The Science of On-Camera Acting

by Andréa Morris

  To expedite communication, perhaps we need a new, acceptable way of talking about the various uses of line readings. A director might offer an actor a “tuning adjustment” before giving them a line reading. Again, a talented actor who doesn’t need to be told how to perform their role still may need to adjust their instrument every once in a while.

  A true and meaningful performance has as much to do with emotion as it does with elocution. The greatest of jazz improvisers knew every angle of every note. They rehearsed for countless hours and played the scales over and over until they could twist those scales into any sound shape at any given moment. Writers do this with the written word. Actors do it through the spoken one. When a director says, “Great but can you try it like this?” you should find joy in playing with the concinnity of words and not feel pressured to play an unfamiliar instrument.

  Accents

  Accents are a great tool to distract working memory and liberate creative impulse. Occupying your analytic mind with the task of maintaining an accent lets inspiration breathe. Most actors report having an easier time acting when having to affect an accent. I have a theory that Australian and British actors fare so well in the United States in part because they are forced to put on an American accent for every audition. Provided you can pull off a convincing accent, this would give anyone a competitive edge.

  Your native tongue shapes your face

  Human beings hold their faces in different ways according to their native language. As an example, you’ve likely heard (in general terms) that French women have a sensual, feminine guile. France’s Romance language requires the speaker’s mouth to pull forward into a slightly pursed-lipped pout, somewhat as though the speaker is being kissed. In contrast, English speakers in North America tend to pull back with the corners of the mouth when speaking.

  Playing with different accents can shed light on how much of your face is based on more or less static factors like bone structure, or placement of muscles and ligaments, versus what is conditioned through a lifetime of speaking a certain way. If you don’t like the way your mouth pulls back, or any other physical characteristic conditioned by a lifetime of repetition, you can go a long way in reshaping it through feedback from the camera and repetition to instill new, subtle oral habits.

  Chapter Endnotes

  1 I have no affiliation with any material, people or organizations I’ve recommended (other than my own) and do not benefit from endorsing them.

  2 I believe it was the Sundance Film Festival that coined the term mumblecore to describe a trend of acting in independent films where dialogue was mumbled.

  Body

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  “The most fundamental question I think we can ever ask is why we and other animals ever evolved a brain. When I ask my students this question they’ll say we have [a brain] to think or to perceive the world, and that’s completely wrong. We have a brain for one reason and one reason only and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movement. Because movement is the only way we have of affecting the world around us.”

  Dr. Daniel Wolpert, neuroscientist and professor at Cambridge University1

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  Our brains did not evolve to keep us trapped inside our minds. For actors this is especially the case. The audience cannot read your thoughts, intentions, subtext, backstory, and motivations unless these are expressed verbally, by the ideas scribed by the writer or the behaviors and physiological cues of the actor. Your tools are your actions and reactions—whether conscious, unconscious, habitual, or impulsive—and your emotions, tears, laughter, saccades, fixations, nictations, etc. It does not end there. It does not end. Your tools are whatever reads on-camera, and hopefully you will continue to explore this indefinitely.

  Character physicality

  Research psychologist at Ohio State University Denis Schaffer2 has shown that much of our daily movement that feels like conscious choice happens beneath the level of conscious awareness. Like voice and virtually everything else, the character’s physical rhythm often emerges organically from these depths, as the actor experiments with an emotional throughline and the text. Physicality frequently emerges from impulse. Again, this is not a rule set in stone. You can also experiment on-camera with different movements and repetitive rhythms. What’s right is what works.

  Activities

  Like accents, activities occupy working memory thereby freeing impulse. Make sure the activity has purpose, even if it is small. Pick an activity only if it is appropriate and natural for your character in that moment. For auditions pick an activity that doesn’t involve any prop that you wouldn’t have on you, for example, a pen, sides, cell phone, etc. An activity that works great in auditions is sorting papers, as you can use the sides in your hand; or trying to fix a piece of your attire, like buttoning, zipping or tying something.

  React physically to your imagined environment

  It took me a while before I realized the practical importance of this principle in auditions. Populate your environment with the imaginary objects that would be there in real life, then react to your environment. If you see it, the oddest thing happens: your audience sees it too. If a character in the scene calls to you from off-camera, acknowledge the direction from which they would be calling you, not from where your reader is sitting. If your character is shown a photo, use your eyes to place the pantomimed photo far enough in front of you and just below frame. This gives the illusion of the photo just below-frame in a way where the camera can still see your eyes. Cheat the photo, cheat your eyes.

  Like with all rules, there are exceptions to this one. An actor I worked with placed the object they were referring to throughout the scene, behind them. In a sense, the imaginary object became an activity because the actor had to swing around 180 degrees every time he needed to reference the imaginary object. His back faced the camera as he cranked his neck over his left shoulder and strained to speak to the other actor off-screen. It was a great choice that helped define his awkward character.

