Craft and Technique
The working craft. Accents, scene study, Meisner, Chekhov, voice, and the long practice of getting better.
This category is about craft, not career. The articles here step back from the audition and look at the work itself. How accents are built to hold under pressure. How Meisner, Chekhov, and Stanislavski relate to each other and how working actors actually use all three. The pieces are longer than the auditioning articles because craft deserves the room. They are also the pieces most likely to reward a second reading, because the practical suggestions land differently once you have tried the thing and come back. If you are deep in rehearsal or scene study and want to think harder about the work, this is your category. If you are auditioning this week, start elsewhere and come back after the shoot.
Articles in Craft and Technique
Showing page 1 of 3. 31 articles in total.
The full craft stack: every discipline a working actor eventually meets
Screen acting is not one skill. It is a stack of overlapping disciplines, and a working actor meets most of them over a career. This pillar piece walks through the eleven craft are…
What scene study actually is: from table read to first run
Scene study is the working actor’s laboratory: a small group or one-to-one setting where actors take a short scene apart, interrogate it, and put it back together over several sess…
Five questions every scene study session should answer
If a scene study session ends and you cannot answer five specific questions about the scene, the session did not do its job. This article lays out the five: who is this character t…
Scene study for screen vs stage: the differences that matter
Stage scene study and screen scene study overlap in the big ideas and diverge in almost everything else. The structure of the scene is the same. The tools you use to play it are no…
Self-directed scene study: running the work without a class
Not every city has a scene study class worth the money, and even where one exists, you cannot rely on it for every hour of work you need. This article covers how to run a self-dire…
On-camera technique: why stage instincts work against you
If you trained on stage first and moved to screen later, your instincts are working against you in ways you do not always feel. Stage trains you to project, to fill a room, to play…
Eyelines, frame, and the geography of a screen scene
Eyeline is one of the small technical things an actor cannot bluff their way through on camera. A wrong eyeline reads as the actor not being in the scene. A correct eyeline is invi…
Stillness on camera: the economy that separates stage actors from screen actors
Stillness on camera is not the absence of acting. It is a specific economy of movement that trusts the lens to magnify whatever is happening behind the eyes. Screen actors who look…
The close-up: what changes when the camera gets in
The close-up is where screen acting stops forgiving anything. The frame is the face, the cut will live or die on three seconds of eye behaviour, and everything the actor thinks abo…
Meisner's repetition exercise, explained by a working actor
Meisner's repetition exercise is the most misunderstood drill in modern acting training. On paper it looks like two people repeating a single observation back and forth. In practic…
Your first Meisner class: what to expect and what not to
Walking into a Meisner class for the first time is disorienting on purpose. You will not read a scene. You will not monologue. You will sit opposite a stranger and repeat a simple …
Why Meisner-trained actors sound different in auditions
Casting directors often describe Meisner-trained actors with the same shorthand: present, simple, not working. Why do these actors sound different on a tape or in a room. It comes …