The Toybox Technique by Al Carretta

THE TOYBOX TECHNIQUE 1.

Introduction – Personal Emotional Consideration

2.

The Team Is Paramount

3.

Welcome to the Toyshop

4.

Theatrical Presentation In Hypercompetition

5.

Independent Film Production

6.

Glossary Of Terms

7.

The Toymakers Emotional Toolkit

8.

Selected Bibliography

The Toybox Technique by Al Carretta. ©2012 - 2017. Nightpiece Media.

All rights reserved.

Introduction - Personal Emotional Consideration ‘You’re all muppets and you’ll all be taken for a ride...’

Legendary advice from my Year 11 Maths teacher in our final lesson. As democratized as production methods (particularly filmmaking) have now become few production guides or methods are honest enough to tell you step by step the likely reality of your experience. This one hopefully will.

Bottom line is this, you’ll taste glimpses of success but won’t actually get anywhere.

You’ll lose lots of money and realize acting and entertainment in general is a tougher world than you ever anticipated but the hope is that the next project is around the corner. It’s not. There aren’t any big jobs in entertainment unless you’re a bankable asset and it takes years of slow burning publicity to become a true ‘banker.'

You might get an advert or two if you’re professional, have personality and know the coup. You might get a shot on the stage but it’ll likely be a TIE production touring Grimsby for Equity minimum. You’ll become disillusioned and then give up or backtrack your career until you are at exactly the same point where you started. Then you’ll look back at the opportunities you had. The people who tried to help you. The people you walked away from...and got somewhere with the production you walked out of... The moments that might have been and as you look up from your office coffee the last time you did any sort of production was five years ago.

This book is written for anyone with an interest in the reality of modern performance from the bottom rungs of the ladder. Those heady heights and promises of an actual paid job - a living wage even, well let’s be honest... If you step up you’re one of the lucky few. And I mean few. Talent means absolutely nothing. Let me repeat that.

Talent means absolutely nothing. Talent is a myth. People are skilled, people have charisma but if you are disconnected do something else.

Performance is based entirely on a given person’s ability to be charismatic. You have to be in the right place at the right time with the right people. You also have to be liked by people first. Remember in primary school when your teacher or parent gave you that cliched advice that life isn’t a popularity contest? It is. We live in vanity driven times surrounded by an agenda led media driven audience born out of ‘me’ culture. The ‘me’ people don’t have time for ‘you’ and that is the grotesque power of social media engineering. Everything is devalued because everything has become infinite.

Remember that spoilt kid who had everything and still cried. That is the media created audience of the 21st Century. Our consumption was once guarded by gatekeepers. It still is and everything out there remains the construct of an agenda but in this immersive world if you’re not popular and don’t ‘engage’ you can’t join the online club. Lifetimes of human experience tell us that engagement isn’t for everyone. Social media has also become omnipotent insofar as it is the most invasive form of control over a userbase the World has ever seen.

Hold on, this is supposed to be about performance, right?

It is, however, for me to discuss any approach with relevance it is essential to understand the vagaries of the world we currently live in. We live in an era of hypercompetition and hypercompetence thanks to technology, however this doesn’t mean things have necessarily advanced.

At it’s best, entertainment (as an industry at large) is cynical and vitriolic, irrespective of the content output. It fuels truly unachievable dreams. Look at the content that gets pumped out. If you grow up with a digital CGI universe how are you ever going to realise that what you see is an artificial reality that can’t be made in the confines of the film studio or theatre. Read the tabloids for a daily dose of celebrity toxicity but keep one eye on what is actually happening in the world.

News agendas dictate what should be on your mind, however trivial. Entertainment agendas work in a similar way. It’s cyclical and attuned to economic circumstance.

Think about these opening statements. These are observational opinions that have far reaching considerations but let’s focus on the subject in hand. Performance. The process can be a rewarding engagement but as we stand the boundaries have changed.

Productions aren’t what they were as administration restricts, imposes and challenges all but the most basic premise.

The process of Acting is an inherently natural task. Your own personality dictates the types of roles you love, hate and are indifferent to, however, any role you play will be determined by an authority who asserts belief in your ability to deliver a contribution.

The authority who asserts belief in you isn’t necessarily going to be the director which is why as an actor the importance of the people you surround yourself with should never be under estimated.

Consider also that mainstream culture has seen style squash substance into submission.

The 21st century is a cynical place, dominated by the artificial and ruled by what Orson Welles often referred to as ‘fakery’. Fantastical or imagined, true performance is a demonstration of natural skill that engages and excites those around you. The ability to inhabit character wholly and suspend the disbelief of an audience is your ultimate goal but without a precocious talent behind you, the learning curve begins with the idea that you can afford yourself the opportunity to fail. Great actors aren’t made overnight but great performances are.

For this exercise you will need a pen and a blank sheet of paper. The purpose of this exercise is to help you gauge the emotional requirements of a role.

Take this given circumstance. As a female actress you’re relatively experienced. You’ve been cast in the highest profile role you have ever had. You knew you had a good chance but the director can’t afford you much time to get to grips with the character. In all honesty, you think the role might be too much. You’re quite daunted by the project but you’ve agreed and the project begins in less than a month.

Be honest. How well do you know yourself? If you want to approach any character with a clean slate you need to understand the basic roots of your own personal motivations and desires. Outside of the potential performance what currently worries you? Are you looking for love, recognition, stability or purpose? Are you stressed in your job, under-supported in a relationship, in too much debt? Ask yourself as many random questions as you can. Write down one word answers then begin to focus your thoughts on the following three questions.

Am I capable of delivering this role?

Can I deliver an appropriate characterisation in the timeframe?

Do I have the emotional capacity for this role?

The final question may seem harsh, almost invasive, but it’s a brutally honest consideration and one that often goes overlooked. In younger and inexperienced actors the idea of emotional capacity can be tricky as the demands of a role are frequently underestimated. If you can answer yes to all three questions immediately, repeat the process a few times. There is no right or wrong answer to this exercise. You are simply questioning things and giving appropriate preparation time to what will be a much longer journey.

Let’s think about the role you’ve been offered. As this is an exercise you can choose any role you like, however, in this first example the role is ‘Nora Helmer’ in a traditional stage production of Henrik Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’. This play needs no introduction but in this particular circumstance you’ve got the part largely bluffing and are unfamiliar with the content and themes.

As you read through the play you begin to understand the emotional weight required.

When Nora finally leaves Torvald it suddenly reminds you of the painful break-up you recently went through in your personal life. Can you emotionally separate this experience or will you need to include any raw feelings within your performance?

Discuss your reactions and look for other potential issues in the play that could cause conflict. Nora’s Father died and she obtained a loan by forging his signature. Torvald undermines Nora’s intelligence. Do you know of any similar circumstances? The links within your personal life may at first be tenuous but suddenly they will connect.

‘A Doll’s House’ is a snapshot of life (albeit in 19th Century) but it’s themes remain universal. How these themes affect you is a key part in decision making for roles. If you don’t feel you have the emotional capacity for the role ask yourself what elements are holding you back? On the flip, if you do have the capacity what are the factors that enable this? Solving these emotional based issues early on creates a simple approach to building character. Ultimately, you are learning your personality as if it were an emotional toolkit and barriers to effective portrayal need to be identified and overcome.

This knowledge, once learnt and applied brings efficiency to your skillset by way of immediate identification with character. In simpler terms, you can quickly learn the roles you are capable of playing and the roles you need to avoid. Many actors do not take the time to honestly explore what roles they can and can’t deliver believing that ‘training’ has prepared them for anything. Unless you’ve been trained at the top, you won’t be prepared for anything until experience embodies you.

Let’s reverse the considerations and think about the role you’ve been offered as an actor. In this example, the role is ‘Johnny Pope’ in A Hatful Of Rain by Michael V.Gazzo. Johnny has a morphine addiction and is married. He also needs a perfect American accent. In your personal life, you’ve begun to experiment with various illegal drugs and are worried that the weekend high is becoming a daily habit. The similarities between you and the character play on your mind. Even though you got the role you bluffed it by phonetically learning the audition piece.

You’ve got the role but have failed to appreciate just how far it overlaps into your own life. Worse than this you can’t do the accent unless you adopt the same technique you did for the audition. It’s hassle all the way, however, it could also be a defining moment and a scenario whereby all experiences can be connected to deliver something special.

Any extreme character should be carefully considered but in discussion, remember all angles need to be explored. The likelihood is you will attempt to undertake any role you’ve been offered but for anything with real depth you need to at least begin with a balanced state of mind.

For the latter stages of this group exercise you need multiple copies of the same play.

In the United Kingdom through the 1990s and 2000s, failure has been an offensive word in education. No one is allowed to fail - the league tables must demonstrate improvement! The standard of Grades go up yearly but at what expense? Today’s ‘B’ was last year’s ‘C,' however the argument is used to illustrate the benefit of systems that acknowledge the importance of failure in the development of success.

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that allowing yourself to fail will give you a foundation on which to succeed. Success is not necessarily monetary or physical.

It is a unique motivation personal to us all. Society defines success with status symbols and we are all fickle but let’s look at more basic examples of success.

For reference, watch excerpts of the film ‘Cast Away’ with Tom Hanks. He survives a plane crash only to find himself stranded on a desert island. After four years he builds a crude raft that will enable him to escape the Island and drift into shipping lanes. He is rescued and returns to a society that has declared him dead.

At this point he has succeeded in escaping from the desert island, however, on his return he must face up to the tragic circumstance that his former Fiancee is married with children. Success or failure? You decide, but the point is if he hadn’t got off the desert island he would never have known what happened. He afforded himself the opportunity to fail.

In performance at large, remember that art is a wholly subjective medium. Accepted conventions and standards enable us to acknowledge a general standard of product but its absolute success is in the hands of gatekeepers relevant to that particular segment of the industry. With this in mind be cynical with your approach to failure. At some point you really do need to be awful.

Choose any play. For my examples I am going to choose Dale Wasserman’s ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ and Christopher Hampton’s ‘Les Liasons Dangereuses’.

Both plays deal with male and female power struggles in wholly different environments.

Look at the respective character lists and decide who could be considered a ‘success’ and who could be considered a ‘failure.' There is no right or wrong answer - it is a starting point for a deeper discussion. In ‘Cuckoo’s Nest‘ there is a division between staff and patients created by Randle McMurphy’s challenge of Nurse Ratched’s authority. In ‘Les Liasons Dangereuses’ the struggle is of a much different order focusing on the morally questionable actions of La Marquise De Merteuil and Le Vicomte De Valmont.

There is no drama without conflict and the division and diversity in both these examples offer a palette of acting experimentation as most aspects of the human psyche are touched upon. Across these two plays, male or female you should identify with at least one of the roles, however the consideration of the exercise is to give yourself the best chance of success by identifying the role you are most capable of delivering.

Consider the exercise a casting session, except you are casting yourself.

Egos are not required here. Honesty is. Write down your relevant acting experience up to this point and match it to the roles on offer. Be wholly realistic. If your experience is merely stepping in a theatre no amount of talent, precocious or otherwise can justify your insistence that you can rival Jack Nicholson or Glenn Close.

Having written down your key experience assess it’s relevance carefully. Portraying a playing card in the school production of ‘Alice In Wonderland’ at aged 12 is totally relevant...if you are now 13 and it was the last thing you did. However, as a 32 year old performer it really has no significance until it is scrutinised. The role came loaded with an experience that is potentially applicable to the (current) production. Being a simple playing card was surreal and involved humility. It was grounding and it was a formative acting experience. Things that ground you provide foundations and platforms on which to develop.

Discuss your experience in greater depth and work out the role you aspire to and the role you are capable of delivering. Essentially you are looking for an achievable performance goal so don’t over estimate your ability. Be harsh with yourself.

Prepare a few lines or actions from the role you feel capable of delivering. Swap the notes of your experience around the room and audition each other. Start to assemble a cast for the play based on the collective experience in the room. How honest were you?

If your group is relatively inexperienced it is unlikely you would have been able to cast the biggest roles. Introducing this element of reality is key to developing a straightforward approach to the roles you can and can’t do.

Exploring roles opens them out and makes them accessible.

For the next section we are going to go a step further and enter what I internally refer to as the Toyshop. In this fantastical place there is one important rule to follow: You are the Toymaker and you hold the only key to the Toyshop.

The Toyshop itself only requires your imagination but the shop needs accounts so you might want to keep them in something physical like a shoebox. As the Toyshop fills up with better toys other people will eventually do the accounting for you but you might find you always do the accounts. It’s your choice. The Toyshop is nothing without customers but you don’t see them because you are the Toymaker. Even when you do see them you don’t notice them because you are so engrossed in finishing the toys. You fill the shelves and know the delight that your creations bring to people but you are quite happy to work slavishly behind the scenes to deliver something amazing.

So, let’s enter the shop. You have the key so open the door. As you walk in you’re a little shocked. It’s the first time you’ve been in and it’s not what you expected at all. It might as well be a blank room. There’s a few shelves, glass cabinets, fixtures and fittings but no toys! Where are the toys? You look around the room and you find an inventory.

Turning the page you find an order sheet but it’s blank. Something seems amiss. You thought this was a Toyshop but so far it seems quite specialist; it looks like it only sells dolls and figures. This is partially true because it is you who needs to start stocking the Toyshop. You can work quickly inside your head so let’s look over your entire performance career.

Think about everything you’ve ever done. Start assembling the figures as representations of your previous performances. Put them in the glass display cases.

Can you visualise just how many different experiences you’ve had?

To aid the visualisation draw yourself a table and divide it by the number of your acting roles. Put the name of each role in the table. Now go back to the Toyshop and visualise those roles in the glass case. It’s a spectacle but some roles look better than others.

Some simply stand out because of flashy costumes but inadvertently some of the roles are quite hidden despite closer inspection revealing complete attention to detail. Some of the roles have even fallen behind the shelves. Some will never be found again but others will be discovered when the time is right.

Suddenly the Toyshop is a fascinating place. It’s overwhelming and filled with experience but everything on sale has seen better days. At first you think about overhauling everything but you realise this would be nearly impossible. This is where you suddenly realise the Toyshop is more akin to a museum with a giftshop. It’s there to remind you of what you’ve done but you can only buy what’s currently being made.

