GSJG_Characterization

Today’s lesson: attention to detail.

With only three days until we strike the first light on our thesis production, we’ve been on a limited schedule and accelerated time frame. As such, I’ve only been able to meet with our talent a few times and progress from read-throughs to rehearsals to blocking sessions. Tonight’s three-hour session was a combination of rehearsing and blocking. For the first time, we had the entire assemblage of talent on the soundstage where we will attempt to transform them back to 1962. This will be the last time we will meet before the shoot.

As we went through one of our blocking set ups, we ran into a problem. The actors weren’t feeling the scene and there wasn’t a connection between them that would make the scene work. As such, we stopped and brainstormed ideas of how to draw more emotion and depth to the scene. After about 15 takes it finally hit me…

I have been researching this subject to the greatest extremes I realized there was one thing missing: the characterizations that were embedded by the individuals we were portraying. What I mean by that is everyone has their nuances that they do subconsciously. It’s something that’s unique to the individual and sometimes looked at as a trait that people often times identify with us. In this case, I had my actor portraying Chris Kraft walk around like he actually did. I have seen enough footage of the man and researched him so thoroughly to the point that I knew how he would be pacing and specifically where and how his hand movements/gestures would be. It didn’t sink in to me until that point these were things that are essential – mainly because I was more concerned about the performance the actor was giving.

After giving the talent new direction and motivation, it was uncanny how much more depth and connection the two actors shared in front of me. It was suddenly apparent that there was a different air between them, and things changed completely. The scene no longer felt flat and the world around them (even though nothing was there) came to life. Maybe this was a fluke or maybe not, but regardless this new idea is something that’s going to help accentuate this story and create added depth (this is especially important since we’re stuck in one room).

What I realized is that I am visualizing this movie through a movie camera, and not through a moving 3-D world. Things move, people move, characteristics that people have need to come to life regardless of how tight the framing is, and if we just have the characters recite lines we’ll put our audience to sleep…no matter how awesome the shots look or how intense the situation becomes.

Although this might seem very rudimentary and almost common knowledge, this is something that I guarantee most ‘directors’ fail to capitalize on. Just use me as an example. Now that I have it in the back of my head – let’s see where this takes us to next-