Today we started a new acting technique - scene/monologue work, or story telling! Up until this point, we have worked mainly on acting fundamentals (that we will continue to work on), and on character development (making a character more interesting, getting into character, adding dynamics to a character). It's important to build a foundation of character development before we move on to this second part of acting so that the focus of the scene or monologue is the character development. But, after we build a character, we need something for them to move forward - and to move them forward even further into deeper character development. This is where our story telling comes in! When telling a story - or setting a scene - we map out our scene the same way we map out our characters, with exterior things that we can add to our scene to make our scene more interesting. We also write out our scene into bullet points to map out the main ideas of our story - to more easily see what they are and to make sure we hit all of them effectively. We mapped out our scene like this: 1. He died 2. He was weird. 3. He swam backwards 4. He bumped his head on the tank 5. I fed him - most of the time 6. I smelled - mac and cheese, dessert. 7. I fed the fish because i smelled food. Our first week on this monologue, we worked on the first half of the story - building on that and adding the second half our second week.
Adding actions to our beats (continued)
Today we continued to work on adding action in our beats or pauses. Adding action to our pauses gives our monologue more life and helps us "act" it better - giving our bodies things to do and ways to react to things, so that our acting isn't completely dependent on how we say a phrase. Action also helps us with the pacing of our scene - allowing us to take it slow and still make it sound and look natural.