Ivana Chubbuck's The Power of The Actor

I have been studying acting at Ivana Chubbuck Studios since October of this year.  I am very pleased with the progress.  The book itself provides an insight into the basics, while her classes puts it to test.  Highly recommend and excited.  Will study for 6 months total and regroup in March.  I will post later on the different scenes I am putting up each classroom.  

Four Character Acting Objectives Actors Need Know

Characters, like people, are machines that want things and do things to get those things they want. They want something now and later. The wants change and sometimes even conflict with each other. You might want one thing in your 20's and another when you turn 45. You may have a certain set of desires when you are single and they may drastically change once you have children.

A character's desires will affect how you portray this character and it's important to know the major types of desires and how they can function in a production.

Lifetime

Not something that can be defined precisely in the text of a production, nevertheless it can be useful to make specific a character. Everybody has issues, dilemmas, or problems that last a life time. These things never get solved so we deal with them our entire lives. Often they are two conflicting desires and the dilemma is the choosing between one or the other. We may think we have the problem handled when later in life it rears its ugly head again. This can help you color any parts of your performance that you don't feel are definitive. It needn't be fireworks and nobody has to consciously notice. It could be that added touch that often elevates great performances to the sublime.

Story

Each character has something they mean to achieve by the end of the play, movie, act, episode, whatever. It may not seem to match any scene or immediate objective but will none the less become evident. More likely the scene and immediate objectives are related somehow to the task of achieving the overall objective of the piece. We don't always take the most obvious route to get something. Every person has a unique way of thinking and they can come to drastically different conclusions about how to get something important to them.

Scene

No matter what little desires the scene may be filled with, overall the scene will have a single overarching desire that supersedes it. At times another desire may become more important and conflict can come into play between scene and immediate objectives. A scene is a story in miniature. The character lives out this scene as if there is no story but just these moments. They do what they think will work, gauge reaction, are reminded of their desires occasionally and then regroup. There is no straight line to getting things that are difficult to get. There is a lot of guessing, risk-taking and side tracking. The thing that will hold them all together is character desires now and soon.

Immediate

This is what the character wants right now. Not in a few minutes but in a few seconds. This might be in reaction to another character or to a physical sensation. This immediate desire may or may not help the character achieve any other desire and in fact may conflict with it. These desires will at times be stronger than others and will change the way you go about trying to get something. In the best of circumstances a person will always be goal-oriented and never let any other desire get in the way but people and characters are rarely like that. We meander and wander our way to our goals and along the way have to take care of others that might seem important at the time.

It's crucial to be able to have a good conception of what your character is about and desire is one of the best ways. Contemplate not only what your character wants in the scene you're doing now but for the whole play and in their lifetime. It might seem like a lot of work for little gain but the slightest advantage is something you can't overlook.

PREPRODUCTION CHECKLIST

Make a Production Schedule:

 a. Block out dates for all your shoots; Aim to leave at least 3 weeks for

careful editing. If you are editing at the last minute, you will be stuck using your first cut rather than having time to try a few different versions, and you won’t have time for polishing, fine-tuning, and post- picture lock work such as color correction and sound mixing (these can make a huge difference).

b. Log, take notes, and assemble selects / rough scenes while you are still in production

c. Check with other members of your camera group to make sure you are not planning overlapping shoot dates.

d. Be realistic about scheduling – a typical rule of thumb is that it takes approximately one 8-hour shooting day to cover 2-4 minutes of script time.

Crew Up: 

a. Plan in advance to make sure you have all the crew members you need

for your shoots. Make sure to ask members of your group and other members of the class ahead of time to make sure you aren’t scrambling for crewmembers at the last minute.

b. Remember, the more you are able to delegate specific jobs to specific people, the more you’ll be able to focus on directing and getting the performances you want out of your actors. At a minimum, you should consider having at least a gaffer and a sound recordist / boom operator on your crew. Additionally, you might consider having a DP (so you are not shooting and directing at the same time), a camera assistant (especially if you’re doing dolly moves or complicated focus pulls), a production / costume designer, etc.

Visualize your project’s “Look”: 

a. As you move from the written script to thinking about your piece on

screen, think broadly about what kind of color palette, mood and tone

you want your piece to have. 

b. Collect images that inspire you visually and post them to the class blog.