  Once you make an object real, respect the space taken up by the imaginary object. Once you’ve established where a table is located, do not walk through the table. This rule applies to every imaginary object you come into contact with in a scene. If a previously established imaginary object suddenly disappears from your hand as you turn the page of your script, the imaginary world you created evaporates in the minds of your audience. To avoid this, simply place the imaginary object down on an imaginary table before turning the page. I know it may seem like an easy thing to ignore, but test this for yourself and its importance should become apparent during playback.

  Reboot

  To shake up your impulses and shift out of autopilot when caught in your head and creatively skipping like a record, switch your feet. We often stand with one leg extended a bit further than the other, our weight shifted slightly to the other side. If you are standing with your right leg out a little further than your left, take a small jump and switch the position of your feet upon landing. Then go back into your scene liberated from this stilted state. You will find you are freer with your impulses and the dialogue.

  Action in auditions

  Action sequences can be difficult to play in auditions, where you’re performing in the confines of an office space and don’t want to look absurd as you pretend you’re plummeting thousands of feet from the belly of a jetliner. Examples of common action scenes in auditions are car accidents where, say, the car goes careening off the side of a cliff after spinning across two lanes of traffic. Actors tend to carry on naturally during the scene until the car-crash cue, when they start whirling about in their chair. The actor will jerk back and forth and thrust about, playing the car wreck. The problem is that they’re actually playing the role of the car. The car is flying all over the place. The natural human response is to stiffen up. It’s a very small action. A reflex. It’s a quick inhale, tensing your body as you brace yourself for the outcome. If your character is drunk the reaction will be slightly diff
erent. It’s more of a sudden disorientation. Drunks aren’t stiff, which is why drunk drivers are more likely to walk away from car accidents than sober drivers. Their bodies are loose upon impact. Yet as a driver or passenger, drunk or stone-cold sober, you are not auditioning to play the vehicle.

  Colin Walk Forward

  Through experimentation one of my students Colin Campbell invented The Colin Walk Forward. He became so familiar with where he stood in a frame that he could use a stationary camera on a tripod to create a medium shot that he would turn into his close-up at an important moment in the scene by taking two slow steps at a slight angle toward camera. He is now able to masterfully close out his audition on a compelling close-up shot.

  Colin became so cognizant of his place in a frame and his eyelines that he frequently brings his lines condensed onto one page and a piece of tape to his auditions. He politely asks casting if he can tape his page just off-camera as an eyeline (he spent several classes training himself to take in the page as a whole without saccadding or squinting as he reads). Colin reports that most casting directors have permitted this. He is then hands-free, with a teleprompter that doubles as an eyeline. He often auditions cold this way, delivering every line perfectly, spared any fleeting micro expression of anxiety that could leak onto his face from forgetting and having to search for the right word. His impulses are free as working memory is almost completely relieved of duty allowing him to slip seamlessly into the zone in his auditions. Colin says that he became a member of CAZT to perfect these techniques. CAZT is a casting office that films actors’ auditions and uploads them to their website. Actors who are members are able to download the video of the audition they just had at these offices to see their work and get feedback (in a note written beneath the video) from casting. Colin says when he’s been permitted to use his audition method it has always played back beautifully.

  I share these techniques with some reservation because it’s the type of thing an actor is likely to read about and try out in professional settings before becoming proficient. Be aware that this may agitate casting, which could cause the practice to become universally frowned upon. It’s a joy being technically proficient enough to play with the tools of your trade as though they are extensions of your body. But technical mastery comes before agility and play.

  Because few actors possess technical proficiency on-camera, actors must request permission, or such expertise can backfire. This happened to an actress who tried the Colin Walk Forward in an audition. A casting associate became alarmed and began frantically moving the camera trying to keep the actress in the medium shot as the actress stepped forward. So few actors are cognizant of the parameters of their frame that the associate assumed the actress was going to fall off-frame. In fact, this actress had a mastery of the frame, where she stood inside it, how much she could move without changing the composition, because it was second nature to her. Always ask casting if you’d like to make any minor technical adjustments or plan on moving within the frame.

  An actor not understanding the edges of your frame is like a painter not knowing where to find the edges of their canvas. These are things actors must know blindfolded, and are some of the innumerable things that become second nature as you deepen your working relationship with the camera.

  Your physique

  So much has been said about diet and exercise, the only thing I wish to add is that one of the least dreary ways of staying in peak physical condition is to use exercise as a means of acquiring physical prowess. Add new skills to your repertoire like boxing, gymnastics, horseback riding, or circus training. You never know what obscure physical skill will give you the edge for a particular role, and it’s fun staying in shape while discovering new things you can do with your body.

  Makeup, hair, and wardrobe departments

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  “Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.”

