Craft and Technique
The working craft. Accents, scene study, Meisner, Chekhov, voice, and the long practice of getting better.
Articles in Craft and Technique
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Meisner for screen: translating the training to the camera
Meisner was built in a studio for stage work, and some of its tools need translation before they land well on camera. The core principles travel cleanly: live moment-to-moment, let…
Michael Chekhov's psychological gesture: the tool most actors miss
The psychological gesture is Michael Chekhov's signature tool: a single, stylised, physical movement that stores the psychological core of a character in the body. Used before a ta…
Chekhov's atmosphere exercise: building the room before you walk in
Atmosphere is Chekhov’s name for the emotional charge of a room, a place, or a moment. His atmosphere exercise trains actors to drop into a specific atmosphere on command, so they …
Chekhov's imaginary body: how to build a character you can actually see
The imaginary body is another of Chekhov's core tools: you construct an internal image of what your character's body is like (heavier, lighter, older, tenser, smoother) and then le…
Chekhov for screen: which tools travel and which do not
Chekhov's technique was built for stage and film at a time when screen acting was still closer to theatre. Some of his tools travel cleanly to modern screen work: psychological ges…
Script analysis: the three reads every actor should give a script
Most actors read a script twice: once for fun, once for their part. That is not enough. A full script analysis takes three passes with three different questions, and the third one …
Objective, obstacle, tactic: the three tools that do the work
Objective, obstacle, and tactic are the three foundational tools most actors first learn in a Stanislavski class and then spend the next ten years using. They survive every other f…
Reading script structure: where your character sits in the scene’s arc
A scene is a small story. It has a beginning, a turn, and an end, and every line sits somewhere on that shape. If you know which line is the turn, you know what every other line is…
The subtext pass: what is being said when nothing is
Subtext is what the character is saying underneath the words they are using. It is usually the opposite of the surface line, or at least askew to it. The subtext pass is a dedicate…
Character development for screen: building a life around three scenes
Screen characters are often built from three or four scenes. You will not get a hundred pages to live with them. You will get fragments. The craft is building a full internal life …
Backstory: how much is useful, how much is a distraction
Backstory is the cheapest drug in acting: a lot of it feels like work, most of it does not land on camera, and some of it actively distracts you from what the scene actually needs.…
Physical life: the three character choices the camera actually sees
The camera is a documentary recorder of physical life. It sees weight, tension, and the speed at which a body moves. It does not reliably see the rest. So if you want a character t…