Find and secure Locations: 

a. Make a list of all the locations that appear in your script, and list a few

options for each one. 

b. Always bring a still camera with you for location scouting. Visit at

several times of day if possible 

c. Take notes about the available light in the location. Think in terms of

planning your lighting creatively around what’s already there. 

d. Think about the size of the location and what kind of options will be available for placing lights and camera positions. Will you be able to

move far back enough to get wide shots if needed? 

e. Make sure to ask a lot of questions – you should find out about

availability, any limitations or scheduling issues, circuits and outlets. 

f. Try to get a sense of any noises or hums in the space that may cause

sound issues (fridges should be turned off – always make sure to turn them back on before you leave! -- vents and fluorescent lights can make noise, etc.).

g. If possible, you might want to move furniture away from walls to avoid casting harsh back shadows. Make sure you will be able to make the changes you need to the location, both in terms of set dressing / props and in terms of logistics (eliminating noise, moving furniture and lights, etc).

h. Post location photos to the class blog.

5. Casting: a. Bad actors and age-inappropriate casting are often the downfall of

student films. It will really pay off to spend time and be creative about casting – Unless they are truly perfect for the part, don’t just cast your friends!

b. Be creative about how you go about looking for actors – try craigslist, local casting resources, calling local theater programs, community / adult ed acting classes, putting up flyers, just asking non-professional regular people in the community who might happen to be the right physical type for the role.

c. Consider teaming up with other class members to hold a common casting type of open audition.

d. Make sure your posting / flyer contains relevant info about the roles you are casting (include age, physical characteristics, short blurb describing character, date /time / length of audition, materials that need to be prepared (such as monologue), your contact info, shoot timeframe, remuneration – you’re not paying them, but you should always offer a DVD of the finished film for their reel)

e. Hold open auditions in a space where you can separate the person auditioning from the people who are waiting.

f. Make a form for people to fill out (including contact info, experience, scheduling constraints, etc)

g. Consider whether you want to ask for a monologue, a cold reading of a scene (good to test chemistry between two people), or reading from your script.

h. Always give some directions / suggestions after the first reading. You want to see if your actor is able to change aspects of their performance / responds well to direction.

i. Videotape auditions if possible – include CU to see facial expression and MS to see gesture / body language.

j. Let actors know when they can expect to hear from you k. Consider holding callbacks if you need to see more.

Production Design (questions to ask yourself): a. What is the Film’s theme? b. What are its mood progressions? c. What kind of location should each sequence have? d. What statement should each location make towards the film’s premise? e. How should each set be lit?

f. What kind of props go with the set? g. What kind of belongings do the characters keep around them? 

h. What kind of clothes does each character wear and what do the clothes

tell us? i. How does their wardrobe vary from scene to scene? 

j. What color palette and progression would promote the film’s thematic

development? Prepare costumes, props, set dressing

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN DEVELOPING A SHOOTING SCRIPT 

a. What do you need to show to establish environment? 

b. When do you show establishing info? 

c. When do characters move and how to show movement (follow

character / make shot wider / let character leave frame / show

another character’s eyeline change) 

d. At each significant moment, whose POV are we sharing -- does POV

shift? When / how? 

e. What are significant eyelines and when do they change? 

f. When / why does the camera move? 

g. How can you use composition to show relationships (framing, focal

length, arrangement of characters, etc)? 

h. What kind of coverage do you need (critical moments should have

more coverage / more editing options)?

Make a Floorplan / lighting plot for each Location 

a. Sketch a simple floorplan 

b. Mark Camera positions (designate A, B, C etc) 

c. A should be the widest shot, since it uses the most lighting and

determines how subsequent shots look 

d. Figure out placement of lights in the scene

A. FLOORPLAN DIAGRAM

B. LIGHTING PLOT

Break down your shooting script: 

e. Number each scene in your script

f. Bracket off each intended shot 

g. Designate each shot as CAM A / B/ C 

h. Give each bracket a shot description 

i. Make sure to leave lots of generous action overlap so you have editing

options 

j. A great exercise is to analyze a dialogue scene in a feature film –

watch the scene, make a floor plan, and try to figure out how to draw all the camera positions into the floor plan.

10.Make a Storyboard

11.Make a Shooting Schedule a. See sample schedules on course website / downloads

The Los Angeles 48 Hour Film Project

Los Angeles Filmmakers Take to the Streets

This weekend 1600 filmmakers from Los Angeles are making films in the 48 Hour Film Project! All of completed films will screen on the dates below.