Once you’re finished with a role it’s unlikely to be revisited but it’s useful to look back at them and know you can still take them off the shelf and appreciate their construction.

Being able to honestly assess your performance is key to developing stronger characterisations.

When you ‘own’ your characters they can have a life far beyond your original design for them. Don’t think that you will create or define every role you play but look over popular culture across the past century and you can list countless roles and the associations they have with particular actors. For example, who is ‘The Godfather’?

Marlon Brando is. Even in death, Brando owns Don Corleone. Thousands of others have imitated but there is only one Don.

Understanding the potential of legacy might seem a little over ambitious but careers don’t happen overnight. If you were born after 1991, Sir Tim Berners Lee invention gave you a world connected on a different level to anything ever seen previously. This is an old idea now but you’ve either grown up with the internet or it was an invention you came to terms with and learnt as it evolved in your respective lifetime.

The escalation of the disingenuously connected world means you can be propelled into stardom overnight with no discernible talent or more shockingly no choice to be subject of such massive personal intrusion.

The information age is a messy affair. Media now leaves a constant stream of unattended wreckage as it seeks the instantly gratifying power of the next big thing. In a sad indictment of the production the asset is everything if it gets the corporation an additional marketing profile to abuse.

Content? Product? Assets? Buzzwords for the same thing, surely? Look at the entertainment you consume and you know that productions are very different to what you could have expected in decades past. A new audience - you - has been moulded carefully to have lesser expectations, a shorter attention span and a poorer understanding of substance quality.

This is a bold statement but one that is proven, justified and re-enforced by the exponential multiplication of entertainment streams. Everyone can have their own TV channel. That’s nearly 7 Billion people to promote ‘Channel Me’ but it’s not a level playing field.

Nobody is going to watch you.

You will have heard of Spiderman. In 2001, Tobey Maguire was the next big thing and Spiderman was one of the Summer Blockbusters of 2002. Watch the film, it’s a great example of popcorn cinema but flash forward to one of the Summer Blockbuster films of 2012. ‘The Amazing Spiderman.' A ‘reboot’ to acknowledge the buzzword. So, ignoring the two sequels, Tobey Maguire’s ‘Spiderman’ had a legacy of less than 10 years. Think about this. A production that cost millions and made millions is replaced practically overnight by what will effectively be the same film that also cost millions and will make millions.

Everything only exists in the now.

This is indicative of the audience that has been created in the past 20 years. Longevity isn’t allowed and the short term memory of an audience is encouraged. If it isn’t present it isn’t relevant. This isn’t the case with acting. You really need to understand the world to see how and where your character(s) belongs. Coming to terms with yourself and armouring your psyche with an emotional tool palette enables you to project characteristics outside of your normal personality, however acting demands you to deliver these tools as an extension of yourself. This means acting is no more than being at one with your own personality and the power of your own interactions.

Primary school English comprehension will give you the tools to breakdown a scene so don’t over complicate it and never fall victim to going deeper than the reality of the scenario. Understand the motivations of the characters, know the subtext and be the most naturalistic version of yourself you can be.

‘Personality goes a long way.’

In quoting Jules Winfield in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film ‘Pulp Fiction’ you are getting the worst kept secret in life and entertainment. It’s all about personality.

Modern life is a rigged talent contest so ignore any preconception of what ‘talent’ you might have. If people like you, you have the beginnings of an audience. This is the failure of instant super stardom. Humans are naturally aspirational beings but we also harbour deep rooted resentment over the most trivial matters. This is the make or break moment for the unknown entity propelled. If they are naturally accepted a career awaits. If there is something a little untoward, opinion drifts quickly and the manufacturing process begins...

The Team Is Paramount At school aged thirteen an end of year assignment in my English class revolved around making a class magazine. I’d made the case for the project and there were two potential editors of the pamphlet, myself being one of them. Applying fairness to the process of selection the teacher decided we should draw straws. I pulled the short straw and the ensuing class wide arguments meant the project collapsed by the end of the lesson.

Formative and defining experiences for me always revolved around the lack of, or collapse, of creative control in situations where I was powerless to intervene. Team sports of any description provide an instant example of the power of leadership and the need for a collective objective. Dynamically, a film or theatre production involves the same methods of team operation so anyone who is quick to dismiss sport - and so many actors are - should look a little closer.

In Basketball, there are five players on court. Point Guard, Shooting Guard, Forwards and a Centre. Everyone has a role to play with the point guard directing the intensity of play. To win games you need players who are competent in their respective positions, however out of five positions a great point guard and a great centre will inevitably make you a winning team. Translated into a concept of theatrical production we would need two out of five actors to hold our piece together.

In Football, you have eleven players on the pitch. A Goalkeeper, Defenders, Midfielders and Strikers. You can’t play without a Goalkeeper so he is the most important player, however he only has limited control over the direction of the game.

He cannot dictate the pace. The midfield playmaker, however, can. He will largely play the centre third of the pitch and run anything into the low teens in kilometres on any given match. This player is the engine of the team but he doesn’t always win games.

Theoretically, the Striker is there to score the goals, that is his purpose. In a theatrical scenario we need at least a good goalkeeper, playmaker and striker to effect a positive outcome on our games.

On stage we would need three out of eleven actors to hold our piece together.

In film and theatrical production there is no such thing as a perfect cast until the realisation dawns upon you when the project is completed. Only after your production is finished will you realise that everyone performed what was required of them and the dynamic delivered. As your personal experience grows you recognise much more quickly how well your team is evolving but objectivity isn’t always available immediately.

The purpose of the above examples is to highlight a dynamic that translates from sport into theatre; the quality of the team. The team is defined by specialised competency in the key roles but in the wider production simple competency is required to maintain the general direction.

A good actor with major experience will empower the performances of most performers he shares the stage or screen with. However, unless the role dictates this actor might not be involved all the time meaning the torch must be passed to a similarly competent controller.

This is where the importance of the team’s core comes through. If the level of performance can’t be maintained the production struggles. The more reliance you have on the ability of a single performer the greater the chance of failure. However, provided you can give that performer the support of at least two other equally weighted actors consistency should be maintained across the production as the experience (should) permeate through.

I have always internally referred to this as my ‘frontline.' Competency in the frontline equates to the building blocks of a great performance but casting this backbone of a production is hardwork.

When you are young and inexperienced you can make mistakes freely. Cast your friends. Go with the crazy guy who turned up late for the audition. Utilise the girl who can sing but has nominal acting ability. Do whatever is needed to stage the play or make the film. Casts develop natural dynamics quickly but until your experience increases or money becomes available to source quality performers they are unlikely to be universally competent. Harsh, but fair.

In an inexperienced student or amateur company at least a third of the cast will be absolutely awful. They are present for the Jolly, the atmosphere and the general peer pressure of participatory involvement in a project. Another third will be competent but relatively disengaged due to external pressures and the final third will be the frontline.

The cast will inevitably bicker, split up, reunite and argue again. One of them (likely a member of the frontline) will leave for an almost unquantifiable reason and be replaced, awful performers will become absolute assets and once majestic actors will simply lose their fizz.

As your experience develops mistakes begin to go through a transitional process. They stop becoming genuine mistakes and become risks. If you are capable of a carefully formulated opinion on the standard of a performer you should be able to know roughly what an actor is capable of on the strength of audition and discussion. However, be aware of the elements beyond the routine.

You want your actor to have a basic grasp of the production process. This also includes them knowing roughly how productions get put together. They need to be savvy. This includes understanding casting. If your performer has signed up to a fee based charlatan agency for a photo embedded within a thumbnail gallery you’ll know that these people have no idea what they are attempting to get involved with. I can elaborate on these internet sites further but your best consideration is to look for yourself. They are out there in abundance. Spotlight is the professional casting directory for the UK and is the only benchmark to consider.

The hardest problem you will ever face with performers who have fallen for any promise is that they cannot be reasoned with quickly. These gullible wannabes are blinkered and delusional in their personal understanding of the talent they don’t possess. Ironically, these performers possess naivete in abundance. However, it isn’t the process of naivete we want them to tap into as actors. It is the inexperience of the green and without acknowledgment of their inherent limitations they are time wasters and production killers.

I deal with casting on frequent occasions but one thing to always look for in a performer is a glow. Few performers carry a glow and very often that glow dies instantly. This is why the ‘X-Factor’ is so specific - there is no permanency behind it.

Stanislavsky refers to a similar process as Prana but that technique involves the wilful projection of your psyche onto an audience. The ‘glow’ that I am discussing is simply inherent to each individual. You can see it when the person walks into a room. The atmosphere lifts as people react. The glow is a presence of engagement. It is not an inner confidence; that is a different consideration. It is a raw conviction of self that balanced performers naturally and entirely subconsciously emote.

Ten (ish) Simple Stages Of A Theatrical Production In principal, staging theatre involves nothing more daunting than consideration of the steps detailed below. Don’t ever see money as an obstacle and work on the basis of total spend versus budget. Budgets are needed for bigger productions but on the lower end of things are largely irrelevant as you’ll never have the whole amount at once anyway.

If you are a relatively inexperienced actor and are given a free ride in a production (payment, accomodation, expenses , etc.) jump on board even if you hate everything and everyone associated with it. The experience will be a gift of humility that will only ever come round once in your acting career. You’ll know the experience when it finds you.

Who am I? The first stage of a theatrical production is You. In the production You serve to be the motivator. The Big I Am. The Boss. The one who will take the abuse and the criticism.

The person who will work harder than anyone else. The director, even.

A scenario with dialogue for actors to talk about.

The next stage is a script. You do not need a great script. It helps but really its all just words on a page. Own the script but do not ever be precious with it. The script is an organic consideration. It will develop naturally. You’ll have to cut sections for pace, you’ll have to lose lines because people can’t say them with the correct inflection and you’ll have to inevitably cut entire roles because they add nothing to the balance of your play. If you have a precious writer get rid of them. They will only waste your time and you can’t lose a rehearsal arguing over a few lines. If you are in the right place at the right time Gatekeepers decide what is worth elevating and your groundbreaking play about a tragic childhood will only go as far as it’s first few performances no matter how much you wish. This is the tragedy of new writing. It needs to be presented in an environment where you have access to an elevated level of cultural interest and the influencers that accompany it.

Time, space and location.

Now you need a performance space and date. It can be anywhere. Conventions dictate an auditorium and lights but the black box that springs up at every ‘Fringe’ worldwide does little to democratize the process of performance.

Actors Wanted.

Actors are now required. These are the people who will deliver your words but they might not necessarily be experience enough to be called actors. They should match your experience and never be paid a fee. Payment detracts from performance in micro-budget theatrical productions. It reveals agendas, creates division and obliterates the ethos of the team who will snipe each other to pieces.

Base level Rehearsal.

Repetition of the script is now required. On stage rehearsals are key to fine tuning the people who will deliver your words. Although rehearsal is essential for dynamic in stage performance your Front Line will make or break your show.

Simple Production, simple Publicity.

In starting to advertise your show, a black and white photocopiable design that announces your script with the 5 W’s (Who, What, Why, Where and When) is all that is needed. Publicity should cost you practically nothing. If it cost more than £10. Be ashamed. Every pound beyond ten is a fraction of the alcoholic drink you will inevitably need at some point in the production and 90% of your flyers will go in the bin.

Value your Product.

The culmination of scripted words recited by actors in a defined space approaches.

Largely overrated if it goes to plan but remember if an audience does turn up they are being charged in accordance with the pricing policy of the venue. Even if your show is poor, the venue has cost you money. You have to acknowledge the cost of the venue in your ticket price and you can’t undercharge. VALUE your product immediately.

People are snobs. A higher ticket price sets a precedent as it demonstrates a consideration of the value of your product as a piece of art. Remember, art is a subjective medium and gatekeepers don’t necessarily have taste.

Who let me down and Why? It’s over. It’s an awful play but comparatively it’s a financial success. Be brutal. Who let you down? Was the actor you risked in that role worth it? Probably not. How come the lighting operator was late with every cue? What the hell was that idiot doing walking through the audience to enter? You want answers to every question you pose.

Take a blank sheet of paper and write down the answers.

Debut productions only ever exist on life support machines. They are a tremendous struggle and an inevitable triumph over adversity. Success is great but it won’t really help you identify your weaknesses. You need to learn. Diplomacy is not always easy and you have to afford the benefit of doubt to inexperienced performers. At the bottom end of experience this doesn’t seem so harsh but if you ever give an opportunity to an untried talent the ‘rule of three’ is almost self-fulfilling and horribly effective in rooting out weakness. As the quality of productions step up performers must remain consistent. To be blunt, you reach a point where you just can’t work with weak and disengaged performers.

The brutal Rule of Three.

The life principle behind the ‘rule of three’ is the given circumstance that every actor has three chances to prove themselves. If they perform poorly as a result of their own indifference first time, most will embrace the opportunity of a second role to make amends. Realistically, if they were poor in the first instance due to attitude they generally won’t be any better second time around. Attitude is everything but is a sleeper process. That is, an actor might be as sweet and adorable as apple pie on set or in rehearsal but they are still dead on their feet. They’ve been partying too hard, took something naughty overnight and come in to your production with enthusiasm and feigned positivity. This is a more cynical process of disrespect than working with someone who is just difficult. This performer isn’t giving your production the time of day. If you’ve got the talent you can be high as a kite and still deliver. If you haven’t you just can’t afford to disrespect a production like this. It makes you (as performer) and the director look like idiots as the whole process is just a struggle. This second chance is the apex of the opportunity afforded - somebody is out of their depth and aiming to prove themselves. As a director, even though you remain genuinely constant and unerring in your faith in their ability to deliver unless the actor really does have potential they will not come close to returning for a third production. It is an unspoken breakpoint that separates amateur level talent and professional performers.

Adopt a process of critical rejection.

After or during the play’s run a review might pop up. Learn now to adopt a policy of Critical Rejection. If the review is bad hold it back from your cast for as long as possible. Bad reviews can have huge demotivating effects on inexperienced actors. If the review is good, never get too excited - check your box office to see the impact the review had. Did it increase sales? Unlikely if its just a regional production. You are not in the West End; it was not press night; and the reputation of reviews in the Edinburgh Fringe collapsed years ago. Read them for what they are. One person’s opinion.

