Theatre rehearsal vs film rehearsal
August 14th 2009 03:44
Professional theatre typically invests 100 hours of rehearsal into each play -- whereas in film you're lucky to have a week or two before the shoot.
How can you get away with reduced hours? -- I suppose the main difference is quantity of material. Theatre makes you stand fairly nakedly in front of crowds (perhaps with a prompt-person hidden somewhere). But in film you're probably shooting one to five minutes a day, and that footage is broken up into any number of cuts. You simply don't have to memorize as much.
Another difference is that film can be more forgiving of acting. There's a lot of reasons for this.
One is the technical ability to fix things -- to do retakes, or record just a few seconds at a time, or perform editing magic in post-production.
Another is that film often requires you simply to do -- "I just want a shot of your hand holding this coin", "I just want to shoot you putting the coin into that vending machine" -- but when you "simply do" in theatre, the details are often lost on stage.
There's a story told of Gregory Peck, that he used to go through his scripts, and at the top of some pages he'd write "NAR". When asked what "NAR" meant, he responded that the letters stood for "No Acting Required".
A final reason that film is more forgiving (though I'm sure there are other reasons) is that "impressionist" acting works better on film, partly because of the ability to do close-ups.
It's possible to speak of a division between "impressionist" and "expressionist" acting. In expressionist acting, the audience looks at your observable behaviour, and extrapolates from there to your mental state, emotional state, psychology. In impressionist acting, the audience attributes thoughts and feelings to you. Think of the way that a camera will quietly linger on someone's face after a scene.
Obviously, there's lots of stuff in film that helps the audience to attribute. Take for instance, image juxtaposition. If, following a plain facial expression, the next image is a bowl of soup, the audience will say the expression means "I'm hungry"; but if the next image is a crying child, the audience will read "restrained sympathy".
And of course there's much more symbolism, button-pushing, mood-setting in film than this -- lighting, set, framing and composition, sounds and soundtrack...
How can you get away with reduced hours? -- I suppose the main difference is quantity of material. Theatre makes you stand fairly nakedly in front of crowds (perhaps with a prompt-person hidden somewhere). But in film you're probably shooting one to five minutes a day, and that footage is broken up into any number of cuts. You simply don't have to memorize as much.
Another difference is that film can be more forgiving of acting. There's a lot of reasons for this.
One is the technical ability to fix things -- to do retakes, or record just a few seconds at a time, or perform editing magic in post-production.
Another is that film often requires you simply to do -- "I just want a shot of your hand holding this coin", "I just want to shoot you putting the coin into that vending machine" -- but when you "simply do" in theatre, the details are often lost on stage.
A final reason that film is more forgiving (though I'm sure there are other reasons) is that "impressionist" acting works better on film, partly because of the ability to do close-ups.
It's possible to speak of a division between "impressionist" and "expressionist" acting. In expressionist acting, the audience looks at your observable behaviour, and extrapolates from there to your mental state, emotional state, psychology. In impressionist acting, the audience attributes thoughts and feelings to you. Think of the way that a camera will quietly linger on someone's face after a scene.
Obviously, there's lots of stuff in film that helps the audience to attribute. Take for instance, image juxtaposition. If, following a plain facial expression, the next image is a bowl of soup, the audience will say the expression means "I'm hungry"; but if the next image is a crying child, the audience will read "restrained sympathy".
And of course there's much more symbolism, button-pushing, mood-setting in film than this -- lighting, set, framing and composition, sounds and soundtrack...
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