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Acting Tips
- Thread starter Shauna23
- Start date
This is more of a general job application tip than anything, it's still a good advice. The important thing to do early on is to have experience, both casual and professional if possible. Casual experience boils down to practicing your acting on friends, family, or even strangers. Simple things such as role playing as a fictional character for a few hours can help boost confidence and ability to adopt different personas, all part of the job in the acting industry. Professional experience means actual performances in front of an audience. If there's a theatre near your home, you might be able to get into some community plays as a volunteer actor. Even better would be a drama club or society, which would also tend to gather around theatres, these clubs often put on their own shows, as well as have workshops for members to practice acting skills on one another, which works well for the casual experience. It's all about getting involved; having such experience sets you apart from other young actors, and could be the deal breaker for securing jobs.
1. Find a couple of actors you like. Emulate them. Delve into them. What are they doing to get into character? What are they doing to stay in character? How will you be able to do that as well? These are questions that once you've answered, you can start applying to virtually every role. Simply being able to do things on command is not enough. Just because the emotion is right does not mean that the character has been made real. You have to become your character, blur the line between actor and character to the point where it's hard to tell which is which.
2. Find a scene that has several vastly different emotions throughout. Read it, understand it, and look even deeper. Try to find the deepest motivations for your character. Why are they Emotion A here? What causes them to become Emotion B? And then why are they now Emotion C? Often times, these answers are not obvious. Often times, you'll need to invent a reason yourself, but you have to make it believable. It has to fall under the conditions already laid out by the scene and maybe even previous scenes.
3. Watch "Whose Line is it Anyway?" religiously. Seriously. Yeah, it's improv, but they way in which the cast is able to quickly create entirely believable characters is an amazing skill to have. Sometimes it helps to base a character off of someone you know, maybe even a mix of people. By grounding characters in traits observed from reality, it adds to the credibility.
4. Observe. Observe everyone you possibly can. What they do, how they do it. Try to ask yourself why they do what they do. Once you can understand people in such a manner, look at your character. What's a situation this character is in that you've seen before? Make it relate to real life. The whole point of acting is to sell a character that is part of a story. You're telling a story. People are more inclined to believe a story when they can relate to the characters in any way, no matter how small.
If you're looking to get into acting, search around for places that are looking for actors. Take classes, be it in school or elsewhere. This is the best field to exemplify that experience is the greatest teacher of all. Never stop practicing. There's a million ways to practice, even things as simple as doing impressions of people or characters.
2. Find a scene that has several vastly different emotions throughout. Read it, understand it, and look even deeper. Try to find the deepest motivations for your character. Why are they Emotion A here? What causes them to become Emotion B? And then why are they now Emotion C? Often times, these answers are not obvious. Often times, you'll need to invent a reason yourself, but you have to make it believable. It has to fall under the conditions already laid out by the scene and maybe even previous scenes.
3. Watch "Whose Line is it Anyway?" religiously. Seriously. Yeah, it's improv, but they way in which the cast is able to quickly create entirely believable characters is an amazing skill to have. Sometimes it helps to base a character off of someone you know, maybe even a mix of people. By grounding characters in traits observed from reality, it adds to the credibility.
4. Observe. Observe everyone you possibly can. What they do, how they do it. Try to ask yourself why they do what they do. Once you can understand people in such a manner, look at your character. What's a situation this character is in that you've seen before? Make it relate to real life. The whole point of acting is to sell a character that is part of a story. You're telling a story. People are more inclined to believe a story when they can relate to the characters in any way, no matter how small.
If you're looking to get into acting, search around for places that are looking for actors. Take classes, be it in school or elsewhere. This is the best field to exemplify that experience is the greatest teacher of all. Never stop practicing. There's a million ways to practice, even things as simple as doing impressions of people or characters.