Negative criticism is audience guidance for the swathe of people who would never have bothered to watch your play anyway. Positive criticism justifies what people worked out for themselves anyway.

Deconstructing your production.

Your production must have an objective. It can be monetary, self-fulfilling or cooperative. Whatever it is it must have one and it must be separate from the script’s objective. The play has a content objective; a subjective consideration you present for your audience to mull over.

Unless you state a reason first (e.g. I am staging Hamlet because I want to play Hamlet and I wouldn’t otherwise be cast) your production must come loaded with a commercial intention. Box office returns have a massive psychological affect on productions. Forget the acting and the performance elements - making money from a show that everyone has contributed to simply motivates. It justifies the effort that everyone has put in. Anyone who claims ‘we’re not doing it for the money’ or words to the effect of ‘it’s a charity thing’ sums up everything that is wrong with key sections of theatrical production. Where did the money appear from? How can you afford to be involved in an industry that revolves around money? Challenge these ‘not doing it for the money’ arguments if they are not accompanied with explicit reasoning. Basic economic principles apply here. Humans have basic needs and they have to be provided for. Once you solve the problem of water, shelter and food human wants become insatiable. Vanity is directly associated with wealth and money, and vanity is a core reason why people aspire to be involved in entertainment.

As an agenda Philanthropy has been long forgotten in the 21st Century. Charity is an insincere commercial enterprise and there is no fund to facilitate the staging of your production just because you want to stage it. You might not be doing it for ‘profit’ but you are still doing it for the money. If you make money, lose it where it should be lost.

Reimburse on everything and pay everyone if you can. If you cannot, welcome to the reality of entertainment production. If you make oodles, do not do a Jimmy Carr and avoid the taxman. Our age is cynical enough and to pass judgement or make a statement on the broader intricacies of life you need to empathise with the experience of the layperson. On the flip, if you see yourself as an Independent. Be Independent. Be cynical of production and its slow demise into corporatisation. If you want to go with the crowd, embrace the flaws of the industry, pay thousands for unaccredited drama tuition then try joining Equity who will laugh in your face as you ask what about my thousands?

Economic Overview.

Your Nan brought Auntie Maureen to the show and she did not pay. Well, sorry Nan I appreciate the blue jumper but you owe me £8 for Auntie Maureen’s ticket. Get the idea? Free does not add value to anything. It cheapens the product further and changes the ethos of the production. If you have 40 tickets to sell, it has to be press tickets on request only and positively no freebies. It’s simply a production killer and creates fictitiously busy venues. Look at the Edinburgh Fringe now; it’s the greatest show on Earth where all the performers watch each others shows for free and wonder what happened to the actual audience who, incidentally, did not bother to turn up.

If you made real dollar on your production now is the time to stop and get a proper job.

You obviously have business acumen or many gullible friends. Nonetheless, welcome to the peak of nothing. Everything beyond is simply an economy of scale.

If you lost less than £500 you have some exceptional grasp of industry demands and will probably shore up an American ‘method’ acting coach through drama classes and Fringe Festival entries for a few years before getting disillusioned then finding a job as an estate agent and realising life is out there.

If you went the whole hog and lost more than £1000 someone in a suit saw you coming and has already opened the Drama Academy that you have been pre-selected to audition for.

For all other outcomes remain cynical and repeat process.

Welcome to the Toyshop The overall approach I am discussing is a considered method of thinking inside a box.

When the box is locked you can only imagine the contents. Outside the box thinking is useless when you need to internalise a scenario. Used as a simple practical tool the approach of the technique utilises the power of your imagination to compartmentalise your experience and personal understanding of performance.

Breaking down what you have achieved broadens your realisation, unlocks confidence in your ability and refreshes your expectations. As long as you are prepared to approach the considerations honestly you should make use of the scenarios.

Firstly, let’s go back to the Toyshop. Open the door and go inside. You’ve probably rearranged the store by now. You’ve started to work it what roles were important but it’s still quite a mess. There’s bits associated with the roles that need to be on the same shelf and other people’s experiences seem to be popping up on adjacent shelves.

Luckily, our Toyshop is magical. We have Toyboxes. Lots and lots of Toyboxes. They aren’t very big but once you open them they allow you to keep everything associated with a production inside. The Toyboxes also replicate your roles so you can leave them on the shelf in full view but they’ll still be inside the toybox too. Go through everything you’ve done performance wise and start mentally placing the ideas and experiences inside. There’s a lot to cram in and suddenly there’s lots of Toyboxes. You can open up as many as you want and when you’re done with them they’ll magically tidy themselves up and go back on the shelf.

After you’ve spent time working out the Toyboxes you’ll find there are bits and bobs from experiences that overlap or just don’t belong directly to anything. We don’t throw anything away in our Toyshop. Everything has a use and the things we can’t find homes for belong a special box in the workshop. This box isn’t a Toybox, it’s the Lost and Found box. Everything gets piled in here and you really have to rummage to find what you’re looking for. You might not find it on the first look but you have enough of an idea about it to know what it is you’re looking for.

Staying in the workshop you notice a book of faces and expressions. It’s the only book you’ve ever seen in the Toyshop and you’re not really sure what it is. The faces are happy and sad but they’re are infinite variations of the looks. As you go through the book more you realise it’s actually fallen out of a cupboard.

The faces book is one of many that line the shelves. They are part of a series of books on the shelf. The books are part of an anthology called the ‘Toymaker’s Emotional Toolkit.’ Some books are thinner than others but there seems to be an order to the books.

The first book is called ‘Shoes and Feet.' It’s a curious design. When you turn a page a new foot or shoe pops out of the book. Quite quickly you realise that you can think of any shoe or foot and when you turn the page it appears. What use is a book with pop up feet is your first thought. You put the book back and take out the second volume.

The second book is called ‘Trousers & Legs’. It works on the same principal. Anything you think of pops up out of the book. You quickly go to the next volume. It’s called ‘Private & Confidential.' You expect it to work the same way as the previous two books did but nothing happens. You turn the page and notice instructions which read ‘Discretionary Production Specific Requirements.’ As you read through you realise this volume is about characters that require specific personal actions such as nudity.

There is advice on every scenario you can think of but at the bottom of every page is the warning ‘At Toymaker’s Discretion.’

The fourth book is called ‘Tops & Torsos’ and works the same way the others have.

You then flip over the original book you were looking at to see where that fits and it says ‘Magic Faces - For Reference Only.’ You’re not sure why it says for reference only but there’s still two more books on the shelf. One book says ‘Head Spaces for Magic Faces’. This is the heaviest book of the anthology but your imagination works differently with this book. When you turn a page a floating sphere appears. It spins and fills instantly with a rainbow of colours except at the bottom of the page it says ‘Insert Only On Completion.’ You shut the book and turn to the final part of the anthology; ‘Accessories & Special Items.’ You try to open it but you can’t this book is locked on the side by a tiny key. You carefully place the book back on the shelf and scan through the spines again. Flicking through a pamphlet drops out. It gives a quick overview of each volume.

The Toymaker’s Emotional Toolkit Vol.1 Shoes and Feet The way your character walks will be dependent on his feet and then his shoes. Think ‘feet’ first, know how you walk and understand what problems you might have with your stance. Personally select appropriate footwear for the character in relation to period and persona. Don’t forget to apply socks as and when appropriate.

Vol.2 Trousers and Legs Selection of appropriate trousers is essential to the emulation of certain periods. High waists, low crotches, belt hooks, buttons and zips will directly affect your movement and ability to access items on your person.

Vol.3 Private and Confidential (use at Toymaker’s discretion) Some roles call for a portrayal of indiscretion. Use this volume to discuss carefully what exactly it is you need to do and how it can be delivered in the most appropriate fashion.

Vol.4 Tops and Torsos Dresses, jackets, boobs, busts, suits and shirts will have a significant impact on the overall make-up of your character.

Vol.5 Magic Faces (for Reference Only) An endless gallery of emotional nuances posed by Transformer actors.

Vol.6 Head Spaces for Magic Faces Magic Faces need specific mindsets created for certain roles. Use this volume to insert special energy into your creation.

Vol.7 Accessories & Special Items This volume can only be opened when the role is near completion.

Having a greater grasp of the complexity of the workshop you head back into the main shop. Suddenly you begin to realise how all the creations were made and the process that went into getting them right. You stand back and realise that you’ve done a lot and have a whole gamut of unique and individual experiences that you haven’t even touched upon. These belong in the Toyshop but where do they go? Suddenly you notice a box at the back of the room. All the other Toyboxes are quite plain but this one is enormous, bright and coloured like a rainbow. How did you miss this to begin with?

What is in the box? The biggest and brightest box in the shop is the Super Toybox. It’s the toybox that dreams are made of because it contains everything. Not just productions and characters past but plans and dreams that are yet to be fulfilled. You feel the super toybox should really belong in the workshop but some of these toys and creations belong to other people.

As you rummage you realise there are an enormous amount of Props in the Super Toybox. Why so many props? In everyday life, people use many things. We live in a world where we rely on things. Most of the roles we play will involve characters using objects of some description.

Things start to make sense then you see an instruction on the lid of the box. It states in big letters: YOUR CHARACTER MUST OWN THE PROPS. How does my character own the props? It’s simple really. Anything your character wears or uses personally belongs to that creation. This means, any previous life the physical item may have had is reborn into the new character.

Let’s use this example. In 2009, I wrote ‘The Tears Of A Clown’ about gagster cum gangster ‘Donnie DiMaggio’. For many months I looked for a suit to portray Donnie. I rummaged through the Super Toybox and found myself in charity shops pawing through hundreds of suits without luck. Finally, I drove to an area where I hadn’t seen the charity shops at any point recently. In the first shop I walked into I found the shiny blue/grey 1970s mohair blend suit that has become synonymous (at least amongst my family and friends) with that character. The woman who sold it to me was probably in her 80s, with plastered make-up and bright red lipstick over crooked teeth. She looked like a character from the play but all she was there to do was to sell me the suit. On buying the suit for the princely sum of seven or eight pounds I assumed ownership of that suit. I didn’t just assume physical ownership, I assumed mental ownership for myself to present to my character. Whoever had worn that suit previously walked a different path. This suit was now Donnie’s and his respective experience had to be inserted into it.

If you take on board a prop or costume you can have no reservations about what you do with it. If it has a previously sentimental attachment then you must let it go or find a different item. If you need the prop to be damaged you must allow it to be damaged with no concern attached. In practice this means you can’t wear Aunt Maureen’s wedding dress if she wants it back unscathed. If you are true to character development Aunt Maureen’s wedding dress now belongs to your character so sentiment must be dismissed and you must insert your character’s identity within it.

For Donnie DiMaggio’s mohair suit I went for a simple and direct method. The Donnie suit was used in the period of action set in 1974. I placed pre ‘74 US coins in the pockets alongside replica ‘74 audience tickets for the ‘Flip Wilson Show’ and a timeless silver fountain pen that matched my silver cufflinks and silver ‘pinkie’ ring.

On stage I also drank Seagram’s Seven Crown with 7-Up or a ‘Seven and Seven.'

Everything on my persona matched the time period of 1974. Every prop associated with Donnie was owned by the character and anything that happened to the props in terms of damage or wear and tear could be attributed to an experience of that character.

The experience of developing and producing a character can be an interesting process due to the subconscious internal factors involved. Consider the following exercise History Repeating. It’s a simple exercise in self-awareness that is a level deeper than my initial discussion of personal emotional consideration. What you need to do is work out the roots of your core internal motivation in a specific scenario. This is more than just character related. It’s the reason you’re choosing to do anything. What you are looking for are the triggers that took you from curious party to dedicated performer.

Look at the process as a journey and start from whatever you feel are key formative experiences and conclude at the first marker point you reached in your career. By marker point I mean the first point at which you achieved something that represented a particular desired goal. My exercise, in diary format is below. I always felt key experiences moulded me when I was younger so I detail things from an early age.

History Repeating – A Performance Experience Diary Spring 1993 Attended my one and only youth drama class. It was a Friday night and I was in attendance with my sister and friend who were both established members of the class at this point. Run by Spotlites Youth Theatre at the Woodlands Youth Centre, Gillingham I simply couldn’t engage or relate very well to the other children as I only really knew how to get on in football teams where my goalkeeping role had always been specified.

Months later I watched Spotlites’ production of ‘Hair’ and was amazed by the design and end action of the actor playing Claude who stayed motionless in state centre stage until the theatre was empty. I can still remember people walking up to him and looking over him as the show ended.

Core motivation in scenario: Self-consciousness, Discovery.

August 1996 I bought cheap record decks from a friend and learnt to DJ. Having only ever had tapes until this point, playing vinyl forced me to start exploring charity shops to build my record collection. It also meant I started listening to obscure records. In the same month I visited family friends in Manchester. Collected from the central bus station, my family friend was an undercover Police officer. In the boot he had countless props he and his colleagues used for various surveillance operations. It was a momentary event but I was fascinated.

After my brief stay in Manchester I attended an American (NBC Camps) organised Basketball camp on the Isle Of Man. The standard of tuition and techniques employed to generate unity and motivation amongst players stay with me to this day. I never knew how to make it rain with a group of people before but the emphasis on social skills and interaction in the evening sessions cemented an invaluable development experience.

Core motivation in scenario: Discovery, Personal Mental Attitude (PMA).

May 1998 Shoot and edit the short film ‘Automatically Sunshine’ on a 8 mm Camera pressing play on the camera then record on the video to make the cuts, re-filming the TV to make the final edit and add a soundtrack via the audio in on the video recorder.

Core motivation in scenario: Proof of concept.

August 1998 Go to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time. Watch nineteen plays in four days. Vow to return in 1999 with a show of some description. Receive A Level results. Universally insulted by classmates for getting a ‘D’ in Media Studies when predicted an ‘A.' Confidence in creative ability decimated. Scrape into Keele University.

Core motivation in scenario: Humility.

May 1999 Present ‘The Two Sides Of A Star’ in Keele University Drama Society One-Act Play competition. Co-direct production with Justin Chisnall. Unsurprisingly, finish runners-up. Work out we delivered the production on approximately 6 hours cast rehearsal Core motivation in scenario: Delivery and achievement of goal.

