Pretend To Be Someone Who...

[darkemeralds]

Who knows something about acting?

It's part of a mental exercise I'm doing: "Pretend To Be Someone Who [fill in the blank]". This week's selection: "Is A Good Actor."

I've done some performing, mostly musical, but acting--real acting, the art and craft of it--is an unknown. More or less completely opaque.

So, have you ever done it? Do you understand it? What's the most important thing about it? How would you define it for someone who has no concept of it? Any good books, articles, videos on the subject that you'd recommend?

Comments

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the book recommendations and for tying this mysterious thing to something I do understand. How one moves that understanding out through the whole body--gesture, movement, expression, voice--instead of just out through the fingertips to the keyboard is the huge missing link.

This exercise is strangely exciting--or perhaps I should say "excitatory"--to my brain. I can practically feel the neurons sparking and lighting up new neural pathways.

I think I'll run up to Powell's for lunch and buy their last remaining six-dollar used copy of Advice to the Player. Whee!

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I've only been to the main Powell's once (and the Beaverton branch once)--zomg, being able to go there during lunch hour for me would be like Cordelia Flyte being able to go to the Vatican.

My fic-writing process has always been film-based: I really do make the little people in my head go through their scenes over and over again until it's right, and I do things like zooming in and cutting from one location to another. I also try to give all the characters the equivalent of quality screen time, although I'm pretty much in the failboat on that.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I'm capable of writing stories in a completely non-filmic way; I wonder if anyone is who has absorbed as much filmed storytelling as the average modern person has.

I don't sit in a director's chair when I write--not to the conscious degree that you seem to--but I do think about how my characters are lit and blocked, and how they speak, move, and gesture.

Still, it's fundamentally and always about the words for me. And I think that's what these PTBSW exercises are for: to imagine a different set of fundamentals.

I just got back from Powell's. It was a zoo in there, but I got Advice to the Players, and I'm very pleased. It's one of Portland's best places, and is only about 15 blocks from my workplace.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Good point about the film influence. (And, of course, for many fandoms our canon is a TV show or movie rather than a book or comic.)

As for the Beaverton Powell's, I was there on a business trip. I had some time to kill, and had the hotel shuttle drop me off at the mall. I could see the Powell's sign directly across from me...with nothing in between but a drop of about 20 feet and a seven-lane highway.

Anyway, I hiked along the highway for about half a mile where there was a crossing, completely ruining my shoes in the process, then hiked back to Powell's and had the hotel shuttle pick me up there.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm glad you've been to the main one once--nothing suburban can quite compare to the organic, piecemeal quality of the mothership.

I don't believe I've ever seen a seven-lane highway. :)