April Cramer's Lounge Discussions

Last night, just for fun and to refine my skills as a director, I took my first acting class. The class centered around the Meisner technique. Learning about the different 'stages' to the technique was enlightening. In the class, experienced actors demonstrated the stages - for brevity's sake, I'll stick to stage one here.

In stage one, one actor will say something they observe about the other person, eg: "You're smiling." The other actor will respond in turn with "I'm smiling." This is where it gets interesting. Each actor will then repeat the same exact line back and forth with the other, and as they do, the emotional connection and the meaning of the line will change DRAMATICALLY as the actors react to each other.

I understood how the meaning of a phrase could change on an intellectual level before this experience but until I was there and saw it done expertly in front of me, I had only a glimpse of the reality.

My takeaway from this is that boiled down, in the hands of a pro, the worst dialog will convey depths of meaning, not because of the skill of the writer, but because of the skill of the actor. Writing good dialog is of course important but... this experience also gave me an inspiration - to write and direct a short film where the dialog is mostly meaningless; where the meaning of the dialog is derived from the context (eg. the characters are leaving a funeral) and how the actors act within the scene. A line as banal as "you wore brown shoes" can take on so many layers of meaning through context and delivery.

The purpose of this exercise for me would be to further develop my writing so that I focus in on giving actors good context to work with. "Show don't tell" is often overused and misunderstood. Focusing on context has helped me. The other benefit to this approach is it prevents OTN dialog. With the dialog so meaningless in the first place, the audience will be forced to read deeper meaning into phrases that seem out of left field like 'you wore brown shoes.'

My screenplay, DEAD WAKE is still making waves!

It's 1:30 am and I'm doing some editing on my debut script. I find that at night I'm a lot more productive and tuned in to write.

What time of the day/night are you most effective when writing?