As a diary scenario, my entires may seem tame to your own experiences but the key to utilising them is recognising how they have set you up to achieve in the future. From attending my first drama class in 1993 to staging my first production six years later I built my experiences progressively to the point where they culminated in a long term goal. Experiences present you with founding motivational blocks, that is with a motivated understanding of your requirements you are more likely to achieve what is asked of you in a role through empathetic understanding. Did your parents divorce?

Did you have a grandparent who died early? These are intrusive considerations but what is personal becomes elemental when you choose a method of application in a role.

We are talking about motivation in situ. To persuade you have to present your case to the audience, so let’s really explore the Toyshop.

Heading back into the workshop you find a book that you didn’t notice previously.

On the cover it says: The Toymaker’s Emotional Toolkit Introduction - The Personas of The World When you open the book it contains a picture and a description of every person you have ever come into contact with in your entire life. The book is thin but practically infinite in length except every image disappears as you turn the page. The first few images contain the biggest personas you have dealt with; the larger than life people who have had the biggest impact on you. It’s likely that your siblings, parents and friends are in those first few pages but quite quickly bigger, more penetrating personalities begin to appear. Teachers, bullies, superiors, authority figures, celebrities and such like begin to dominate. What is about these people that made an impression?

Think down to absolute base level. You might remember someone because of what you perceive to be a negative trait. An irritating laugh, a silly reaction to their own sneeze or a giant mole above their lip might make them stand out. On the flip, your perception of them could be positive. A gleaming smile, blonde hair or a delicate voice might be key factors in you remembering them. The key point to focus on is what you remember about certain people that makes you engage with them.

People who you are in contact with daily will likely be harder to analyse instantly than people you don’t see very often. It’s a simple question of frequency; the more you see of somebody the more complacent you become in their company. You act on a different level as you behave subconsciously in their presence.

Familiarity can be the foundation of great collaborations in art as a subconscious understanding of what is required empowers nonverbal action. Go back to the book.

Flick through and look at all those people. Who did you share a connection with? Who did you feel a subconscious bond with? It is unlikely you can identify with everyone but you’ll quickly see a trend. The people you have known for many years will share a connection of knowing with you. Through mutually shared experiences and time you will have an intrinsic understanding of that person’s behaviour. This is how good friends who haven’t seen each other over a number of years can pick things up exactly where they left off, however the subconscious connection that time creates is different to the ‘click’ that impact can create by virtue of process.

So, what is the ‘click’? Tennessee Williams describes the ‘click’ of alcoholism through Blanche DuBois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ however in this context that is more of a switch that signifies her emotional pain numbing under the effect of alcohol. The ‘click’ that I look for is the immediate bond you share with certain people.

The click isn’t a scenario where you are simply involved with like-minded people; that is far too generalised a consideration. The click is an almost telepathic link shared between individuals that informs an unspoken way of working.

Go back to the book. Who did you ever share a ‘click’ with. Remember, it’s different to an emotional bond of time and shared experience. It’s an instantaneous effervescent moment however, fizz stops fizzing. It can last for days, months even years but when the last bubbles pop it simply dies. You can’t combine the ‘click’ with mutually shared experiences. For all practical purposes it’s a one night stand; how long it lasts beyond the night is the unpredictable dynamic. The best artistic scenarios come from a foundation of people with subconscious, time served relationships behind them who are melted with specific ‘click’ personas.

As a persona I think of a ‘click’ actor is an ignition; a dynamic personality who brings a higher emotional level to the game by understanding depth, substance and motivation at an intrinsic level. He can start things. You don’t need to explain anything to a click actor; they are capable of delivering immediately and root their ability through every other performer. A click actor isn’t necessarily the greatest technical actor but they are the unbreakable link in a chain and have a permeating charisma.

Go back to the book. Are there any other personas that standout? We’ve dealt with the subconscious thought process but now let’s be a little more physical. Let’s look at bigger personalities, the people who do something to be seen or recognised. Do you remember the performer who talked things up so much then failed to deliver the performance of humility that was required? We’ve all seen the types but what is it about certain characteristics that demand you avoid them?

Beware the Hyper-ego. These are the actors who have clear cut experience and competence but are shrouded by some former guilt that deflates them come performance time. Learn to identify traits that give performers their identity. Too much or too little inward thinking is cause for concern when progress is slow. You can build up internal characteristics quickly but you can’t spend forever on a specific area as personalities are multifaceted.

If you are portraying a performer who is an artist certainly paint a picture in character but the likelihood is unless the role is a specific character study or biopic, one will suffice to prove the experiment. Any more is a trip for the ego. Similarly, when looking for character traits substance can be achieved with key allusions to the character’s personality. Assuming he is an artist, defining props, costumes and mannerisms will present him to the audience, however these do not need to be infinite in their consideration.

An example would be overcomplicating the use of brushes. Your particular hyper-ego actor is insistent he has a variety of brushes for different scenes. From large to small he wants to ponder, feel and reflect on each different brush he is going to use in each respective scene.

In process of painting different brushes are inevitably required but in performance particularly theatrical - the audience can suspend their disbelief enough to appreciate a brush and a canvas represent the artistic process. Any unnecessary exaggeration of performance is a deliberate inflation of status inherent to the Hyper-ego actor.

Upstaging, high volume and over gesticulation are just a few examples of what will frustrate actors and directors alike. Hyper-ego performers are much more frequent in youth and student drama and are endemic to indie film and larger production extra work.

In film many actors seek to capitalise on the trivial to add perceived weight and gravitas. This can be particularly noted with larger props such as walking sticks, canes and hats. Look at the parliament scenes in the film ‘Amazing Grace’ to see classic examples of bit-part exuberance that devalues scenes.

The hyper-ego is the one style of actor that has nominal accommodation in any given performance. If you find yourself with a hyper-ego determine your tolerance level and apply the rule of three.

Slowly, this book in the workshop is opening your eyes to the persona definitions of the people who have inspired you through your life. Think of your greatest inspiration.

Who do you most admire?

How do you identify with them? How do you portray them?

Without internalising the process, many actors unconsciously resort to mimicry.

A mimic actor simply copies the performances of others and delivers a vanity edged character. Look in a mirror. When you are young it’s a fascinating process. You can stare at yourself for hours trying to look like someone famous in a specific pose but you never will.

In your mind’s eye if you look long enough you’ll perceive yourself to be anyone you want to be but you still won’t have improved your natural ability to react the look spontaneously because you won’t have a mirror in front of you.

A mimic actor is a useful addition to any team. They will be able to do specific roles exceptionally well, particularly in an ensemble. Mimics also develop their range and end up being the style of actor whom I believe to be most frequent, the progressive actor.

When you were younger did you go to a drama club or class? Were you in the school play? Do you remember that kid who pissed themselves at the back of the stage? They might have been mocked brutally afterwards but it didn’t stop them performing. They went though school plays, into youth theatre, into am-dram and student theatre and now they’re pursuing acting as a going concern. They have a rounded experience, aren’t particularly incredible but are simply progressive, notching up key roles. Their respective experience snowballs and they become a veteran of performance. These are valued contributors to the world of performance. They often form the chassis of production and prove that experience over raw talent holds firm.

Beyond progressive actors, we move into Engines and Linchpins. These are the actors that hold productions together. They embody elements of all other actor types I have described but deliver the power and keep the wheels on the axles. A production with an Engine but no Linchpin will struggle; the wheels can roll off at any time. A strong engine and a good linchpin will give your production a core, however where mimics can develop into progressives, Engines and Linchpins are a process of natural personality selection. They are actors simply inclined to absorb the responsibility of productions. Engines have credence, enthusiasm and energy.

They will have always been strong performers and propel the production but they need a similar but contrasting ally. This is where the Linchpin locks into place becoming the gravitas for the production.

Go back to the book. Find a face. Look carefully. Flick through and find them again.

Wow. You’ve spotted them but they look different. They’ve changed. They’ve reinvented themselves. This is the final acting type I am going to discuss. The Transformer.

Transformer actors imbue a facade over a production. They embody the production design and are often the key art on the poster or hold significant profile roles. Their importance stems from their ability to wholly transcend personality physically and emotionally. Many female Transformers will have spent time as models before moving into acting, however, this entry route often creates an imbalance of experience meaning they are likely plagued with the issues of the hyper-ego actor. Unless they reject the hyper-ego element to become simply a mimic or progressive they will have a short lived time as an actor. Simply looking different isn’t the process of the Transformer actor.

Firstly, they will have complete command of the role’s physical nuances and idiosyncrasies to the extent that they are simply a natural extension of that specific persona. Secondly, any accent or mannered delivery will also be natural and the look will be one of complete embodiment and contrast to that of any previous role. As a Transformer, all facets of the emotional toolkit are present and a much more internal process is evident.

As a film actor John Cazale is one of the finest examples of this Transformer process.

He doesn’t look particularly different in his roles but he introduces an injection of panic to the films that help define them. Not everyone can be a Transformer actor.

More often Transformer requirements are role specific which is why Transformer performers can be wasted in roles that don’t demand the skillset.

At a glance, this is how the acting types line up for a production.

Hyper Ego Chorus, walk-on, nominal dialogue.

Mimic Play roles up to Supporting Lead.

Progressive Play roles up to Supporting Lead.

Engine Play Lead roles.

Linchpin Play Authoritative Lead roles.

Click Play Key (Title) Lead roles.

Transformer Plays role specific parts that no few are suited to.

All productions require a mixture of the above types. No production will be truly efficient without a Click. The cooperation and interdependence required in acting meaning that roles are usefully illustrated as Trust Circles. Essentially you have a closed, inner, outer and greater circle. It’s not a circle of attention, it’s a circle of influence.

Your closed circle involves the key leads. That is, the engine, linchpin, click and transformer belong here. They are the heart of the production - they will rescue it when it’s failing which is why you have to trust these people 100%. Mimics and progressives make up the inner circle. They are essential to the production’s success but their failure won’t derail things. You need to have faith in them but in this circle of trust you can expect them to be 75% reliable. Hyper Egos belong in the outer circle. They are prone to failure so expect them to be 25% reliable. Other acting elements make up the greater circle including choruses but have a theoretical 0% reliability rating in the circle. Those in the greater circle can be non performing contributors such as accent coaches or producers but largely it is the rest of the world or outside factors, however you wish to consider it. Anyone in the greater circle cannot be relied upon to bring an added dimension to your production unless the closed circle’s strength is allowed to permeate.

The point of the circle is that trust and confidence is built from the hardcore performers. When this closed circle makes progress the additional circles benefit.

This is why the frontline of your production is so important. As an additional example.

Apply this trust circle directly to your own friendship scenario. The closed circle is reserved for the people who have the highest importance within your life, namely family, best friends and significant others.

The inner circle is made up of the people you interact with on a daily, weekly or more casual basis and the outer circle is made up of the people you know through routine, passing or in more generally lucid circumstances. The greater circle is the rest of the world.

In the personal version of the trust circle there is no way to penetrate the core without first becoming part of the respective circles. This is a penetrative process for the outsider wanting access to the closed circle. In life your closed circle doesn’t have a sphere of influence but it remains a foundation of trust. In the closed trust circle of the production the process is one of mushrooming influence.

When you trust and believe in your actors you want them to do well. As a director it is important to empower your actors where possible. Sometimes analysis confuses the inexperienced, however, when your actor presents a permanently mixed emotional palette in life generally you are faced with an awkward scenario, particularly in the middle of production. The section that follows is an analysis of my own scene sent to a performer whose ability to externalise an internalised process was under developed.

I have edited the content where applicable and obviously acknowledge Stanislavsky as the man for emotional memory.

AL’S SUPER SCENE BREAKDOWN “...This is some background technique (essay) on approaching the “mini-meltdown” scene. The “mini-meltdown” scene isn’t quite as bad as it sounds but I do understand that it really isn’t for everyone to lose emotional control so with your own sensitivity in mind I want to give you the best way into it.

Firstly, in an Al film we are in the land of ‘method’ acting and there are key approaches to gaining access to the emotions you may need for the dialogue or action in a scene.

Two of these approaches are Emotional Memory and Sense Memory. I advise the latter.

Emotional memory calls on the recall power of personal experience(s) to convey the emotion required by the character. I use this process as it works for me and suits my nature but this is a fragile method as the more you rely on specific memories the more diluted they become. What this means is if you ever use a memory to get into a mindset you need to know the threshold of it: e.g. at what point the memory kicks in and creates the emotion. The skill (and flaw) behind emotional memory is achieving control by turning the threshold level of the memory down to one and still achieving the desired level. You can’t get to get to this state without sacrificing the power of certain memories as each memory is like a battery. The power wears out but even if recharged it will never return to full capacity.

Emotional Memory is a totally internal process. I am going to recommend you totally avoid this method as even though it is your own headspace and memories remain personal it remains an invasive technique. Again, my key here is respect of your own sensitivity and I want to push you in the direction of looking upset without being upset.

Sense memory calls on the use of the physical sensations associated with a specific experience. This is more accessible as it can be controlled to a much greater extent. It is as simple as imagining the pain associated with stubbing your toe. You can apply this to infinity creating any circumstance and knowing what physical responses you will feel. Cooking, cleaning, dancing, it doesn’t matter you just have to focus on dissecting the action and you will uncover the million unthought physical aspects of that scenario.

I’ll begin this process with dancing. Say you’ve spent the whole evening having fun dancing - and at the end of it are simply exhausted. Your legs ache, your arms ache, your body aches, all you want to do is roll into bed, snuggle into the duvet and sleep but you’re hungry.

Hunger motivates you beyond sleep.

You have eggs in the Fridge so imagine frying eggs on a gas hob. Say the pan is heating up and you drip olive oil in hastily because you’re tired. It sizzles a little bit and you swirl it around to cover the pan to stop the egg sticking. You break the egg on the side of the pan and you touch the hot pan briefly as you crack the egg into the oil.

Your finger burns a little bit and you wince slightly as a minute splash of oil hits the back of your hand. The pain is small and momentary but still enough to make you briefly rub your finger and the back of your hand. You eat the eggs but the shells have made a mess on the kitchen worktop. People won’t be happy if you leave mess so you have a pang of guilt.

Guilt motivates you beyond sleep.

