Getting Into Character

When you're acting it's important to LEARN YOUR CHARACTER. Yes you need to make the character your own but you need to analyze the character so that you can do it correctly. Whenever I receive a role there are a few things I've learned you should always do to learn your character. First of all you need to know the time period. Obviously someone in the 1920's isn't going to have their hand on their hips or other quirks we have in our modern society. Time period is also important because people behaved different within families, schools and every day life. This brings me to my next tip that you need to learn character interaction. Look at the other people your character will be in contact and interact with. If you're doing a reenactment or a show previously done or if there is a movie use those past performances to see how your character should talk, behave and act towards the other characters. If this is an original work, ask the director or writer how they imagined your character acting towards the others and the kind of relationships they have. Finally ALWAYS learn your character's history. Learn their backstory, what they are driven to do, and who they are, as if doing a history report. If you don't know who they are, how can you pretend to be them? And also make sure to enjoy it. It should be fun getting to be in another person's shoes for the sake of entertainment.

Lions and tigers and animals movies OH MY!

Ahhh animal movies, we've all seen them. Beethoven, Shiloh, Shaggy Dog and so on. There are a lot of extra steps in making movies like these, the biggest being the animals. You need to get the animals, the trainers, pay for their special food and needs. Also unlike humans you need to be more patient with them during scenes because they don't function like human beings do. But what really drives people to make these movies? I mean sure some like the Air Bud series has TONS of movies and probably made the recurring actors a lot of money but how much could it really be making for the film maker. It seems to me that the cost of making these movies should highly outweigh the profits especially since they are geared to a younger audience who now in days want more mature content. Anyway thats just my thoughts on theses movies and hope this provoked some thought for you as well.

What Is Slow Motion?

Hello internet, this week we're talking about something most people have seen. SLOW MOTION! Everybody love's watching some good slow motion, but how is real slow motion done? Some would say that you just run slow and slur your voice. Others would say you just take your video and slow down the playback rate. Now people could even say you shoot something on the new iPhone. But real slow motion is much more than that. For real slow motion you shoot with specially designed cameras. One of the most common brand names for slow motion cameras is called the Phantom cameras. Cameras like these record slow motion by recording tens of thousands of frames per seconds (differing from each model). At normal playback of 30 frames per second you could have only a few seconds of video play back at a duration of a couple of minutes. However this isn't something just anyone can do. It costs a lot of money to purchase one of these cameras and special training to operate them. So creates a special career field for camera operators who'd like to invest in doing slow motion as their job. For a great example of slow motion in use for fun ways you can check out www.youtube.com/theslowmoguys. It's a channel where a professional slow motion camera operator uses his phantom to shoot really cool entertaining things in slow motion. Until next week I'll leave you with their newest video you wouldn't wanna miss.