Workshops & Masterclasses for Actors
“You can learn the right questions to ask in developing a character. You ask yourself where they’re from, what they want, what their relationships are like, what their decision making process is in life and the tools they use to get what they want. Rather than using adjectives – he’s angry here — he’s sad here — you give the character motivation to pursue something, and as you build the character you give them the tools for going about getting what they want”.
— Billy Crudup
Martin Villeneuve is a man that has dared to dream and for him, that paid off. Big time. On a mini budget he was able to create and produce a mega sci-fi thriller set in the future of Montreal. What he had working for him? He didn’t know that his film was impossible to make. He viewed his financial constraints as creative challenges and was able to inspire others to believe in his dream as well.
The best way to get more auditions is to have great headshots. Here are my suggestions to help you find and choose a game-changing photographer that is a fit for you.
1. Do your research. Get recommendations from acting coaches, industry professionals, and actor friends. If you have representation, they usually have a list of photographers that they recommend. (Be wary if they only recommend one.) Your representation trusts their work, but you must connect and feel confident with the one you choose. If you don’t have representation, call agencies and ask the receptionist about the photographers they recommend. The names you hear several times are the ones you should look into.
Most reputable photographers have a website. View their pictures, prices, recommendations, and locations online, and check to see how professional their personal website is. Make sure that the photographer’s specialty or main body of work matches the type of photo(s) you are looking to get – commercial, theatrical, modeling, dance, etc. Money is often a factor, but know that the least expensive is not usually very good and the most expensive is not always the best.
2. Ask questions. Here are some questions I strongly suggest you ask.
Do you shoot film or digital photos?
What exactly does your price include? Hair and make-up? Proof prints or CD? Final prints? Retouching?
How much time do you allocate for the session?
How many “looks” – clothes changes or setups—are included? How do you define a “look”?
Approximately how many shots will I have to choose from?
What is your payment policy? (Don’t pay in full before the shoot and/or don’t make the final payment until the shoot or ideally after you receive or can see your photos.)
Do you have a monitor to see the pictures during the shoot?
Do use a studio and/or go on location?
If on location, where do you go? One location or several? How do we travel there?
How do you manage the light?
Do you help with wardrobe selection?
Do I receive proof sheets, 4 x 6 prints, a CD and/or see the proofs on a website?
How long after the shoot before I receive or can see the proofs? The CD? The final prints?
If I am not pleased with the photos, what options do you offer?
What ideas do you have on how to shoot me?
What qualities in me do you want to capture?
What types of roles could I play that my pictures should capture?
There are really no right answers for these questions. What you learn and how the photographers answer you will help you with your selection.
3. Evaluate the photographer’s work. At your meeting, ask to see numerous photos from a single shoot. Sometimes a photographer only gets one good picture from a shoot, and you want several choices. Evaluate the photos for the following qualities.
Pictures capture genuine personalities. Subjects are not trying too hard to depict something that does not look honest.
The actor is in focus and the background is subtle—not distracting.
The lighting is flattering. Photos are not overexposed, too dark, or have distracting shadows
The subject’s facial expressions are natural and capture different facets of actor’s personality—playful, introspective, sensitive, sexy, vulnerable, business-like, etc.
The subject’s eyes have life and are not fixed or lifeless.
The subject’s smile is genuine—not posed.
The subject’s face and body angles are attractive.
There is a diversity of poses, setups, and backgrounds.
Hair and makeup are not distracting, messy, or overdone.
Wardrobe is flattering not distracting or emphasizing unattractive body areas.
4. Consider the photographer’s personality. You are only with the photographer for a short time. You must be comfortable so you can be freed up and accessible. The photographer you select should be professional, communicative, creative, supportive, friendly, and fun.
5. Check the studio or location set-up. If the shoot is going be in a studio, check the lighting equipment, monitor, camera(s), background, and the place where you will be changing and preparing. Is it a professional setup and are you going to be comfortable shooting there?
By utilizing these five steps, you have a very good chance at getting headshots that will assist you in getting not only more auditions but the auditions that you are really right for, thereby giving you a better chance of booking work.