You need to use some Flash and a cloth to clean the surface. You go under the sink to get the Flash but before you squeeze the trigger you have to twist the nozzle. The nozzle is awkward and is another instantaneous annoyance on the fingers you use as the plastic leaves a momentary impression on your fingertips. You spray the work surface and the chemicals in the cleaner irritate you. The smell hits the back of your nose and throat and that little wince of discomfort comes back as the irritation hits your eyes too. You wash the cloth under the tap and leave the kitchen.

Sleep now motivates you but you are irritated.

Take the minor discomforts; the brief burning sensations on your hands and the irritation to your eyes. Amplify them with your imagination. Couple them with the thought of tiredness and your physicality will be that of someone who is relatively upset.

Using even minor personal emotions to create performance can be powerful stuff but using the power of sense protects you from this as it takes you to the physical reactions that can imply an associated emotional response. With this in mind don’t be afraid to exploit mimicry to achieve a desired physicality....”

The e-mail goes on to break the (then forthcoming) scene down quite explicitly but the question is did the direction help? In the short term I believe the actor was introduced to a greater depth of thinking about performance that they hadn’t encountered previously.

In the long term, it’s efficacy was nominal.

If I, as an actor of my own classification, were a ‘Hyper-Ego’ I would like to think that key communications such as these could define the path of influence an actor takes.

They don’t and they can’t because there is a necessity demanded of any instruction.

The instructed needs to understand what they are being told. An actor who warrants deconstructive tuition probably isn’t ready for what you are expecting of them.

Unfortunately, performance demands you have access to a simple palette of emotions.

A performance of standard requires a platform of roots and interactions that happen over time. It also requires a performer to take responsibility for actions. This is where the house of cards collapses and our friend empathy pops up to take centre stage.

Crying, squealing and screwing your face up will get you so far but shock horror, what if that moment you are trying to reflect is so daunting that there are no tears. There is simply fear. Fear in your eyes. Empathy gives you access to the fear resident in your eyes.

Compartmentalising a role means delivering it in the confines of the production and putting it to bed when you leave. This distinction is a necessary evil. You can stay in character if you wish but a fully costumed Henry V will raise eyebrows at the Jobcentre when you’re signing on during the rehearsal period.

Theatrical Presentation In ‘Hypercompetition’ Theatre is a strange medium. The more experienced you become the easier it becomes to assemble a production but the harder it comes to execute without an internal monologue of criticism. You want a good production. You know what’s wrong but you just can’t pinpoint it because you’ve got picky thanks to your experience.

Let’s go back to absolute basics and start with the play you have chosen to stage.

Before anything else, let’s just weigh in with the key thought of costs. If you’re presenting a modern play, it will attract a capacity dependent royalty fee on every performance.

At a minimum fifty pounds per performance even a three night run is going to cost £150. Think about this. Your venue is probably going to be at least £100 a night too meaning at least £450 has to be found just to get started on the basics. Theatre productions come through on margins that many actors are hide from. If you’ve been to a decent drama school and had the luxury of consistent day long rehearsals just start counting them up. You might have hated them but the three weeks of (for example) Monday to Friday 9am - 5pm rehearsal that gave you a slick, tight production, they aren’t free for the independent producer. That is 120 hours of room hire to pay for.

Even at the unlikely price of £5 an hour that is £600 just on rehearsals. On this basis our budget has pushed £1000. You just can’t afford to break the budget so early on.

Realistically, you’ll be looking to stage between 20 and 40 hours of rehearsal. ‘But that’s not enough?’ Exactly. Do you see where the problems really begin to mount?

In autumn 2001 I benefited from free hall hire from my local council for a period of about twelve weeks. They gave you pink slips to fill out your room requirements.

When I pushed for a better deal some point later they practically denied companies ever got preferential deals like this despite me having been given one previously. I hate being treated with disrespect and I hate people reneging on agreements. When venues treat you poorly, walk away. You can’t work with negativity from anyone, let alone a venue.

You are the customer and you pay for a service. Venues are quick to forget this.

When you hire a venue you are entitled to treat the venue according to the price you are paying. It’s a good time to read the contract and have a chuckle at it too. In busy festivals (such as Edinburgh) you’ll likely face a time-letting agreement scenario. This gives you access to the space for a time window in which your show must be set, performed and striked within the time period hired.

Regular hires work differently. If your theatre is overpriced (most council arts venues are) and poorly equipped with demotivated, overzealous and undertrained staff, treat it exactly for what it is. If it’s value for money, afford it the respect it deserves. If it’s free, you have no argument. In venue land overall value is hard to find and in council ‘ents’ alongside poor venues there is nominal staff churn rate in gatekeeping positions.

You get high and low level employees who are practically ‘unsackable’ and stay in jobs they should have lost ten years ago.

So, think about what you are about to stage. If you haven’t got £1000 to stand in front of an incinerator and burn you cannot effectively stage a short run theatre production in a commercial environment. If you’re at school or in training the rules are different.

Your tuition fees are going somewhere. I remain in debt to this day because I continuously staged theatre and risked everything to deliver cost-ineffective productions.

Every theatre production is cost-ineffective.

Risk is where the nature of true independence is born. There are a million ways to run your collective but usually it boils down to one or two who are prepared to keep pumping the money in. I started my theatre company with great intentions as a not-for-profit, student led unincorporated association. For about the first year of full operation we’d ask for rehearsal subs and shared contributions to enable the company to get to Edinburgh. We worked on the basis of profit share and in 2001 after a £400 contribution towards production and accommodation, everyone ended up getting about £45 back when the box office was divided. Remember what I said about profit motivating things?

In 2002, shortly after we staged ‘Electra’ in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe a seismic change occurred in my attitude towards production. Firstly, we had paid £1200 for a time slot we were only using £600 worth of time in. Secondly, money was forever an issue and getting everyone to pay their contribution to the production had been draining. Finally, I noticed that my attitude simply didn’t belong in the student / am-dram ethos.

As you become more experienced in anything you usually follow one of two paths.

Complacency and contentment or a desire for development and progression. I’ve never been completely happy with what I have achieved in theatre because I have only ever worked on nothing and have never had a full acting compliment to work with. I cannot name a single production that I haven’t had to scrabble around finding money or cast for. This is what forced me to learn how to create productions and performances out of nothing. The luxuries of money and cast would have moulded my attitude very differently.

Having looked at those setup flaws let’s choose the play that we are going to stage. I’m going to go with Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Hedda Gabler,’ a play I know particularly well having run it for the duration of the 2004 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

‘Hedda’ is one of Ibsen’s most popular works. The lead role of Hedda Tesman is often considered the ‘female Hamlet,' however a thorough understanding of the play reveals Hedda to be a woman who simply has no place in the society she knows after marriage.

I’m not going to pull apart the content of Hedda too much. I am simply going to focus on addressing all aspects in the delivery of the production. Occasionally I will move into brief analysis but the study guides on Hedda are more than sufficient to guide you through the plot.

Who, what, why, where and when are the five W’s. Learn them and apply them to your productions. The who is obviously you, your company and the what is the production (Hedda Gabler). These are very much self-explanatory. The why and where needs a little more explanation.

Let’s consider why you have chosen to stage ‘Hedda Gabler.’ Are you staging it because it will sell tickets? Do you have a cast that are particularly suited? Do you actually like Ibsen? Are you a motivated company? Take a blank piece of paper and ask yourself as many questions as you can. They will inform and educate your opinion on everything related to your interpretation of the show.

Where have you chosen to stage Hedda? Is it in a festival like the Edinburgh Fringe or is it a simple local production in a local venue? Where you stage it will be a key factor on the production’s direction. You may be doing something radically different with it.

If so a festival audience are much more likely to appreciate something out of the ordinary.

A regional audience is never ready for anything too experimental or ‘out there.' Unless you have a captive audience who will watch anything you stage audiences can be easy to alienate. They’ll stomach what you present, they’ll just never come back.

In the early 2000s I was totally discouraged from staging Ibsen in a local theatre. It was only in 2003 that I learnt the true power of Ibsen as a theatrical crowd puller.

Remember that a pillar of theatre like Ibsen comes with ready made publicity.

When? Let’s do the show right here! Let’s not. Timing is essential and it is important to consider the yearly correlations that turn up. Dynamically each year is different but generally certain events are geared to presentation at certain times of year. If you’re staging Pantomime, you’ll know that it’s only really popular in December, January and maybe pushing February half-term of you’re in an am-dram group. Anytime outside of this is breaking a long standing convention unnecessarily and then relies on a unique marketing gimmick greater than it would not normally demand. I am not a great fan of ‘panto’ but that is just my own personal preference. I understand it’s function, purpose and accessibility within entertainment at large.

With short runs in venues of 100 capacity or less timing shifts into a more general consideration of your local clientele and venues. The licensing trade suffers badly through January and February but this may not necessarily be the case with your specific event should you stage it in these months. Just obey the simple rule; anything beyond 100 seats requires a campaign of much greater consideration.

Many areas of the country suffer from a distinct lack of entertainment venues and anything independent struggles. This is endemic of today’s society but lets consider a theoretical staging of a production in Rochester, Kent as it stands in 2012. Every year the town (it was once a City but lost City status) holds annual Charles Dickens Festival celebrations and an annual Sweeps Festival alongside a week of major concert events in Rochester Castle Gardens. It also presents events as part of the ‘Fuse Festival’ weekend.

Sounds busy, right? It is busy. They are Rochester’s key tourist events, however, the ‘Sweeps’ and ‘Dickens’ are effectively pageants but I think I am using that word in the wrong context. Most of the events are a pageant in it’s lesser used term, that is what looks impressive and grand is shallow and empty. The Castle Concerts have been a staple for years and attract thousands. The Fuse Festival weekend is another outdoor festival full of unique fad based theatrical verticals. Full of what? The ‘Big Dance Flashmob’ event didn’t take place for example. There was probably a logistical reason why it didn’t but it could have been the fact that the newspaper announced where and when the Flashmob was going to take place and invited people to turn up. Mmm...

That’s surely now a pre-planned event and something of a failure on the part of the newspaper who should have covered the event after it had happened.

But back to fad based theatrical verticals. What I have come to loathe in entertainment over the years is the commercialisation of what is cult and what is niche. The Long Tail is one of the most comprehensive answers to the market at large you’ll ever find and this is where you can gain some understanding of where your product may lie.

The complete principal of the Long Tail (a term coined only in 2004 by Chris Anderson) can be found in books dedicated to it but my consideration is this. As of July 2012, ‘The Amazing Spiderman’ is a massive entertainment event. For theis respective summer it’s marketing budget means it will be manipulating access to a massive audience share as it can buy influencing control over you. Let us now contrast this.

The fad based theatrical event(s) has been plodding along for years now. It’s content is irrelevant but after two years it is finally achieving a reasonable market penetration thanks to UK wide touring. The problem is you can multiply the arrows infinitely. So many of the productions have done the same thing just to achieve this same tiny audience share.

All companies want from you now is your data. Supermarkets are the best example but knowing the fanboy has been mainstreamed as a target demographic means however much you thought you were a rebel or an outsider you are encapsulated within a database that knows you better than you know yourself.

Few people or operations are genuinely independent anymore. In the connected world you can’t be because you have to subscribe to one of the demographics to fit in and if like me, you aren’t too cool for school the situation isn’t inverted like you think it might be. You are simply alienated. This isn’t good for anyone. If you disengage or disconnect you are suddenly outside the walls to the prison of technology. It isn’t that people don’t want to live like this it’s the forceful nature of the submission that connection demands of you. Communication in a virtual world is a one way commitment which is why you as an audience no longer engage naturally with a vertical. You are manipulated towards one.

This is a truly compartmentalised approach to the exploitation of the fan (who incidentally is still you) but the rise of the nerd isn’t great if an audience just to the left or right of the mainstream collapses. The mainstream is a volatile audience. It’s just subdued by the market’s deliberate campaign of indulgence but remember people don’t always want to question what they can’t comprehend. The mainstream audience gets what it demands but sometimes the market forgets to pander to it’s core audience.

When this happens the beast gets angry. When it’s angry the mainstream beast takes a long time to be subdued. Niche audiences suddenly have a problem. They are such a thinly sliced vertical share they only benefit from parallel alignments to similar genres or products. This is the problem of niche. It is a relinquishment of success for control with a glass ceiling of success for your effort.

In other words, by never generating enough success for your vertical to threaten the mainstream you’ll stay on the Fringe for ever as you’ll only ever excel within the impact of your audience share.

Wooh. That’s some crazy talk. What am I talking about? Market share. It begins with your first production. What you present indicates how much of a market share you might be able to aspire to in the future. Think about it. If you present ‘Mr.Fuggles Crazifilous Stilt Sicktacular’ how far can it go? It can go as far as the Fuggilites (his followers) are prepared to follow him but Mr.Fuggles himself is a cantankerous bastard of an alcoholic, can only walk on stilts and uses a water pump taped to said stilts to sick over his adoring crowd. He knows that his show only appeals to puerile, toilet humor obsessed 7-12 year olds, however, his fun advertising and consummate professionalism means in affluent areas mummy and daddy love him and local schools and councils book him because they mistakenly think he’s sick and they believe themselves to have a grasp of the understanding of today’s youth buzzwords.

Fuggles is a fad dynamic in a niche. His competition and ultimate replacement after a sick too far is ‘Mrs.Fannywatches Jugs Juggling Jumblorium.' They belong in the same niche but both are restricted by a glass ceiling of popularity. Entertainment is filled with fads and the Fannywatchers and the Fuggilites cease to subscribe to the routine a week after their 12th birthday.

Incidentally, kids theatre is a cynical goldmine that I have never had an interest in, however, let’s head back to this fabled land of Rochester and think about presenting our play there.

I discussed the big events but what about the little events? The little venues. Let’s walk through the high street. Near the train station you have ‘Medway Little Theatre.' It’s a community based am-dram theatre that hosts all of it’s own productions with occasional productions by external companies. It’s fanbase is drawn from the local area and holds what I would describe as an enclosed audience. Remember the trust circle?

Apply the same principle to a production’s audience appeal. Begin with the cast, crew and society members as the closed circle and map their respective ability to attract and influence.

In community theatre the core audience is a measure of the extension of influence.

Children’s productions can attract massive audiences due to the captive nature of the following. Up to a certain age most families will trek en-masse to watch the darling daughter dance in the chorus but at an unspecified time darling daughter will stop being adorable and become a brat.