  Helen Hayes3

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  I want to devote the rest of this chapter on body to your physical appearance on-camera as dictated by hair, makeup, and wardrobe (also called “vanities.”) This is an area that I have never seen get much attention. Yet it is one I hear actors stress about, lament over, and shed tears over, after a day of work where they felt insecure on-set because someone responsible for their appearance made them look awful. I’ve worked with a top-of-field makeup artist who gave me Groucho Marx eyebrows and layered the makeup so thick I looked like a performance-ready drag queen when my character was a college freshman. These aren’t even my words. A message board featured a lengthy thread about how I looked like a drag queen, and I couldn’t disagree with any of the comments. An actress friend of mine was always finicky about her hair. Hair stylists on-set loved her full locks and would emphasize the boldness with big, fun styles. But it dwarfed her face on-camera, undermining her delicate beauty. In some instances her hair was a goofy distraction in scenes where her acting was superb and would have otherwise served as great clips for her reel. Even though she was fond of her natural tresses, she eventually had her hair chemically straightened to avoid the stress of having to assert herself with hair stylists with their own ideas while she tried to stay centered and in character. Another actor friend starring on a television show would sit in makeup for a half hour before returning to his trailer, where he’d wash off his entire face and then proceed to set. He said it was just easier that way.

  Because actors are living, breathing, eating, moving canvases, a PA will call “final touches” on-set before the camera rolls, an expression used to cue vanities to do any final tweaking. This usually stirs up a flurry of activity around actors standing on their marks, and it’s the best time for a makeup, hair, or wardrobe person to check a monitor and see what the camera sees. One day, in the makeup trailer, I cautiously tried to speak to a makeup artist who was caking it on my face. Another actress I was working with had encouraged me to speak with the makeup artist as she too thought I looked funny. The talk seemed unavoidably uncomfortable. Later, when I was standing on my mark and the PA called “final touches,” the makeup artist looked the other way in a defiant gesture of “you’re on your own.” I later noticed older, more experienced actresses simply insisting upon what they wanted, forgoing any discussion of the matter. The amount of subversion that goes on between actors and vanities is nuts.

  Another factor is that many makeup artists are still adjusting to the switch from 35mm film to digital HD. Informed and disciplined vanities recognize that newer cameras amplify. Makeup looks heavier, hair looks bigger, and wardrobe is louder or hangs differently on screen than it does in person. You’ll notice many of these principles by experimenting with the camera. Patterns in clothing, jewelry, accessories, makeup, and hairstyles that work in person often overwhelm on screen.

  Not all makeup, hair, and wardrobe people are created equal. And it seems truly talented artists are more impervious to feedback than their less-skilled counterparts. One of the best makeup artists I ever worked with, Zee Graham, turned to face me in the mirror when she was done and said, “If you’ve got a problem with anything, speak up.” She chided, “It’s your face being immortalized on celluloid, not mine.” I was surprised and grateful she even asked. Few ever do. And the fact is, it is your face, your hair, your body. At the end of the day, the audience is more apt to think you are not physically appealing, not that makeup or hair screwed up. So be polite but assert yourself. No makeup, hair, or wardrobe person has lived with your face, hair, and body as long as you have. They did not make you up before the audition that got you cast. I’ve walked from a makeup trailer onto set and had a director freak out because I looked so much different than I did when I came into audition. Yet, oddly, I’ve never had a makeup or hair person confer with me about how I did my makeup and hair for the audition that got me the part.

  ***

  Zee Graham: “Back in the good old days they had camera tests, a whole day devoted to creating the charact
er’s appearance and seeing how makeup looked on camera and what worked. It should be a collaboration of the director, actor, and hair, makeup, and wardrobe. It’s rarely a collaboration of anyone these days. Concerns need to be voiced before the cameras roll so it doesn’t become a complicated continuity issue down the line. Usually the only department an actor meets with before shooting is the wardrobe department when you go in for your fitting. Makeup and hair get sent notes from wardrobe and we base your look on what you’ll be wearing. So you could always give your phone number to wardrobe to pass on to makeup and hair and ask them to call you. That way you can make a polite introduction and have a brief conversation about any of your concerns before arriving on the day.”

  ***

  Ideally, actors need to feel confident when they walk out on set. Even if you’re playing a wretched-looking beast, you need to feel confident that you are the most fabulous putrid-looking beast. Part of makeup, hair, and wardrobe’s job is to help get you into character, and not leave you stranded outside your center feeling self-conscious. But sometimes you need to set the stage for others to help you feel confident and grounded. Sometimes too, actors have terrible ideas, like one TV actress who was convinced an orange-tinged lipstick was her color. Or the actor playing the supernatural villain who ‘borrowed’ a thick charcoal eyeliner, and snuck into the bathroom to give his eyes some definition before shooting.