To learn what industry pros look for in headshots, watch my Agent Submission video featuring three L.A. commercial agents and my Casting Director’s Submission video featuring four L.A. commercial casting directors.
Carolyne, a casting director, working actress, and director, is considered by agents, casting directors and students, the best Commercial Audition Acting Coach in Los Angeles. Since 1982, the Carolyne Barry Workshops have been one of the most successful, full training Acting Schools. Ms. Barry and her coaching staff have trained thousands of professional actors. The comprehensive acting, commercial, hosting, and musical theatre workshops and the teachers offered in her programs have often been voted the BEST by the Backstage readers. Follow Carolyne onFacebook and Twitter. www.carolynebarry.com www.mastertalentteachers.com
A short interview with Neal Edelstein, the man behind “Haunting Melissa,” a horror film available exclusively via an iPhone app that creates an individual screening schedule courtesy of push notifications. This is so brilliant I can’t believe nobody thought of it before – I think we’re heading towards a revolution, and that’s a good thing.
Were you surprised people haven’t done this before?
It’s always hard to find a great story. It’s even harder to get financing. And then it’s really hard to marry the technology and the story. You have to get it there [yourself] in many ways. In Hollywood a lot of people are really successful and doing really well—why waste your time trying to innovate when you get XYZ script made and collect a massive paycheck? I’m not motivated by money; I’m motivated by innovating.
How else is “Haunting Melissa” innovative?
If you go back and watch something, it changes because I went back and shot things. The app gives you the ability to edit in real time. I’m able to create these other layers that change how the story is told. It’s basically a living, breathing object. It just gives you an unbelievable malleability that no storytelling device has ever.
What was the casting process like?
I was really wanting to shoot in this specific area in Alberta, Canada, and I wanted to hire local people. I wanted to create that kind of hermetically sealed film experience. There’s a pocket of people who are super gifted, and I was fortunate to tap into that. I ended up working exactly where I wanted to be.
Thanks to Backstage.com
“I am open to what is irrational. I open doors to intuition, because rationality is really death. Nothing that happens makes sense anyway.”
1. A DIRECTOR MUST BE A PEOPLE PERSON • Ninety-five percent of your job is handling personnel. People who’ve never done it imagine that it’s some act, like painting a Picasso from a blank canvas, but it’s not like that. Directing is mostly about handling people’s egos, vulnerabilities and moods. It’s all about trying to bring everybody to a boil at the right moment. You’ve got to make sure everyone is in the same film. It sounds stupidly simple, like ‘Of course they’re in the same film!’ But you see films all the time where people are clearly not in the same film together.
2. HIRE TALENTED PEOPLE • Your main job as a director is to hire talented people and get the space right for them to work in. I have a lot of respect for actors when they’re performing, and I expect people to behave. I don’t want to see people reading newspapers behind the camera or whispering or anything like that.
3. LEARN TO TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS • Ideally, you make a film up as you go along. I don’t mean that you’re irresponsible and you’ve literally got no idea, but the ideal is that you’ve covered everything—every angle—so that you’re free to do it any of those ways. Even on low-budget films, you have financial responsibilities. Should you fuck it up, you can still fall back on one of those ways of doing it. You’ve got Plan A to go back to, even though you should always make it with Plan B if you can. That way keeps it fresh for the actors, and for you.
4. FILM HAPPENS IN THE MOMENT • What’s extraordinary about film is that you make it on the day, and then it’s like that forever more. On that day, the actor may have broken up with his wife the night before, so he’s inevitably going to read a scene differently. He’s going to be a different person.
I come from theater, which is live and changes every night. I thought film was going to be the opposite of that, but it’s not. It changes every time you watch it: Different audiences, different places, different moods that you’re in. The thing is logically fixed, but it still changes all the time. You have to get your head around that.