At the same time Grandma and Grandad have lost interest because it didn’t sit right with them that she got drunk instead of attending her rehearsal. Yep, the girl was only ten. If she’d been eleven it wouldn’t have been a problem but ten...you get the idea, an audience is easily lost through circumstance.

So, our first port of call reflects an ‘enclosed’ audience in a venue. Head around the corner and there is a venue called ‘The Royal Function Rooms’. It has fascinating history and is well documented in local history books as never really being much of a success as a theatre. The stage is high, the room is cavernous, there are no seats set out and for something that was once a genuine music hall it would struggle to facilitate the atmosphere of stage performance without tweaks. Isolated by the heavy traffic of an immediately adjacent main road and with public car parks a few minutes walk away our theatre audience is going to struggle to even locate this place and without a preexisting reputation for current theatrical performance a simple assessment can be made; it is totally unsuitable for our production.

Moving along the High Street you begin to face a plethora of Pubs and Restaurants.

There is clear trade in this location but it’s all service based. The Queen Charlotte has a basement function room, a possibility?

There is the obligatory Wetherspoons, the cavernous sixteen hundred and fifty capacity Casino Rooms but nowhere for the show yet. Moving further down the High Street, we pass more pubs and restaurants until we reach the Rochester Visitor centre. It has a basic auditorium with a shallow stage and no theatrical elements present.

You can’t park outside and you have totally restricted access for a get-in to the venue, which is on the first floor of the building after you have navigated the main entrance.

It’s not a theatre per se, it’s just a lecture theatre and without a full lighting and sound rig you can’t do much.

So if I want to stage the production in Rochester, where do I present it? Simple answer, I don’t waste my time. Effectively, the audience demands are catered for by the Council events and the presence of community in the little theatre. There may be other ‘artist’ based events such as music gigs that can be staged but music is a different dynamic that can be afforded greater restrictions on time, space and location to be efficient.

Learning when not to waste your money is a hard call for the inexperienced or over enthused. If you can’t find the venue to stage your production go further afield and look for a location that fulfils the requirements of your piece first. When you know your production will be safely housed in a venue you can think about catering to an audience.

Venues demand a specific neutrality of space that community venues can’t always offer. The ‘blank space’ doesn’t have to be a black box but it has to be devoid of enough material attachment that any company can imprint themselves within it without the labelling inherent to the location. Specifically, you can’t stage a show concerned about the negative reputation of a former company.

So, why shouldn’t I just book anywhere? If you have money to waste you can book anywhere but it won’t help you. Staging a production in an unsuitable space will simply set back your personal development as you will inevitably be compromising.

In 2002 and 2003, I used the Rochester Visitor Centre to present my odd rework of ‘Philoctetes’ and the preview performances of my 2003 Edinburgh Fringe production of ‘A Doll’s House.’ The fact that the space didn’t adhere to anything close to a traditional theatrical space compromised delivery of both productions. You couldn’t get excited about the presentation as you couldn’t even supply the audience with the benefit of simple lighting design and however much you adhere to the argument that theatre can be performed anywhere suspension of disbelief has to be established long before it can be maintained. ‘Pure’ theatre as many commentators observe comes from multiple complimentary factors. The stage is one of them.

So, if I can’t find a stage should I just give up? No, you just have to get out there and look. If you design your productions before you even think about staging them you can build a blueprint for what you want to achieve. I stopped producing theatre consistently because in my heart of hearts I presented all the plays I ever really wanted to present.

I moved into film in consideration of an increasingly fractured audience, however, there is no democracy in content and with my blueprint of artistic progress relatively fulfilled I want to maneuver strategically with a different gameplan. The era of ‘Hypercompetition’ has long been upon us in major manufacturing but as the Internet economy has become all encompassing a perverse landscape for the producing artist has arisen. You need to be prepared to establish and erode your creations in order to constantly recreate demand for your product and to cyclically reacquire a competitive edge that didn’t exist previously.

Entertainment is cyclical and progressive.

So, it goes around in circles but still expands? In a nutshell, yes. The market construct remains the same but more of the same products enter it increasing it’s size. At base level the content remains largely the same but the expansion comes from the development of the medium itself and the fact that all the industry has tried to do is sell you back your own products year on year. Widescreen edition. Director’s Cut. Millenium Edition, whatever, it’s all the same product repackaged.

Go back to music in the 1980s. It began as an era dominated by vinyl and tapes. The transition into compact disc was also well under way leading to a combined distribution model that dominated the 1990s and early 2000s where music was delivered in multiple tangible formats. April 2003 saw the birth of now with the introduction of the iTunes music store but considering the humble ‘mp3’ was a marker point of digital media in the late 1990s monetising and creating consumer acceptance for payment of the format took more than a decade with a devastating result. If you can have everything at once you are indulged to the point of subconscious disengagement.

Choice is hard enough at the best of times but access to everything can’t create scarcity.

But with all this economic talk we’ve almost forgotten what we are doing. We were trying to produce a play. What was it? Hedda Gabler. We were looking for a venue, right? No, we were looking for an audience.

The venue facilitates the audience.

If the venue fails to contain the audience, your production has a greater chance of failing. Think of the venue as a DVD Player or similar piece of technology. You put your disc in the machine and it plays fine for the first half of the film then stops. The disc is brand new but the machine rejects it. The next year you’ve upgraded your machine and you choose to experiment with the old disc. It works with no problems.

To present live entertainment effectively the stage must be set. Live productions need a point of focus and removal of distractions for consumer engagement. You need comfortable seats, toilet access, an intelligible sound system, good lighting and competent operators because a foundation of technical competence inherent within all levels of the venue gives you as a producer confidence in your ability to deliver.

Confidence in an environment is often overlooked but to me it’s essential if you want to deliver and encompass your vision. In my discussion earlier I said if something is free you can’t argue. In this scenario of venue inspired confidence, if your venue comes up to speed all you have to worry about is your production, you can’t defend a weak production in a competent stage environment.

Music Is The Answer (to your problems). Music has an emotional power far greater than any silent moving image. The moving image we’ve come to love in the twentieth and twenty-first century is a total trick of the eye. Sound and our interpretation of it is a much more visceral experience. You don’t need eyes to see, you need vision (thanks Faithless) but you can feel music just as much as you hear it. Stand in front of a proper nightclub sound system for a moment and watch your clothes shake. Audio frequencies have a direct physical power that visuals lack. Imagery can provoke a reaction but they can’t actually knock you off your feet even if they are 3D. A stack of bass bins will do a good job.

Music in whatever format or genre accompanied with live theatre or the moving image creates incredibly memorable experiences. It makes the moment and bonds people in a way that film can’t. Film is not a universal experience when necessity of explanation is required. This is the power and failure of visual storytelling; you have to be good at it and you have to speak in grammatical form, which in turn your audience must converse in.

Television exudes a sickening control over it’s audience. The Internet is just television as a wholly interactive and immersive experience but great minds have said that before and my present argument is the more traditional power that is exerted by music.

Sound has been around a lot longer than any image. Cave paintings might date back many thousands of years but Mr.Caveman farted and laughed long before he even knew that in years to come he could fart, record it, see it on Youtube and have it as his ringtone. Power to the humble trump but let’s consider where sound can take your production.

Many years ago I staged a production of John Webster’s ‘The Duchess Of Malfi.' The show was fun to stage but nothing to write home about artistically with the exception of my consideration of music as a key element to the production. Around my comic lack of discipline towards the text I used trance, hard house, plastic push knives and blood packs to get my message across. I always look back to this production and consider it my first experiment with a signature style.

I might have assaulted the senses of the wannabe bourgeois in attendance but in the development of my own design process I was onto something. I used key tracks such as ‘The Witch Doktor’ and ‘The Boogie Monster’ by Armand Van Helden with motivated conceptual effect in scenes where characters (namely Ferdinand) needed to depict madness. Lyrically, ‘The Witch Doktor’ repeats the title as a lyric over various drum beats and crescendos whilst the lyric ‘Are you afraid of the boogie monster?’ dominates the latter track.

Using dance tracks to evoke a sense of madness created a direct link between sound and visual aesthetic on stage. Max Linen’s bass frightener ‘The Soulshaker’ was a great tool in scaring the Duchess mid scene as the vocals develop unexpectedly. ‘I am the voice from behind the speakers’ has power when it pops up out of nowhere. In scenes of the Duchess’ tragic relationship with Antonio I called on the ethereal power of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio For Strings’ and Rodrigo’s ‘Adagio.' As the Duchess faces execution I used the breakdown of Armand Van Helden’s ‘Mother Earth’ to deliver poignancy. The lyric ‘Can you feel her pain’ was transcending blended with Crescendo’s ‘Are You Out There’ which contains the repeated lyric ‘Let The Heavens Open.' Horribly poignant for a brutal death scene the final track in the mix was the church bell driven 2001 Cosmic Gate remix of Miss Shiva’s classic 1990s anthem ‘Dreams’. Source the tracks on iTunes or Youtube and you’ll hear the mood I was aiming to create.

Music is far more accessible to anyone than theatre or film is. To be good at music you need to excel technically and demonstrate those all important factors, rhythm and soul.

So, watch a band and pull them apart. Let’s assume we are watching four piece. They are a dynamic in their own right. They are an engine for display purposes only. They tell stories in their songs but they’re not going anywhere physically. The music is. It’s the music that takes you on the journey. The performer is facilitating your experience of that journey. This isn’t a pretentious analogy, it’s a base observation of what is going on. How good the performer’s are is how far they can take you into the experience. If a band can be equated to a ninety minute film, I’ve seen less than a handful of (up and coming) acts who’ve shown me a beginning middle and an end. I think I watched about fifteen hundred bands between 2005 - 2008. In comparison to other gig obsessed people I don’t think that’s that many bands but the key was the majority of the bands I searched out were the startup bands on the first rungs of the performance ladder. I wanted to see if there was anyone worth taking on as a prospect. The unexpected answer was no.

Expectations of bands were horribly skewed by myth. In a band you want to perfect your dynamic and this doesn’t mean you have to play a gig every weekend. A band is a product like any other theatre production. Gigs have the same principle as theatre productions but they overlap in a giant ‘X.' The Giant X is simple. Music events and theatre events coexist at opposite ends of the scale. When music events grow they crossover into the spectrum of traditional theatre usage. If they grow further they move into even bigger stadia, if they decrease in size they move back to their original circuit. The point of the crossover is to illustrate the scenario that at a certain size there is nominal distinction between product, it merely becomes live event promotion.

Gigs are easier to sell than any film or theatre production but like anything live, they’re not tangible and can’t be pulled off the shelf. List what is ‘cool’ about a gig versus what is cool about theatre or film and you’ve already left the room to catch ‘Marcy & The Fickle Persona*’ play that hip bar in town where warm bottled beer is £4 but they make it funky by giving you a free lollipop. *Marcy and The Fickle Persona are available to hire should I choose to capitalise on this book’s success and develop them beyond just a name.

Gigs align themselves with ‘cool’ naturally. It’s an associative scenario. When anyone with popularity heads out to see one you need to be seen with them to be seen that you’re on the scene. Sadly, the extension of what was geographic cool is now accompanied with virtual cool. If you don’t hang out on Facebook or Tweet your bile, you have no style. Really? To be said in the questioned cynical tone adopted by scene kids and their afficianados. What happens when the first real EMP is dropped kids?

You can answer that question yourself with some self-motivated research in a book.

I’m not making an examination of sub, pop or counterculture here. This is demographics and the capitalist economy at work. It’s the reason nobody is watching your film or making the effort to see your one man Hamlet in fabled Rochester. If you’re not cool you are not allowed to sell your product in the most profitable part of town.

The Cool School is the most cynical element of capitalism. You might think of yourself as a free spirited, modern hippy who sticks it to the man with a partially developed understanding of politics and a drug habit but you’ve failed to see the ice is so thin you are merely another vertical in the market’s long tail. Modern economics and the society that encompasses it is based on a capitalism that allows you beliefs and radical aspirations that are so unachievable they exist on a wholly mythical level, however, because you don’t pop the bubble for long enough to get out of the goo you don’t realise the scale of mendacity emblazoned upon you.

The Coke and Chugging example is the best. You think you’re cool because Class A is the way every Friday night. It’s been this way for years. You believe in Charity, don’t really understand philanthropy and are touched by the third world. You have no truly moral concept of the fact that your use of drugs is in direct contradiction of the beliefs you preach for, stand for and are employed to represent.

You chug, that is you persuade people to give monthly amounts to said charity you represent, except you are paid at least minimum wage meaning you have to sign up two people every hour just to get paid. The argument from there is self-explanatory but in performance it’s relevant and cyclical. This is a job that many performers do.

For every you and every me (thanks Placebo), there is an identical person. Identical in every taste set you know bar one tiny, tiny difference. They like Madonna. You don’t.

Another vertical slice is carved. What this means is the market has become so infinite, so fractured and so niche led that in reality there are 7 billion slices of market share available and the only one you can ever rely on is your own. But what you like one year, you don’t like the next. Damn Economics and that stupid principle.

Human wants are insatiable.

Relevant to anything in life. Your decision to keep wanting new stuff and rejecting the old means market penetration can only ever be built one person at a time and when something gets big it simply collapses to be rebuilt. Capitalism implicates a social construct that is constantly reinvented. If you can’t influence immediately you can’t spread your message. Society is dictated by rules and socially accepted misdemeanors.

That is, what you are doing right now (whatever it is), is tolerated merely by society’s construct. Capitalism is the ultimate style icon, reinventing the rules to deliver a new status quo as necessary. Think of when you last smoked cigarettes at a gig. It certainly wasn’t inside but that was once the norm. Why was it once the norm?

Because everyone makes a lot of money when they kill each other that way.

To quote Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in The Godfather, ‘We are all part of the same hypocrisy.’ How you align yourself within this hypocrisy is what defines you. If you choose to understand it, you choose to wander on the edge of the herd. If you choose to embrace it, you’re firmly in the middle, alienated from the ability to analyse and subject to trampling when the herd rears up in shock at the new.

The what?

Independent Film Production On 14th February 2005 entertainment as we know it began to change exponentially. A certain website popped up online and in the time since has built up an archive of epic proportions. In fact, epic is not even the right word. Infinite is. Bear this in mind when reading this discussion. Film and video production exist in Pre and Post 2005 models.

