Acting Class 1

Hey guys!  So, I go to acting classes once a week (currently every Monday) for about an hour.  In my opinion, it's not enough time.  I love it so much.  I've been going for about two years now and basically we do  monologues, scenes, and a whole bunch of really wacky stuff.  I thought it might be fun to blog about my acting class when I get home every Monday so I can share what I learned with you guys.  Here it goes...

Today, the guy who runs the class asked us what film genre was considered to have the worst acting.  Take a guess.  If you guessed horror, you are right.  Apparently, actors and actresses in the horror industry have a bad rap for... well... sucking.  I don't know about you, but I've seen a lot of good horror movies with good acting in them, so I was a bit confused.  Basically, he explained that, unless your pulling out real emotions, your acting is going to suck, and if your acting sucks and you don't feel the emotion behind it, neither will your audience.  I think this was a good topic to bring up.  All of us have different methods to acting, whether it be imitating others, imagining ourselves in the situation, or so on, but, no matter what, we should always be feeling real emotions about the scene we are doing.  A good way to test this in yourself, which is what we did today, is to do a scene or monologue that's  horror based.  Before you start it, though, you have to think of something that really scares you, your biggest fear, and bring that out in the scene you are doing.  Here's a good monologue to try for a girl or a boy (technically it's written for a girl but, don't worry, anyone can do it).

http://www.whysanity.net/monos/blair.html




Whether you do this one or you pick your own, the point is the same.  If you felt genuine fear while doing it, you got it right.  If not, really try to pull whatever scares you into your head and let it effect your emotions.  Hard stuff, but it makes for good acting.


Well, I hope that was a little informative.  If it wasn't entertaining enough, I'll tell you what our "warm up" was.  We had to make a dating video, but we had to be really weird people that no one would ever want to date.  You can imagine that in a class full of spazzes, that was pretty funny.  But, it is an interesting idea for a party game...

My question for you today is:  Is it easy or hard for you to pull up emotions while acting and do you have any techniques that makes it easier?

Anyhow, thanks for reading again!  I'll be posting pretty frequently about random things and I will post every Monday about my acting classes.  Thanks for reading and I will talk to you later! :)