How Madeleine Had a Rude Awakening

Okay, it wasn't so much rude as it was utterly bewildering.

In BFA lately we've been over at the RTVF studio learning Acting for the Camera. And let me just tell you:

Acting for the camera is completely different.

You always hear the cliche lines that film acting is much subtler, smaller, more natural and that stage acting is bigger, theatrical and while still natural in that it retains the sense of truth in what you say, it's not necessarily how we would say it in every day life. And walking in to these 5 weeks with John and Bruce, we knew all that. We've heard that a lot. But hearing something in theory and understanding it, and then getting up and doing it literally and understanding it are two totally different things entirely.

We filmed some scenes from "Good Will Hunting" today, just for practice, to get a feel for framing and how rehearsing for scenes work and scoring for a film scene and all that jazz. They didn't expect us to memorize it since they literally handed it to us at the beginning of class. It was expected to be rough. And it was. I think we handled all the changes a little bit better than we thought we would, but that does not negate the fact that before we shot, we felt, collectively, totally lost. Everything, even down to the SCORING of a film scene is different, which was not something that we inherently could have picked up on. The way beats are marked out and the way the scene is constructed in that it has a "value" set on it at the beginning, and somewhere in that scene the value has to change to be the opposite at the end. So if a scene starts out positive in tone (usually with the protagonist), the scene has to end negative. And somewhere in that scene, there has to be a turning point where it is clear to said protagonist that things have changed for them.

This is not the way we think in theatre. We mark out beats, we play objectives, we may even have the "value" thing in common, but the structure of the scene, the way lines are delivered, the whole "bubble" concept that has to include the audience in stage, but must never include the camera in film, everything else is different.

I suppose this is all redundant. Like, "Come on, Madeleine, why didn't you know this before? Why is this such a big revelation to you? You just admitted you'd heard all that stuff before." Which I had. But like I said, doing it and hearing about it are totally different. I guess today was the first true day where those differences were made utterly clear to me.