Pre 2005, content still had a certain degree of scarcity. Post 2005, everything found its way onto the web.

The worlds of stage and screen merge in different ways but one thing that has never changed is the importance of casting. Lots of people think film and theatre acting require two different processes. I disagree. Film acting and theatre acting is exactly the same thing. Film acting is not a different skillset but it is a catered approach.

All acting is personality and conviction based. That dumb blonde who looks delightful, does just that - look delightful. What else can she do? Nothing. Like so many vanity driven actors and actresses (or should I say ‘celebrity’) she’s a doll. If you are engaging to watch on stage, you’ll be engaging to watch on film. You simply have to master control of your delivery and be aware that most films are made thirty seconds at a time.

Whoever thinks that some people can act for film but not on stage is incredibly deluded. Dialogue can be overrated in any context and this has created a certain snobbery over the years. The Queen’s English is beautiful. RP is ideal for intelligibility in delivery but some actors are just awful at dialogue. They can still act, they just aren’t going to be Hamlet. Wow, that is crazy talk I hear you say. People ‘acting’ but not speaking. Call Team America because this is something for the world’s culture police.

Without a fantastical plot and a Jacques Lecoq inspired performance a dumb show isn’t for everyone but your actions must still convince.

Stanislavsky and a million other practitioners deal with this exhaustively. Its called non-verbal-action.

It obliterates dialogue.

Interactions in film focus on presentation and reactions to circumstance. If you have a good emotional toolkit you’ll understand that the level of intensity differs from stage to screen and it is only matching your experience that is required. On stage you might boom like Brian Blessed. On film your audience is feet away and the camera is practically in your face. You need a different tone. If you lack conviction on stage, any lack of conviction on screen will be amplified.

Conviction.

So important it needs it’s own page. Conviction is the one area that I have seen most overlooked by indie film actors. Something that you are involved in for a matter of hours won’t register anywhere as much as an experience that is ongoing over months but ironically film hangs around for a long time.

Old performances get rediscovered. Embarrassing moments are exposed. Sadly, Theatrical performance loses relevance very quickly. Theatre is a reinvigorating process until the production ends. On film, the performance is only unique once. It captures what you did. If the theatre production is piercing enough to make an impact the show might go on to bigger and better things but the moment of theatre quickly disintegrates. A good bar chat afterwards and the audience moves on for a new experience. Three months of rehearsal for five performances playing a supporting role and no one even filmed it...

It might seem obvious but film production uses the same methods as stage production.

Tech was just previously inaccessible. Independent film production has seen a seismic shift since the introduction of hi-definition technologies in 2004 and 2008.

The accessibility to deliver short films opened up with the first decent miniDV based

digital cameras (e.g. Canon XL-1) in the mid 1990s but feature films at cinematic standard have only been a truly practical consideration since the early-2000s. An eighty minute film is more than just eighty minutes of footage. It is hours of content cut down to that. Computer power, cost of storage and ability to deliver a cinematic grade image are the barriers that have now fallen. Sound confusing? It was.

When it comes to cameras don’t fall into the tech trap. What is this tech trap? Aiming for quality equipment immediately. Don’t shoot on a Red, forget an Arri Alexa and ignore a Canon CS300. What is this man saying? These are the gold standard of new indie cameras. Big tits. They don’t help you manage a team. As an indie filmmaker you will fall victim to technology marketing so understand the basics and let tech nerds do the rest.

If you want to make a cinematic film that adheres to the technical expectations of any cinemagoer of the past 80 years it needs to be shot at 24fps and be told with the general observations associated with film grammar. Camera tech is another book. This is about performance with people, not machinery. So, you’ve got your image at 24fps. Did you think about sound? You should of because poor sound is a sure fire problem of the inexperienced director. Quite how a multi-million dollar production such as The Dark Knight Rises can have reviewers in arms about audio issues (the muffled voice of ‘Bane’ as played by Tom Hardy) is beyond me.

It doesn’t matter what it looks like, your mum and Aunt Maureen will be the first people who say they can’t hear it very well. Mics need to be as close to the person speaking as possible and advice to your cast and crew that the microphones you’ll be using are directional is pretty damn key info. Record silence and the entire version of the scene in the quietest place available on the set and you should be covering most audio eventualities.

Shoot the same scene twice with the cheapest and most expensive cameras and in context the image will be irrelevant. If the film is made well enough for you to suspend your disbelief, the camera used will be of no consequence to you or your audience.

Back in 1993 Quentin Tarantino made ‘Pulp Fiction.' It cost a few million but he wanted to make it look like it cost millions and millions. He achieved this look by shooting on the best grade film stock. His images were practically grain free and gave the film a much higher production value. In Hollywood terms he made a $5 million film look like a $25 million film. This principal is simple to apply. Master the equipment so it delivers beyond it’s expectations.

Jumping forward, before we take a step back there are two things that restrict the progress of independent film in the UK. Originally, the lack of independent cinemas, the cost of a 35 mm print and the BBFC classification of your content were the barriers to presentation of your film. The 35 mm restriction is now removed but continued lack of independent showcasing cinemas, the requirement of a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) at £1000 (free ‘ish’ if your tech savvy with patience and half-decent computer) and roughly £1000 on a BBFC certificate for a publicly screenable feature still set the barriers in place. Alongside this restriction of ‘official’ public presentation of your film saturation of online streaming content means visual content floats in a sea of banality.

Hold on, I make independent film. I shoot indie film productions because it suits my artistic style. I love studio theatre for it’s intimacy but for me indie film holds the same bubble like process. I can get away with things on film that have to be live in a theatrical production.

My own acting is a prime example. I don’t learn lines for my own films. Out of respect for other people’s processes I would in other productions but me working from scripts, cue cards or subtly placed props never detracts from my performance because as a director and a casting director I know I’m shooting for the ‘take’ and can only play a finite amount of roles appropriately. These are essentially white, conservative authority figures. I’m not breaking my mould unnecessarily because there is no demand for me to do so. On screen, you’d never know I was acknowledging Brando and delivering the lines from the wall or a script on someone’s back because film is “fakery” like nothing else out there.

Theatre is immersion in an emotional world of real people but present it live on a screen and the emotional impact becomes diluted. Many people can’t engage well with the emotional capacity required for live action. If your parents divorced in your teens and you never really got to grips with it, a play with that subject matter might be too raw to accept. It might not, but it might also be the key to confronting and unlocking the problem. This is the collective intimacy of theatre versus the individual moment of film. In your living room in front of the TV you have a relationship with the screen. In the cinema it’s the same screen but you are part of an introverted experience. It still involves suspension of disbelief but the theatrical version requires emotional capacity that isn’t prepackaged. If anything hits close to home it can hurt. The world of the screen is different as emotions are contrived at every step.

Angles and focus tell different stories and Film grammar is dictatorial in the experience it gives you. The message in a theatre production can be similarly exaggerated but all scripts are just words telling stories. The structure of the storytelling is much the same but the emotional investment is less. This is the key difference between stage and screen.

The next big split between film and theatre is casting. On film, casting is everything.

On stage grab anyone who can perform and put them in your production. If they show willing find out what they can do; they might surprise you. No one will remember if they’re awful. In years gone by you’ll look back and think they were good. Such is the power of memory and rose tinted glasses.

Film casting involves a whole new aesthetic dynamic over theatrical casting but in the land of indie film, Julia Roberts isn’t going to send through her headshot and a copy of Erin Brockovich to see if she’ll be suited. The process is thus. You will send out casting breakdowns to various professional casting/recruitment websites. The breakdown will include all pertinent information about the film and the role. Once ‘live’ you will be flooded with poor applications.

Incredibly poor applications.

In my experience, poor applications are the absolute norm for the land of indie film.

They’re not from particularly weak actors you are just sourcing from a demotivated, dejected and largely ill-equipped audience that often think the job they are applying for is beneath them (but they’ll apply anyway).

You’ll get applications from weirdos, freaks and wannabes. Unheard of drama schools and even a few slip-ups from the proper drama schools will sneak into your inbox. A few will actually look like their head shots but you’d still be hard pushed to spot them in the street. Undoubtedly everyone will love the script (they haven’t read it yet) and some will even write you a nice essay on the character you advertised as an afterthought.

You’ll get pictures of men in silly hats, soft porn from girls yet to understand that modeling and acting are different things, grannies who wish to return to the stage and the most frustrating one of all people who apply for a role they know are ten years too old to play but apply for on the off chance.

Finally, you’ll get the actors who impress enough to be offered an audition but come back to you needing to ‘think about the role’ before they confirm attendance at the audition. Delete e-mail immediately. These are the pure and simple time wasters who are applying for the buzz that comes with being wanted for something. Another comedy application you’ll receive is the actor who doesn’t read the role requirements and perceives dialogue in a section of script to be a requirement of the role.

Nudity is the classic misconception. If I needed to cast nudity I would have advertised quite clearly and I think nudity is a reserve for paid work only.

These are the clowns, pimps and charlatans to look out for but overall when making an application for a role three lines and a decent smallest file size headshot do it. Look up Mark Summers if you want to know how to do things properly because I would pretty much acknowledge him as God in the world of casting.

My personal experience of casting transcends theatre and film. The first auditions I ever held where in 1999 in a University room for a summer drama society production.

We had a panel, we had discussions and I only had one person in mind for the play we were staging. Incidentally, I’d written the play for said person and was defiant that she be cast in the role. I got my way, my production looked stunning but suffered as I craved the aesthetic (1940s noir) over substance. I never regret this decision for the simple reason that I was being true to my vision for the production, however, if you choose this stubborn route you have to take the responsibilities of your actions.

Acting is a lifestyle profession and out of work performers are prepared to work for expenses to get some useful clips on their showreel. Harsh fact, brutal reality.

Remember, ‘Equity minimum?' That is a living wage but theatre productions have the potential to make money from ticket sales every night the show is on. Micro budget indie films don’t have the potential to recoup their costs without greater investment on completion and successful distribution. Actors forget this and don’t realise that to see a film succeed they might have to show a little bit of interest post production. Mostly, they won’t which immediately questions their motivations for involvement.

If you expect weak applicants you will never be disappointed. Low expectations can help you achieve a higher quality than anticipated but to make a film you have to cast a family of people who might work together visually. Accept the pitfalls and filter.

Filter, filter, filter.

In indie land you have complete freedom over who you cast however, the response you get to your casting is a dynamic in it’s own right. The film title, described role, time of week, month and popularity of site will play a part in the response you get. You’ll get lots of interest, however, you’ll quickly get bored of lots of interest. Weak actors are demotivating for directors. Weak applications more so. This is why you have to filter and this is why you have to filter quickly. Casting then becomes a slow victim of narrow-focus. Experience dictates and suddenly you don’t open out all the parts anymore. You look for two or three. You revert to direct sourcing most of the roles reducing the opportunities and proving the concept that most work is never advertised.

Film casting requires a visual aesthetic and a subtle, unspoken aura of quality, however film casting is multifaceted. People watch films because people - men and women love watching other people. Put someone stunning on screen and they will be watched by an audience. Their actions will be mimicked by Girls and Boys alike whose vanity will creep through as looks are copied by hours of mirror staring.

This is the nature of the visual aesthetic. In films people have to look a certain way to evoke a sense of belonging in the environment they populate. Actors who are amazing in one film might not be amazing in another unless they have the power to transform.

Transformation is a highly desirable skill to possess as an actor but few people are truly capable of becoming other people.

On a more practical front, learn how to read the subtext of every application received.

Know whose hot and whose not when it comes to the UK drama schools. If the potential applicant has not trained at a DRAMA UK* accredited school marker it out.

That training is unlikely to help your film and will largely be irrelevant - particularly if it is a ‘Film Acting’ school. Key roles are more pertinent but ultimately attitude is everything and that is what you are really casting for. *Previously CDS/NCDT (Conference of Drama Schools/National Council For Drama Training) was the mark to look for.

Attitude makes performers. With the right preparation they will become an asset to you and themselves. I have sourced actors using countless methods including the traditional approach to auditions and direct showcase attendance. For me, the audition process is quite insincere. People work hard to carve a section but the intensity they demonstrate for a minute will never be translated to your production.

Showreels are usually poor. I’ve seen a handful of good showreels in my entire experience of them because most actors insist on putting awful music at the start and end of the clip. Don’t. You might look stunning but Directors want to see you act not dissolve beautifully between transitions as Kylie Minogue plays.

Casting is without doubt the hardest process of making your film. If you can’t find who you want reschedule the film until you do. Unless you really need to get to grips with knowledge gaps and need the experience DON’T compromise. Compromise on budget, equipment, everyone and everything else but never your cast.

The advice in the last paragraph contradicts my own experience but I have compromised on numerous occasions to keep things moving. My biggest ever mistake in casting was being caught out by a coy introvert who played the audition in the tone of a wide eyed blase extrovert. I lived with this mistake but throw caution to the wind with exceptionally introverted actors. This type of actor often has a shell they retreat inside of when they don’t get to grips with what is required of them. What they are capable of you will have seen already because there in plain sight, at every moment of that audition, that was the range of their ability. Bottom line, you need to trust the people you work with. In the intimacy of an indie film set everyone has to work for the team.

As you become more experienced you will find lead actors are stardust. Lead actresses are more prevalent but great lead actors are simply hard to find. There is an A-List for a reason. If you’re an A-Lister you can be precious and pretentious because you have something that 99.9% of the rest of the acting world don’t have. In indie land precious actors are simply not allowed. Pretension can be overlooked but precious actors are a hinderance to any film set. You’ll know precious actors when they melt down trying to make tea or perform other simple tasks.

Generally, good casting covers most of the direction needed in a film. Well cast films have dynamics that flow naturally but watch out for the dead fish. These are the actors who do not perform in headspace. If they die let them float away quickly and cut them from the film. Emotionally vacant actors are poison to a screen production. You can spot a vacant screen actor by their eyes. No matter how well they know their lines they will be a moment behind the dialogue. This is the headspace acting that pairs up with an actor’s glow. If an actor begins to fail in their role, let them go immediately and NEVER persevere with a struggling screen performer; they are toxic to a production.

