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Pick Up Your Cues
Acting Mastery
27 May
Actors love MOMENTS,
Audiences love MOMENTUM
When coaching self-tapes, I often see actors making great choices… but taking way too long to get to them.
In acting we’re taught to be “in the moment.” But by emphasising the moment, there’s a common trap I see actors fall into all the time:
they start turning everything into a moment.
Actors love moments, because it feels good to be in the moment. It often feels good, because it feels dramatic.
But…
If you turn every moment into a moment, then nothing is a moment.
If you don’t earn your moments, then your work becomes self-indulgent.
If you pick up the pace and go for the momentum of the scene, you will earn those emotional moments and begin to trust your impulses.
Obviously, it’s not a one size fits all approach.
If you take this idea and apply it to GENRE, what makes a script comedic as opposed to an outright Drama, is the PACE. Because faster is funnier. It can also depend on the FORMAT of the story.
A page of dialogue in a film script should equate to around a minute of screen time. For television drama it’s between 45 seconds to a minute and for half-hour comedy between 30-45 seconds. If it’s taking you longer than this to get through a page of dialogue, consider picking up your pace.
Audiences don’t need to be spoon fed.
If the script is already dramatic, you don’t need to try to make it more dramatic. It’s already in there! This applies to dialogue too. You don’t need to overemphasise the the sound of words. We only do that when we think someone doesn’t understand what we’re saying. The audience understands what you’re saying. What’s important for you as actor to understand is why your character is saying it.
Audiences are not stupid. We shouldn’t treat them as such.
In fact, collectively, the audience is smarter than we are.
Take the pressure off yourself and any need to help the audience understand what you’re saying.
It’s the difference between treating the text like Opera, where everything is over-emphasised, pushed and overly dramatic, versus treating the text like Frank Sinatra or Billie Holliday, where the text is conversational, but every now and then you hit a high note or build to a crescendo.
Going for the momentum in a scene also means that you don’t have time to overthink how the line SHOULD be delivered.
We think before we act, so we can act before we think.
Your thinking time is in your prep. When you’re in the scene, we want to act on and trust impulse.
The moment you begin to overthink an impulse, it’s no longer an impulse: it becomes an IDEA of how you think the scene SHOULD go.
So… when to take a moment?
When your character is faced with a decision or in their emotional truth. Because as humans, this is when we tend to slow down. Emotion takes time.
And how can you make a moment land? By pausing.
A recent study concluded that the amount of time a person needs to experience ‘a moment’, is between 2-3 seconds.
If you take between 2-3 seconds after saying a line, before moving on to the next, what you just said will ‘land’.
I’ll leave you with this clip from class talking about picking up your cues:
Until next time!
Ben Mathews & The Acting Mastery Team
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