you have an understanding of what the other characters are saying to you.

  4 Finn AS, Lee T, Kraus A, Hudson Kam CL (2014) When It Hurts (and Helps) to Try: The Role of Effort in Language Learning. PLOS ONE 9(7): e101806. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0101806 www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0101806, accessed August 1st 2014.

  5 Dickerson, Kelly, "Why Adults Struggle to Pick up New Languages." LiveScience. www.livescience.com/46938-why-adults-struggle-with-new-languages.html, accessed August 1, 2014.

  6 Haber, Margie, and Barbara Babchick, How to Get the Part, without Falling Apart! (Los Angeles: Lone Eagle Pub., 1999).

  7 Beilock, Sian, Choke (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2011), 60.

  8 Einstein, Albert, "Is Imagination More Important than Knowledge? Einstein." Times Higher Education. November 8, 2002, accessed August 6, 2014.

  9 Coverage happens after the master shot, when the camera goes in for medium shots and close-ups.

  10 Spiking the lens is when you look directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall.

  Voice

  Dr. Ekman: “The voice is another emotion-signal system. Does it signal emotions clearly that the face does not? There’s some evidence that the voice is the best signal system for feelings of sensual pleasure and contentment, much better than the face. People will give you a particular smile or a variation on a smile but it’s not as clear which kind of enjoyment they’re having. There is some work being done in England on voice being a primary distinctive signal for any kind of sensory pleasure and any feeling of relief. Also, we know the voice is a great signal system for amusement—the chuckle and laugh.

  ***

  Many vocal training programs offered to actors today focus on opening up your pelvis, diaphragmatic breathing, relaxing, resonance, and staying hydrated. This is great, and you can find many classes dedicated to this kind of work. But it also seems that many successful screen actors today have very little vocal training. Screen actors don’t have to project to the back row of a theatre. Acting in film and television is traditionally more of a visual medium than theater, where the emphasis is on the spoken word. And screen acting rarely ventures into the musical genre these days. Yet I’d like to focus on one specific area of vocal training that has great implications for every contemporary screen actor.

  The perilous lack of speech training for screen actors reveals itself most obviously in the context of proper elocution and comedy. If you take the time to study comedies you’ll notice the precision and clarity with which skilled comedic actors speak.

  A while ago I started experimenting with tricks to sweeten audio when editing actors’ online auditions. I noticed that if I used the actor’s raw comedic performance that was fairly strong on its own and then bumped certain consonants, it gave the overall impression that the actor was an expert in the genre. I used the sweetened version to show actors how nuances of elocution and appreciation for the sounds words make suggest comedic proficiency. Consonants b, d, k, p, and t are consonant plosives that tend to lend themselves to humor because they involve a sudden kick, a release of air. This is called phonosemantics, the idea that sounds have inherent meaning.

  The claim that consonant plosives lend themselves to humor does not mean that humor is boiled down to phonemes, only that some sounds support comedy more than others. A notable comedic master of language and sounds was George Carlin, who listed the kumquat as a food that sounded too funny to eat, and whose wildly celebrated monologue Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television (replete with plosives) was so celebrated and controversial it made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

  Smoke and mirrors

  I filmed an actor for an audition who performed excellently, but at the end of his strongest take he dropped the consonant on the last line, which sort of hollowed out the full impact of the closing beat. One interesting fact about memory is how important it is to end strong, because the impression that ingrains itself in memory is the beginning and end of an event. When I captured the footage to edit I tweaked the audio track, isolating and bumping the consonant, shaving off the edges of any background hiss so the consonant played smoothly. It took a mere two minutes of sound mixing and I did it in front of him so he could see the difference before and after and the importance of a strong ending. Although this actor had plenty of experience, having just starred in a summer blockbuster (and yes, still having to audition),
he was silent as he processed the overall impact of this one little tweak. He shook his head, “It’s all smoke and mirrors…”