When it comes to rehearsing for screen, take the approach that every camera movement you’ve ever been involved with previously was in rehearsal for the specific moment about to unfold. Don’t rehearse the scene too many times. Rehearse and plot the action simultaneously and never shoot dialogue rehearsals. Not only is it a waste of footage you’ll lose the actor’s immediacy. If you have nervous actors pretend you’ve pressed record. Shoot a fictitious section. It’s a gem of a confidence trick if you combine it with positive encouragement.

In preproduction of any scene don’t be afraid to work with an overwritten scene. Script doctors will tell you to cut your scene first but this is a practical approach to learning the dynamics of performance. Overshooting gives you something to work with. Have you ever used an editing program. If you have, think about it. Did you have any source material to edit when you first tried to learn it? No. This why there is nothing wrong with overwritten scenes. If you’re prepared to embrace the process they serve a dual purpose as they can teach you how to edit and show you what a scene can become firsthand.

Overwritten scenes aren’t appropriate for long, however, in the film at large undershoot most things but always shoot the protagonist. Less is easier to edit but reign in the protagonist at every step. Shoot everything to edit and most of the shots you shoot should be in the film.

In the current age there is no reason why you can’t edit immediately. Quick editing turnaround gives your film scope but it also gives you a quick choice to abandon the project without further cost. Don’t go to a post-production house unless you want to waste money and if you’ve spent more than a year on any single project know exactly why this is the case. Indie films can be made in months. Unless it’s a true epic, one year on one indie film is slow progress but much like the ‘muppet’ advice early on in this book I give you a priceless comment.

No one cares about your stupid film.

Once you’ve got over this problem you’ll quickly learn that most wannabe filmmakers fail to grasp structure and film grammar. No matter how good your screenplay is, assembling scenes into a coherent format that suddenly has a beginning, middle and an end is not difficult, it is simply challenging to grasp the width of the scale. It demands you learn the visual map of your film in a different way. You need to see the filmstrip from start to finish on the wall and understand the significance of the frames within.

If you can disassemble your film mentally into three minute sections you should be able to work on the basis that what you are delivering is effectively twenty-five to thirty, three minute chapters that combine to make a full length film. It’s a great theory but in practice it won’t unfold exactly like that.

A million other film books detail structure far more explicitly than I intend to but we’re going for simple straightforward storytelling and this structure encloses it adequately.

The first act needs to introduce the key characters, the second act needs to establish and progress the story whilst the third act must achieve resolve and catharsis.

In film, you can’t have confused or passive protagonists. As an inexperienced director you will find yourself faced with these exact problems as you come to terms with the intricate nature of casting. It is by far the hardest element to eradicate in the ultimate development of your filmmaking ability. Until you know what to look for, you won’t immediately spot the descent of a protagonist because the script itself never exposes the potential weakness of the protagonist. But I’ve written such a good lead role...

Imagine that guy who you didn’t cast. You know the one, he just had nothing going for him. What if that guy played ‘Indiana Jones’. Remember what I said about ownership.

Good actors bring life to your written creations.

The protagonist lives or dies in the hands of the actor.

This is why casting is so important. Theatre plays evolve in such a way that you can spot who isn’t doing their job very quickly. In film, stories develop in fractured directions as they are shot highly out of sequence or in sections. You can’t see the actor’s whole performance at once. You’re seeing snapshots that look good but don’t help you ascertain the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is the killer. Once all of your sections are assembled you’ll see the natural arc that the lead performer has contributed. If every scene is flat or at one level you have a passive or confused protagonist. If in one scene they deliver an emotional intensity at least 40% above that of any other scene they will have presented the audience with an emotional apex. Without an emotional apex the character goes nowhere and kills your film by providing an incomplete exploration of persona. This apex need only happen once but it presents what the actor is capable of. If you believe the actor is capable of a specific act you suspend your disbelief and absorb yourself in the necessary response demanded.

Watch Martin Scorsese’s ‘Goodfellas’ and lookout for the scene when Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) pistol whips Karen’s (Lorraine Bracco) neighbour on his driveway. In one scene we are introduced to a level of intensity that means Liotta need do nothing else to convince us of the strength of his performance.

An underlying process of scene structure is the editorial design that provokes sympathy or empathy in a scene. From an editorial perspective this is a lesson in grammatical exploitation as the sequence of images and their edit points will create an emotional hold over your but let’s explore empathy and sympathy.

I could easily write this section in another chapter but it seems most pertinent to be included here. Empathy and sympathy is easily misunderstood by the inexperienced actor. They are two wildly different emotional demands that play out on film with greater amplification than on stage by virtue of manipulation and the close up.

Sympathy is the easier of the two to grasp. Sympathy demands an emotionally positive reaction to a negative scenario. Sympathy is often disingenuous. Think about it. You’ve just failed your driving test. Your Aunt Maureen gives you the £10 and the card she was going to give you anyway and says words to the effect of ‘Better luck next time...’

Aunt Maureen is disengaged from your emotional state but she is offering risk free (on her part) throwaway emotional support. She is merely sympathising. Maureen has two Cats, a philandering husband and a Doberman with diarrhea to worry about.

The ability to evoke sympathy in film is a simple and highly manipulative process.

Think about what films and TV shows you’ve cried at. Invert that scenario. Think how many times you cried at the theatre. The moving image has an incredible power to design your reactions.

So, if sympathy is so disingenuous that means everyone can do it? Yes. If you can go ‘Aaah, never mind,' you’ve just grasped the depth of the process. Pity and sorrow are surface reactions.

The actor who sympathises in the process of evoking and emoting to the audience is no use to you. The audience can’t go a level deeper with just a surface level interpretation.

The audience may only be able to react with sympathy but subconsciously they will be affected much further than they realise.

The actor who emotes and evokes empathy delivers the audience a process of true engagement. Sympathy is already present as a core component but empathetic performance creates truth in process. Most audience members will become the emotional vehicles of the character they most relate to. If the actor proves they can understand the motivations of their fellow performer the audience can too.

Empathy is a delicate process of the subconscious. Empathy is Aunt Maureen’s ability to overlook self-preservation and sit down with you to deliver emotional support by way of engagement, understanding and relation of herself to your problem.

If your performers can’t demonstrate empathy they will be ill suited as protagonists.

Solve the protagonist issue early on and you will deliver coherent productions much sooner.

So with the overall structure of a film in place what about the breakdown of individual scenes? Your script needs to be told in terms of conventional film grammar. How you interpret this grammar is your unique stylistic interpretation. I’m not going to illustrate designs on how to shoot scenes when there are dedicated books to the that single subject matter. What I am going to describe is the simplest route to getting the best out of the scene you shoot.

Firstly, the size of your crew has become a preference not a necessity. You can shoot solo with an on camera mic quite comfortably if the circumstance dictates but ideally you want at least one assistant and you want them to be responsible for sound with a separate recorder.

If you can understand cameras, audio and the edit you have a good degree of competency behind you. If you understand the performance dynamic explicitly too I would describe you as demonstrating my consideration of ‘hypercompetence.' I want to separate this from the theory of the competent man or woman in literature. I feel ‘hypercompetence’ is something different as in this context it applies to the mastery of a specific set of technological and creative disciplines.

You have the opportunity to master all the equipment and processes. Jobs are no longer specified in the way they were before. I want to hire someone who knows what I know about the equipment. Look at the development of cameras and the demise of the lighting cameraman and specialist videographer.

When you start to think in tech you’ll see that the industry of the moving image has been built on an operator platform, that is, without a physical operator the mechanical eye can’t look so the gimmick doesn’t materialise.

Make the material eye good enough, give it the power to look and watch informatively it’s trained operator becomes surplus to requirements. You or something infinitesimal smaller becomes the operator. If the future of film sees discrete floating cameras controlled by nano technology giving us unparalleled access to the action then the whole crew is a continuity issue in the visual aesthetic.

Technology facilitates the production of a performance. So, let’s assume you’re about to shoot your scene. You’ve instructed your actors. What do you need to do now?

Firstly, follow the tech checklist of your own making. Make sure you’re shooting the correct frame rate, shutter speed, exposure , etc., press record and call action in the tone of the scene. Unless you need a megaphone roaring ACTION! serves little purpose.

You want to shoot a ‘take.' My consideration of a ‘take’ is the exact moment that person has got the delivery and actions right. Some people will never deliver the take you want but you have to move on or you’ll never finish. Film is about immediacy of moment and therefore the performance of your actor should reflect this, however, film is a manipulated convention. The same way photographs are cropped for maximum effect, film is engineered. Think of holiday snapshots. You don’t keep the bad ones.

The nice ones go on the wall or on in a frame.

In it’s final presentation, theatre is a process of truth. Film is a process of fabrication.

Understand those two clear cut differences and you will see exactly what is demanded out of the two mediums. They are both forms of entertainment and engagement but most pertinently, they reflect an opportunity for the end user to digest an experience in a manner that is most appealing to them.

The final step is learning to deal with your film. The likelihood is your finished masterpiece is only a masterpiece for a few months until you start to look at it objectively. This is what you made the film for. This is the reason why you cast those people, shot that scene and cried when it was all over. You made it for the experience it’s given you. So, why are you making the next one? For exactly the same reasons as above. You will have to deal bluntly with the likely fact that your film or theatre production isn’t what you thought it would be but it happened, you did it, life goes on.

Tough three words to face there.

Life goes on.

Glossary of terms Hyper Ego Chorus, walk-on, nominal dialogue. Technically competent, emotionally deficient, egotistical performer suited only to Chorus, walk-on and nominal dialogue parts.

Mimic Play roles up to Supporting Lead. An Actor who performs through mimicry.

Progressive Play roles up to Supporting Lead. An Actor whose experience has grown and developed year on year.

Engine Play Lead roles. Lead actor, nothing but.

Linchpin Play Authoritative Lead roles - role specific.

Click Play Key (Title) Lead roles. Ultimate universal performer.

Transformer Plays role specific parts that no few are suited to. They can’t be wasted - a rare actor who can physically and emotionally adapt to any (complex) role.

Dead Fish Emotionally vacant screen performers with disengaged eye activity.

Glow An unspoken aura that surrounds and attaches to performers. When it disappears it is unlikely to come back.

Headspace Acting A facet of acting for the screen. The unspoken process of conviction by which you believe the performer’s respective performance.

Hypercompetence Multiple professional skill-sets.

Indie Land The world of independent film and theatre production.

Magic Faces Transformer actresses whose exemplary external processes expose a weak and chronically under developed internal process.

Production Killer Performer or scenario that kills a project.

Stardust A-List actors.

The Cool School The most pretentious element of any ‘scene’.

The Toyshop The home of all your artistic creations.

The Toybox A representation of the production as a whole.

Super Toybox Everything you ever dreamt of.

The Toymaker You. Lost & Found Box Random artifacts and items that don’t fit in the toybox.

Weirdos, freaks and wannabes The unavoidable detritus inherent to Indie film casting.

The Toymaker’s Emotional Toolkit In discussion, this quick overview will help you form the internal process of a character.

Introduction - The Personas of The World Your character is a young girl about to embark on an adventure. She is somewhere between the ages of 15 - 24 and on the surface is relatively normal. Let’s flick through the book and examine people who are similar.

Vol.1 Shoes and Feet This girl walks a lot. She needs good shoes and knows what blisters are all too well but she doesn’t always wear good shoes.

Vol.2 Trousers and Legs A bit of a tomboy, skirts just aren’t sensible for her. Trousers are the way but she hates wearing them.

Vol.3 Private and Confidential (use at Toymaker’s discretion) When she was little, she fell out of a tree and suffered a deep cut across the left side of her ribcage. Post puberty, she has a scarred left breast but even her old boyfriends don’t know. When she lost her virginity she kept her top on.

Vol.4 Tops and Torsos The girl still carries emotions related to falling out of that tree. Even though you can’t see her scar, she’ll never wear a top that exposes any part of her chest.

Vol.5 Magic Faces (for Reference Only) She has the facial characteristics of Winona Ryder.

Vol.6 Head Spaces for Magic Faces She needs a balanced emotional palette for the journey she is about to undertake. Her journey will result in her overcoming deep rooted fears.

Vol.7 Accessories & Special Items She wears a ring that her most important boyfriend gave her. She can’t let him go even though he totally rejected her many years ago. She keeps a card from another boyfriend in a box though she has never been sure what this person means to her.

Selected Bibliography Films The Godfather Part III (1990) Directed by Francis Ford Coppolla [Film]. USA: Paramount Pictures.

Goodfellas(1990) Directed by Martin Scorsese[Film]. USA: Warner Bros.

Pulp Fiction (1994) Directed by Quentin Tarantino. [Film]. USA: Miramax Pictures.

Cast Away (2000) Directed by Robert Zemeckis. [Film] USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Spiderman (2002) Directed by Sam Raimi. [Film] USA: Columbia Pictures.

The Amazing Spiderman (2012).

Directed by Marc Webb. [Film] USA: Columbia Pictures.

Plays SHAKESPEARE, W. The tragedy of Hamlet, prince of Denmark In-text: (Shakespeare) Bibliography: Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy Of Hamlet, Prince Of Denmark. Champaign, Ill.: Project Gutenberg. Print.

EYRE, R., BAMBOROUGH, K., BAMBOROUGH, A. AND IBSEN, H. Hedda Gabler In-text: (Eyre et al.)

Bibliography: Eyre, Richard et al. Hedda Gabler. London: Nick Hern Books, 2005. Print.

IBSEN, H. AND LORD, H. F. Nora, or, A Doll's House In-text: (Ibsen and Lord, 1890) Bibliography: Ibsen, H. and Lord, H. (1890). Nora, or, A doll's house. London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh.

WILLIAMS, T. A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays In-text: (Williams) Bibliography: Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire And Other Plays. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.

GAZZO, M. V. A Hatful Of Rain In-text: (Gazzo) Bibliography: Gazzo, Michael V. A Hatful Of Rain. New York: S. French, 1984. Print.

HAMPTON, C. AND LACLOS, C. D. Les Liaisons Dangereuses In-text: (Hampton and Laclos) Bibliography: Hampton, Christopher, and Choderlos de Laclos. Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

London: Faber and Faber, 1985. Print.

WASSERMAN, D. AND KESEY, K. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest In-text: (Wasserman and Kesey) Bibliography: Wasserman, Dale, and Ken Kesey. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. New York: S. French, 1974. Print.