Today we continued to work on our character development - and making our character more interesting. Every thing that we do in a scene or monologue should tie back to this character development - all voice inflection, action, beat - should clarify, explain, describe, or move our character forward in some way. Today we worked on making sure that no action went wasted and no voice inflection was without purpose.
It really helped us fill out our character and act the scene out better - by mapping out each motivation it gave Erin a whole new tool box of possible actions and reactions to the situations we created. For example - if our character is telling a random story to a random audience, all you have to go on are the words the character is saying. You have to decide the significance of each word and action that you put into the scene based off of nothing. This tends to leave actors with a flat scene, or a very 1 dimensional character. They take the one objective the scene maps out for them with the language and they measure their success based on whether or not they showed that one thing.
With our character development process, we have given the actor several different options in how to say a line, react to a line, which emotion they want to use to best tell their story that we have added complexity to.
Connecting action to character development
Today we also worked on making sure every action we did connected back to our character development.
We started with big - awkward action, to get Erin out of a character that is an extension of herself. Having a character like this is never a bad thing - but because Erin is so good. We talked about how it would be so much more effective for her to show HOW good she is with a challenging comedic roll.
We made sure our action in our beats was big, that we gave our audience an appropriate amount of time to respond and react to the funny lines and actions we were doing.