  Dustin Hoffman speaks openly about one of the most famous scenes in film history, the movie that put him on the map, The Graduate, with Anne Bancroft. During the shooting of this scene, Director Mike Nichols whispered to Hoffman to walk over and put his hand on Bancroft’s breast. Bancroft didn’t miss a beat and ignored Hoffman’s hand while fussing with a stain in the pleat of her dress. Hoffman said he had to turn and walk away from camera and bang his head against the wall to keep from laughing and breaking character. In the film, the effect is of Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, having a complete emotional breakdown. A magnificent scene, an incredible film, and my point is that even if you’re a marvelous actor, it doesn’t take away from the fact that film is a lot of smoke and mirrors. Talented actors just bring more smoke and bigger mirrors.

  …As do gifted editors. I worked with an editor some years back who talked about a show she was working on with an actress who won an Emmy for her performance on the show. The entire staff in postproduction unabashedly takes credit for this actress’s Emmy because the actress is notoriously difficult and not very capable. To salvage each shot, production ordered directors to keep the cameras rolling between takes. Every time the actress stood on her mark, waiting to hear “action,” goofing around, talking to her friends in hair and makeup (strategically positioned off-camera) the cameras rolled, and the show’s editors used countless of these very natural moments caught on film as reaction shots to insert into scenes in the actual show. The trick worked better than they expected.

  Proper elocution

  It’s not just comedy that requires proper elocution. While watching several deftly written and performed dramas on TV, my husband and I (both with perfectly good hearing) are frequently unable to catch critical, plot-twisting lines from supporting cast members, and sometimes even the series leads. Actor mumbling is nothing new, but it’s especially distracting when the shows are so good you truly care about every line being uttered. Fine actors swallow words all over the place, confusing otherwise superb performances.

  One evening I was rewinding my DVR to catch a muffled word breathed through barely parted lips and clenched teeth. Frustrated I abandoned the television program and did a YouTube search and landed on the channel Elocution Solution featuring an exceedingly straightforward YouTube video on elocution. A list of words and phonetic sounds on a screen and a small box in the upper-right-hand corner framed the face of a New Yorker guiding me through proper jaw, tongue, and breath placement for words I had no idea I’d been mispronouncing. I contacted the woman featured in the video, certified speech pathologist Harriet Pehde. I signed up for a series of Skyped elocution lessons with her and downloaded her elocution video handbook, which I highly recommend.1 I found it helpful and inexpensive, and speech pathologists Harriet and Ann are warm and pretty adorable.

  The key to perfecting today’s preferred style of acting, naturalism, is to avoid mumblecore2 performances and to perfect the soft, articulate throwaway. Learning this involves reconditioning oral habits. Practice elocution exercises slowly and intentionally, and commit, for the sake of practice, to overenunciating. Once the habit has been internalized—delivered from working memory to procedural memory—you can vocalize with more subtlety and still be understood. It goes back to the old adage: you must know the rules before you can break them.

  Common mispronunciations in the standard American dialect

  Many English speakers in North America think elocution involves fully pronouncing the t sound (aspirating) or hitting the t sharply. An example of this is pronouncing the t in kittens. This is, in fact, a mispronunciation that makes the word kitten sound pretentious or silly.

  It is correct to pronounce the t in words like articulate, abstract, and attract. However, in words like kitten, identity, reality, and personality, the t is pronounced more like a d. How often have you heard someone try to sound intelligent and refined by mispronouncing the t in these words? You may crave the opportunity to work with great writing, but would you know how to articulate great writing? Not to seem like a slap on the back of the hand with a ruler, but a large part of an actor’s job is to beautifully and effectively transmit the words in a script to the audience. Proper elocution is necessary to convincingly portray a wide range of roles, and is necessary for almost any period piece as elocution was a core curriculum in elementary school until this past century.

  Proper elocution, when spoken subtly and expertly, sounds beautiful. It’s pleasing to the ear. Your voice has the potential to sound attractive while sounding natural, modern, edgy, or relaxed. The adoption of a formally affable voice doesn’t preclude the option of turning it off at will. Breadth requires mastery. Mastery requires practice. Practice elocution.

