Acting Needs: Training

Last night I attended my very first Film Acting class! Thanks to Bailee and KCStage I found a great little training studio just up the street from where I live. It’s Brian Cutler’s Commercial Actors Studio, and the main instructor is none other than Brian Cutler. The class set-up is done so that all the levels are in the same class together, just working on varying degrees of difficulty. Every time you take the class, you move up to more difficult levels, and new students join in and get to learn not only from the instructors, but from the more experienced students as well. Last night was the first night of a 4 week On-Camera Class, and we started with Commercials. So the two other new students and myself got to watch the dozen other actors perform what they had been working on (oh, almost forgot, they film it all with lights and sound so you get a feel for the camera), and then received a little extra instruction about marks, slating, and things to keep in mind before we did our own one-line commercial. We were then given notes, and got to try a couple more times. Before the night was over everyone had a couple more commercials to shoot, and us first timers had some larger ones, and a partner one as well. After everyone presented what they had been working on, we then got to watch and critique all the shoots we just did. During all of this Brian and Jill (who was running the camera) were giving constant feedback, and would take the time to talk about auditions and agents, even what to and not to wear to a Film audition (guess what color is most suggested to wear…blue! Blah!). The great part was the other people in the class, everyone is very welcoming, supportive and encouraging.
I realized that I have a lot to learn. While yes my experience in theatre will help me, I've always been winging it when it comes to camera work. There are some very little things that I could do to be better. For example, I need to work on keeping the action and energy of a scene going until the director says cut. I usually would freeze when the scripted action was done, I did this because I didn't know what else to do. What I was doing was making the directors job more difficult by giving them less to work with. The second major thing is that I keep shifting my eyes away from the camera. I've become so used to being told not to look at cameras (photo, not video) that I've adapted it to film as well.
Next weeks class will be cold reading of scripts! The format will be very similar to the commercial class, I can't wait!