Cruellest Cut: Acting

Article courtesy of ACP Media - Metro - visit Metrolive

Hamish Grieve puts himself under the camera's gaze.

There’s a scene in Extras where Ricky Gervais plays a footman in the background of an Eliza-bethan period drama. As the two leads run through their dialogue, Gervais edges slowly into the back of shot and looks straight at the camera. The director yells "cut" and Gervais walks contentedly back to his mark. That is until he overhears the director mutter, "Got it, we’ll just have to edit out the fat bloke in post-production."

Any aspiring actor will spend many hours as an extra desperately trying to get noticed or, even better, get a line of dialogue. (In New Zealand the setting will most likely be a hospital waiting room.) But this hasn’t put off the 11 people who have sacrificed a Saturday morning sleep-in to take a screen acting class at PASNZ (the Performing Arts School of New Zealand).

The classroom is a modern studio with a couple of stage lights, a camera and a TV. The participants are all women (apart from an urban commando named Mikhail dressed in ripped camo gear, cowboy hat, and sunglasses with multi-coloured dreads and several facial piercings) and range from pretty young things to middle-aged soccer mums. They amble in with takeaway coffees and, without prompting, chat to the other students while repeatedly walking the length of the room. (This is perhaps a technique to get the thespian juices flowing.)

This is the third week of a six-week course run by John Watson, a balding, elfin-like chap with bright blue eyes and a face that seems immediately familiar. He has done plenty of time in front of the camera, mainly in local productions such as Shortland Street and Hercules.

The first three weeks are spent getting comfortable with the camera so we split into pairs and are told to discuss an interesting part of our week.

Watson moves around the class filming us talk, at times moving the camera in startlingly close. It’s unsettling knowing that every rugby scar, pimple and nostril hair is being studied and magnified.

Several people in the class have theatre experience but they have been told they will need to retrain if they want to move into TV. Screen acting is, we’re told, about toning everything down. It’s different from the stage where every action must be exaggerated. The essence of screen acting is to be as normal as possible. When the camera zooms in on you, a raise of an eyebrow or a purse of the lips is all that is needed to convey emotion. We break into groups of three and move outside where our brief is to use our surroundings to create a scene from a movie. We meander into the grounds of a nearby school and a drug deal comes to mind, but instead we opt for a schoolyard drama. I play a seedy old teacher who is keeping a naughty young schoolgirl back after school for extra discipline and is blackmailed by another teacher who wants the principal’s job.

The other groups are more lateral in their approach: one creates a tiger’s cage from a metal railing for a story about a zoo and another manages to incorporate a guy working a digger nearby into their story about protesters and a building demolition. Watson shoots each scene at least three times, in some instances using close-ups, and explaining basic filmmaking techniques.

Then it’s back to the classroom to view our masterpieces. They say the camera adds 10kg, and I make a mental note to go for more runs and to never quit my day job.

Some of the others display more natural talent, but I suspect most of the class are just there for enjoyment and you won’t spot them in a hospital waiting room any time soon.

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