5. IF YOUR LAST FILM WAS A SMASH HIT, DON’T PANIC • I had an obsession with the story of 127 Hours, which pre-dated Slumdog Millionaire. But I know—because I’m not an idiot—that the only reason [the studio] allowed us to make it was because Slumdog made buckets of money for them and they felt an obligation of sorts. Not an obligation to let me do whatever I want, but you kind of get a free go on the merry-go-round.
6. DON’T BE AFRAID TO TELL STORIES ABOUT OTHER CULTURES • You can’t just hijack a culture for your story, but you can benefit from it. If you go into it with the right attitude, you can learn a lot about yourself, as well as about the potential of film in other cultures, which is something we tried to do with Slumdog Millionaire… Most films are still made in America, about Americans, and that’s fine. But things are changing and I think Slumdog was evidence of that. There will be more evidence as we go on.
7. USE YOUR POWER FOR GOOD • You have so much power as director that if you’re any good at all, you should be able to use that to the benefit of everyone. You have so much power to shape the movie the way you want it that, if you’re on form and you’ve done your prep right and you’re ready, you should be able to make a decent job of it with the other people.
8. DON’T HAVE AN EGO • Your working process—the way you treat people, your belief in people—will ultimately be reflected in the product itself. The means of production are just as important as what you produce. Not everyone believes that, but I do. I won’t stand for anyone being treated badly by anyone. I don’t like anyone shouting or abusing people or anything like that. You see people sometimes who are waiting for you to be like that, because they’ve had an experience like that in the past, but I’m not a believer in that. The texture of a film is affected very much by the honor with which you make it.
9. MAKE THE TEST SCREENING PROCESS WORK FOR YOU • Test screenings are tough. It makes you nervous, exposing the film, but they’re very important and I’ve learned a great deal from using them. Not so much from the whole process of cards and the discussions afterwards, but the live experience of sitting in an auditorium with an audience that doesn’t know much about the story you’re going to tell them—I find that so valuable. I’ve learned not so much to like it, but to value how important it is. I think you have to, really.
10. COME TO THE SET WITH A LOOK BOOK • I always have a bible of photographs, images by which I illustrate a film. I don’t mean strict storyboards, I just mean for inspiration for scenes, for images, for ideas, for characters, for costumes, even for props. These images can come from anywhere. They can come from obvious places like great photographers, or they can come from magazine advertisements—anywhere, really. I compile them into a book and I always have it with me and I show it to the actors, the crew, everybody!
11. EVEN PERFECT FORMULAS DON’T ALWAYS WORK • As a director your job is to find the pulse of the film through the actors, which is partly linked to their talent and partly to their charisma. Charisma is a bit indefinable, thank God, or else it would be prescribed in the way that you chemically make a new painkiller. In the movies—and this leads to a lot of tragedy and heartache—you can sometimes have the most perfect formula and it still doesn’t work. That’s a reality that we are all victims of sometimes and benefit from at other times. But if you follow your own instincts and make a leap of faith, then you can at least be proud of the way you did it.
12. TAKE INSPIRATION WHERE YOU FIND IT • When we were promoting Slumdog Millionaire, we were kind of side-by-side with Darren Aronofsky, who was also with Fox Searchlight and was promoting The Wrestler. I watched it and it was really interesting; Darren just decided that he was going to follow this actor around, and it was wonderful. I thought, ‘I want to make a film like that. I want to see if I can make a film like that.’ It’s a film about one actor. It’s about the monolithic nature of film sometimes, you know? It’s about a dominant performance.
13. PUSH THE PRAM • I think you should always try to push things as far as you can, really. I call it “pushing the pram.” You know, like a stroller that you push a baby around in? I think you should always push the pram to the edge of the cliff—that’s what people go to the cinema for. This could apply to a romantic comedy; you push anything as far as it will stretch. I think that’s one of your duties as a director… You’ll only ever regret not doing that, not having pushed it. If you do your job well, you’ll be amazed at how far the audience will go with you. They’ll go a long, long way—they’ve already come a long way just to see your movie!
