Last week’s class got me thinking about how important actor performance is for a shot/scene. Actor performance influences just about everything:
- Framing
- Focus
- Camera movement
- W/R & M/U
- Props
- Set dressing
- Everything else production design
- Lighting – e.g. changing expression could make lighting fall differently on actor’s face
- Rhythm within shot
- Rhythm within scene – where the cuts are
- Sound (sync) – dialogue, other vocal character sounds
- Sound design – foley, musical score
- Other actors’ performances
- Narrative
- Colour grading (e.g. skin colour)
- Marketing
- The film’s critical and commercial success.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The actor may be given strong guidelines but, in the end, they rule the scene. Everything depends on their performance. The success of the shot/scene depends on their performance.
Casting affords some control – you select the character’s look and that will influence the production design (are they scroungy-looking (despite W/R & M/U)? Will this make the otherwise grand/classy setting appear tacky/over-embellished?) and lighting (maybe they have a big nose that casts a pronounced shadow) and perhaps even the final colour grading (sharpening wrinkles and softening skin and hair and eye colouring?). You then rehearse your actor according to your established storyboard vision. But their practiced or chance rhythm will influence the final (visual and aural) cut. Their voice’s timbre and pitch and volume will influence the sound design. Their screen presence and physicality and vocal performance and interaction with the other actors will dictate how the narrative translates to the audience.
Replace an actor in a shot with a different actor and the shot’s flavour completely changes: the sound, the look, the rhythm. I suppose that’s what’s so important about casting. And that’s what’s so interesting about individual actors. They can each completely transform a not-yet-realised character in ways often unimagined.
But that’s just the surface impression. Think about all of the choices the actor has to make in regards to how they will embody a character. Think about all of the possible ways to realise a character. If you look at it analytically, it’s an overwhelming number of decisions to make. Voice pitch and pauses and quirky habits and walking style and tiny facial expression reaction here and upward inflexion on this line and so on. “Which voice timbre would be most suitable/interesting for my character?” “Which voice timbre would work best for my character in this particular moment?” There could be an infinite number of decisions. (Side note: this is like my discussion about defining a shot all over again!) In the end, there’s no possible way that you can decide everything. There’s a lot of the character that remains as chance performance – often informed by the actor’s own identity.
If we talk about screen performance more broadly, we’re not just talking about the actors on screen. We’re talking about every single cast and crew member’s performance interacting and bringing an imagined shot to the best fruition that any given moment/situation will allow. The most obvious crew performance role here is the camera operator. They will try to realise the director and DP’s visions as accurately as possible, but they are relying on the performances of the actors and the focus puller and dolly grip and boom operator and they only have one more take to get it (says the AD who is more focused on acquiring all required performances for the film rather than honing individual performance quality). But it’s not just those key people that are performing together to achieve a shot. It’s every single individual involved. Everyone on set and everyone off set – not just the producers and storyboard artist and post-production team, but also each individual goddamn audience member – is working to orchestrate a collective performance. And everyone will get something different out of it.
The central idea here is that screen performance is collaborative. Far more widely collaborative than we are aware of. A final screen performance is constructed from multifarious and highly interdependent individual performances.