Here are some important notes for 48HFP filmmakers:

• Elements: The required elements for Los Angeles will be listed to the right.
• Media: You must submit your film on one of the media listed to the right.
• Documents: You must submit releases for all team members, all music, all locations, and any other copyrighted material, as well as a team leader's agreement, a roster, and a certification statement. These forms can be downloaded from on our production documents page.
• Rules/FAQ: You should make sure that your film complies with our rules. If you have questions about the rules, the best place to go is our faq.
• 48HFP Hotline: If you have a question during the filmmaking weekend, call the 48HFP Hotline. The number is on the Kickoff Info Sheet that your team representative was given at the kickoff. If you email us, you will probably not receive an answer in time, so please call.
• Dropoff: The location to drop off your film is listed below.
• Coda: Be safe! Make great films! Good luck!

There are still a few slots available in the Los Angeles 48HFP.

Register for Los Angeles now!

Los Angeles 48HFP Events

Kickoff

Date	August 3, 2012
Time	6:00pm
Place	Dim Mak Studios (Cinespace), 6356 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, CA 90028

Dropoff

Date	August 5, 2012
Time	6:00-9:00pm (by 7:30pm to be on time!)
Place	Dim Mak Studios (Cinespace), 6356 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, CA 90028

Premiere Screenings

Date	August 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th
Time	7:00pm and 9:30pm
Place	Laemmle Noho 7, 5240 Lankershim Boulevard North Hollywood
Tickets	$11.00 (purchase them here)

A Poem by Diana

Love and Peace Abound

The World Goes Round & Round

Ever Circling, Ever Whirling

Ever Twirling, Ever Hurling

The Soul of Every Being In The Universe

Moved by Bliss & Serenity

Iin Life's Gift of the Abundant Purse.

Truthfully and Uncommon Rarity.

The Art of Listening

The Art of Listening
It is through this creative process
that we at once love and are loved

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all - which is so important, too - to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. Think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.

This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it. It makes people happy and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing them good.
______________________________________________________
Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice?
Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly
what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest,
least censorious, least bossy people you know. ______________________________________________________

Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.

When we listen to people there is an alternating current that recharges us so we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.

Now, there are brilliant people who cannot listen much. They have no ingoing wires on their apparatus. They are entertaining, but exhausting, too.

I think it is because these lecturers, these brilliant performers, by not giving us a chance to talk, do not let this little creative fountain inside us begin to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisdom. That is why, when someone has listened to you, you go home rested and lighthearted.

When people listen, creative waters flow

Now this little creative fountain is in us all. It is the spirit, or the intelligence, or the imagination - whatever you want to call it. If you are very tired, strained, have no solitude, run too many errands, talk to too many people, drink too many cocktails, this little fountain is muddied over and covered with a lot of debris. The result is you stop living from the center, the creative fountain, and you live from the periphery, from externals. That is, you go along on mere willpower without imagination.

It is when people really listen to us, with quiet, fascinated attention, that the little fountain begins to work again, to accelerate in the most surprising way.

I discovered all this about three years ago, and truly it made a revolutionary change in my life. Before that, when I went to a party, I would think anxiously: "Now try hard. Be lively. Say bright things. Talk. Don't let down." And when tired, I would have to drink a lot of coffee to keep this up.

Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk; to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing, or changing the subject.

Sometimes, of course, I cannot listen as well as others. But when I have this listening power, people crowd around and their heads keep turning to me as though irresistibly pulled. By listening I have started up their creative fountain. I do them good.

Now why does it do them good? I have a kind of mystical notion about this. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.

It is so in writing. You are taught in school to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull things on paper too - you can tear them up afterward - for only then do the bright ones come.

If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.

Women listen better

I think women have this listening faculty more than men. It is not the fault of men. They lose it because of their long habit of striving in business, of self-assertion. And the more forceful men are, the less they can listen as they grow older. And that is why women in general are more fun than men, more restful and inspiriting.

Now this non-listening of able men is the cause of one of the saddest things in the world - the loneliness of fathers, of those quietly sad men who move along with their grown children like remote ghosts.