14. ALWAYS GIVE 100 PERCENT • You should be working at your absolute maximum, all the time. Whether you’re credited with stuff in the end doesn’t really matter. Focus on pushing yourself as much as you can. I tend not to write, but I love bouncing off of writing; I love having the writers write and then me bouncing off of it. I bounce off writers the same way I bounce off actors.
15. FIND YOUR OWN “ESQUE” • A lesson I learned from A Life Less Ordinary was about changing a tone—I’m not sure you can do that. We changed the tone to a kind of Capra-esque tone, and whenever you do anything more “esque,” you’re in trouble. That would be one of my rules: No “esques.” Don’t try to Coen-esque anything or Capra-esque anything or Tarkovsky-esque anything, because you’ll just get yourself in a lot of trouble. You have to find your own “esque” and then stick to it.
Judith Weston, veteren acting coach of actors and directors has some sage advice. Her first rule is one I try and live by: “Acting is not pretending. To be in the moment, actors – and directors – must liberate themselves from doing it right.” But how do you do that? Unlike many others, Judith offers concrete tools to try and unearth the most interesting and truthful response. “One of my favorite problem solving techniques is this. When you can’t think of the right answer, think of three wrong answers. I promise it will “unstick” you whenever you are stuck.”
If you like what you Judith has to say, you should read her two books, Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film and Television and Film Director’s Intuition: Script Analysis and Rehearsal Techniques. They’re both filled with more advice that you can absorb in one reading. But watch this short interview with the woman herself and you’ll see what I mean. In less than 5 minutes she unveils some real gold nuggets of wisdom geared to make you a better actor and or director.
“I think we’re (actors) healthier than a lot of people; at least we have an outlet, at least we’re able to examine stuff and go to places that most people don’t have an outlet to do”.
Rule #1: There are no rules. There are as many ways to make a film as there are potential filmmakers. It’s an open form. Anyway, I would personally never presume to tell anyone else what to do or how to do anything. To me that’s like telling someone else what their religious beliefs should be. Fuck that. That’s against my personal philosophy—more of a code than a set of “rules.” Therefore, disregard the “rules” you are presently reading, and instead consider them to be merely notes to myself. One should make one’s own “notes” because there is no one way to do anything. If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.
Rule #2: Don’t let the fuckers get ya. They can either help you, or not help you, but they can’t stop you. People who finance films, distribute films, promote films and exhibit films are not filmmakers. They are not interested in letting filmmakers define and dictate the way they do their business, so filmmakers should have no interest in allowing them to dictate the way a film is made. Carry a gun if necessary.
Also, avoid sycophants at all costs. There are always people around who only want to be involved in filmmaking to get rich, get famous, or get laid. Generally, they know as much about filmmaking as George W. Bush knows about hand-to-hand combat.
Rule #3: The production is there to serve the film. The film is not there to serve the production. Unfortunately, in the world of filmmaking this is almost universally backwards. The film is not being made to serve the budget, the schedule, or the resumes of those involved. Filmmakers who don’t understand this should be hung from their ankles and asked why the sky appears to be upside down.
Rule #4: Filmmaking is a collaborative process. You get the chance to work with others whose minds and ideas may be stronger than your own. Make sure they remain focused on their own function and not someone else’s job, or you’ll have a big mess. But treat all collaborators as equals and with respect. A production assistant who is holding back traffic so the crew can get a shot is no less important than the actors in the scene, the director of photography, the production designer or the director. Hierarchy is for those whose egos are inflated or out of control, or for people in the military. Those with whom you choose to collaborate, if you make good choices, can elevate the quality and content of your film to a much higher plane than any one mind could imagine on its own. If you don’t want to work with other people, go paint a painting or write a book. (And if you want to be a fucking dictator, I guess these days you just have to go into politics…).
Rule #5: Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
Article thanks to Moviemaker.com
“I think the great underestimation about life is that life is manageable, or it’s supposed to be easy, or good people will preserve. I’d rather go a little bit deeper and look at life through the ideal of the never-ending, really difficult obstacle course. Or how about good old-fashioned Buddhist joyful participation in the suffering of mankind?”