  For a sample of a video tutorial from the elocution handbook see the reference section at www.TheScienceOfOnCameraActing.com

  The musical notes of words

  In unrehearsed conversations, the emotion and meaning you wish to express informs the impulse, pitch, and stress patterns of your speech. This enhances meaningful communication. Pehde describes it as words having musical notes.

  ***

  Harriet Pehde: “There are two types of examples [of the musical notation of words] that come to mind. One is the intonation and stress patterns of a word, where you would use different pitches on different syllables to color the meaning of a word, and different levels of stress on a syllable. An unstressed syllable would be like an eighth note and a stressed syllable could be a half or a whole note depending on how much you want to stress it. For example the word ‘important’—Depending on the context, each syllable could be stressed the same, or the ‘im’ could be the eighth note and the ‘port’ could be the half note and the ‘ant’ would be another one-eighth note. Another example is that each sound in a word has an assigned beat and if you leave out a sound or add an extra sound the timing is off and it falls flat. Just like when you’re off key. Take the same word ‘important’—if you produce the first t with too much air, the word is choppy and doesn’t flow properly.”

  ***

  You’ve likely attempted to memorize lines by rote, standing in front of a mirror practicing your delivery, trying to infuse the lines with just the right, most compelling emphasis. In other words, you’ve used working memory to rehearse the pitch, stress, and pace you thought would best affect the delivery of your lines. However, this flips a natural process on its head. Instead of the meaning plucking the chords of your words, music is made in the hopes of bringing about meaning. This often limits actors as it leaves them relying on form, not content.

  It can also lead to a director wanting, nay, needing to give you a line reading. A line reading is when the director reads the actor’s lines showing them the tone, inflection, and delivery that they wish the actor to reproduce. There is a moratorium on line readings that actually underscores a major barricade to actor-director communication, particularly when actors have rehearsed their lines by rote. The confused etiquette that directors cannot give actors line readings may disrupt the mutually desired outcome of both actor and director: a strongly communicated performance. Unfortunately, the practice endures, mainly because it is thought of as threatening or pejorative to actors.

  A line reading from a director is seen as a major faux pas, an insult to actors and the mark of an amateur or unprofessional director. The general feeling is if a director does not like how the actor is performing so much so that they feel a need to give line readings, they shouldn’t have cast that actor.

  But the blackout on line reading paints the practice with too broad a brush. Line readings are often the most effective and unambiguous means of showing an actor when they are missing the musicality of a phrase, the proper inflection, which occurs routinely, usually as a result of the actor rote memorizing lines. You can mispronounce a phrase like you’d mispronounce a single word. In both ca
ses the result is distracting and weird. Actors mispronounce phrases all the time. By repeatedly practicing variations on delivery, the actor divorces the sound of words and phrases from their underlying message. This is when a director needs to give you a line reading to get the train back on the track. But because line readings are frowned upon, the director talks in circles to describe what could so easily be demonstrated.

  Pehde used the example, “Hi, how are you?” to point out the common musicality of phrases. There are a handful of various inflections that work for this phrase, like the classic inflection, the monotone, and the staircase. The classic inflection is the pitch on the word “are” in “how are you?” is delivered higher than the “how” and the “you.” Try inverting the classic inflection and the phrase sounds very weird and distracting. Play with the pitches in the inflection diagram and hear how the different inflections sound.

  To be clear, an actor can deliver a line countless wonderful ways if the musicality isn’t so off-key that it reveals a disconnect with the message, reducing the words to nothing more than noise. When the musicality of phrasing is off-key it is not the same thing as making an interesting, creative choice in your delivery. This is sometimes what actors, deaf to their muddled inflection, insist they are doing. When a director shows an actor the difference in inflection, by delivering the line the way the actor is delivering it and then delivering the line with the proper musicality, the line reading works like a tuning fork for the actor. This does not have to be the director saying, “I want you to say it exactly like this,” but, “I want you to be in harmony with the meaning of your words.”