When my father was over 70, he was a fiery, humorous, admirable man, a scholar, a man of great force. But he was deep in the loneliness of old age and another generation. He was so fond of me. But he could not hear me - not one word I said, really. I was just audience. I would walk around the lake with him on a beautiful afternoon and he would talk to me about Darwin and Huxley and higher criticism of the Bible.

"Yes, I see, I see," I kept saying and tried to keep my mind pinned to it, but I was restive and bored. There was a feeling of helplessness because he could not hear what I had to say about it. When I spoke I found myself shouting, as one does to a foreigner, and in a kind of despair that he could not hear me. After the walk I would feel that I had worked off my duty and I was anxious to get him settled and reading in his Morris chair, so that I could go out and have a livelier time with other people. And he would sigh and look after me absentmindedly with perplexed loneliness.

For years afterward I have thought with real suffering about my father's loneliness. Such a wonderful man, and reaching out to me and wanting to know me! But he could not. He could not listen. But now I think that if only I had known as much about listening then as I do now, I could have bridged the chasm between us. To give an example:

Recently, a man I had not seen for 20 years wrote me. He was an unusually forceful man and had made a great deal of money. But he had lost his ability to listen. He talked rapidly and told wonderful stories and it was just fascinating to hear them. But when I spoke - restlessness: "Just hand me that, will you? ... Where is my pipe?" It was just a habit. He read countless books and was eager to take in ideas, but he just could not listen to people.

Patient listening

Well, this is what I did. I was more patient - I did not resist his non-listening talk as I did my father's. I listened and listened to him, not once pressing against him, even in thought, with my own self-assertion.

I said to myself: "He has been under a driving pressure for years. His family has grown to resist his talk. But now, by listening, I will pull it all out of him. He must talk freely and on and on. When he has been really listened to enough, he will grow tranquil. He will begin to want to hear me."

And he did, after a few days. He began asking me questions. And presently I was saying gently:

"You see, it has become hard for you to listen."

He stopped dead and stared at me. And it was because I had listened with such complete, absorbed, uncritical sympathy, without one flaw of boredom or impatience, that he now believed and trusted me, although he did not know this.

"Now talk," he said. "Tell me about that. Tell me all about that."

Well, we walked back and forth across the lawn and I told him my ideas about it.

"You love your children, but probably don't let them in. Unless you listen, you can't know anybody. Oh, you will know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps, but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is."

Well, I don't think I would have written this article if my notions had not had such an extraordinary effect on this man. For he says they have changed his whole life. He wrote me that his children at once came closer; he was astonished to see what they are; how original, independent, courageous. His wife seemed really to care about him again, and they were actually talking about all kinds of things and making each other laugh.

Family tragedies

For just as the tragedy of parents and children is not listening, so it is of husbands and wives. If they disagree they begin to shout louder and louder - if not actually, at least inwardly - hanging fiercely and deafly onto their own ideas, instead of listening and becoming quieter and more comprehending.

But the most serious result of not listening is that worst thing in the world, boredom; for it is really the death of love. It seals people off from each other more than any other thing.

Now, how to listen. It is harder than you think. Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad- tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don't love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.

In order to listen, here are some suggestions: Try to learn tranquility, to live in the present a part of the time every day. Sometimes say to yourself: "Now. What is happening now? This friend is talking. I am quiet. There is endless time. I hear it, every word." Then suddenly you begin to hear not only what people are saying, but also what they are trying to say, and you sense the whole truth about them. And you sense existence, not piecemeal, not this object and that, but as a translucent whole.

Then watch your self-assertiveness. And give it up. Remember, it is not enough just to will to listen to people. One must really listen. Only then does the magic begin.
______________________________________________________ We should all know this: that listening, not talking,
is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.
And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic
than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and
does more good. ______________________________________________________

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.

---

Brenda Ueland, a prolific Minnesota author and columnist, died in 1985 at the age of 93. Her father was a lawyer and judge, her mother a suffrage leader. From a collection of her essays, "Strength To Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings by Brenda Ueland." Copyright 1992 by The Estate of Brenda Ueland. Reprinted on this webpage by permission of Holy Cow! Press, Box 3170, Mt. Royal Station, Duluth, Minn. 55803. Phone/Fax: 218-724-1653

Film: Down With Love

Starring:
Renee Zellweger
Swan McGregor
Sarah Paulson
David Hyde Pierce

This is a cute film with a unique storyline. Aesthetically pleasing film.
I was entertained.