The Science of On-Camera Acting

by Andréa Morris

  In this model emotions are not only categorized by whether they are experienced as positive or negative, but by how intensely they are experienced. Because of the different level of arousal between high and low-intensity emotions, it’s easier to swing back and forth, left and right, on this scale than it is to go up or down. For instance, if you are someone with a high-intensity set point (HI) you might readily experience a positive emotion like enthusiasm. In this excited state, it’s easier for you to transition to another high-intensity emotion like anxiety, than it is to arrive at an emotion of lower intensity. If you’re someone with a low-intensity set point (LI) it’s easier for you to hover and transition between low-intensity emotions (positive and negative) like serenity and sadness, or contentment and boredom. Actors typically display sets of behaviors based on their emotional-intensity set points, and both HI and LI set points have their advantages and challenges.

  If you are an HI actor, you likely have substantial emotional torque, meaning you can quickly get to a state of heightened emotional arousal in a scene. The most common challenge for HI actors is the easy arousal of nervous energy. A later chapter addresses this issue in depth.

  Another challenge for HI actors is sensing when to hold back. It requires a level of sophistication to recognize when a slow emotional build works better throughout a scene or entire act, or when a stiff upper lip is more moving than a full-blown emotional meltdown. Emotional torque isn’t synonymous with good acting if the actor isn’t creatively aware enough to govern it. When high-intensity emotions are over exercised, it’s like a song that’s all bridge and no verse.

  The best way to get an idea about your emotional-intensity throughline is to gauge your nervousness at auditions. If you do not get nervous at auditions it is very likely you hover in the LI range. As someone who works in the emotional arts, being aware of your intensity set point lets you navigate your strengths and weaknesses.

  Tension

  Relaxation exercises are designed to release tension in the body, but a common misconception is when anxiety and tension are treated synonymously. Anxiety in the actor is undesirable, but tension in the body is neither good nor bad. Because everyone falls on different points along the intensity spectrum, different degrees of tension in the body work for different roles.

  I work with an actress with effervescent energy and big, bright eyes. Even when she’s sitting still, bored, checking her phone, her eyes remain alert and wide open. Her intensity set point is on the upper end of the spectrum. Her natural state is a state of great arousal, a state where she is most comfortable, and a state she settles into effortlessly. But for certain characters, it’s too intense. She can practice relaxation exercises till the cows come home, but they can’t change her physiology. Nor does relaxing help her play a low-key character, because her natural state of equilibrium is more intense than most.

  When this actress is called upon to play someone with an LI set point, we have a cue: “half-mast.” This cue triggers her upper eyelids, the levator palpebrae superioris muscles, to lower and she takes on the physical appearance of someone more laid-back. Though the action is small, the overall effect is transformative. For the vast majority of actors this cue would make them look weird, drowsy, and sedated, but for this actress, it softens her pertness. When working on certain characters, this simple movement has been her single most transformative adjustment. Due to her intensity set point, playing someone relaxed requires tension to maintain her eyes at “half-mast.” A relaxed character comes across on-camera but could not be arrived at by the actress herself, relaxing.

  On the other end of the spectrum are LIs. I want to be clear that high and low intensity set points are not value judgments, they are neither good nor bad. They are different intensities both with their advantages and challenges for performers. A challenge for LI actors can be putting tension in their body when the stakes are high. I can tell when these actors aren’t fully feeling the intense emotion because the stakes are being expressed in their face but missing from their body. The camera picks up the disconnect making it impossible to believe them. When the pressure is on, our whole bodies go into fight or flight mode. The giveaway as to whether the character is truly feeling the intensity of the scene is most obvious in a close-up shot where the actor’s neck meets their shoulders. When the body is tense, the trapezius, sternothyroid muscles, and scalene muscle group contract noticeably, creating pits and shadows in the neck, shoulders, and throat.

  In a high-stakes scene, I’ll often see an LI actor with their hand placed casually in their pocket just below frame. Or they may have one hip jutted out and are leaning to one side. LI actors in high-stakes scenes must take their hands out of their pockets, make two fists and tense up every muscle in their body. Clench hands, legs, butt, and whole body until they start to shake with anxiety tremors. This over-the-top tension shifts the body from their comfort zone to the higher end of the intensity spectrum. Once there, drop it down a notch so the shaking stops, while maintaining tension throughout the body. This makes it easier to sustain and raise the stakes throughout the scene. Another factor is breathing. Actors often take a large breath in and exhale deeply before beginning a scene. In a high-stakes scene, you must tense your body to match the degree of tension called for by the stakes in the scene. Take a deep breath in and don’t exhale deeply. Maintain shallow breathing until you hear “cut.”

  Although LI actors seem to be the minority in terms of the actor population on a whole, anecdotally I’ve noticed that the actors who work consistently seem to fall more frequently into this LI threshold.4 LI actors certainly have the advantage of being able to keep their cool under pressure. Over the course of the day, actors enter and exit casting offices in rapid succession, each with varying degrees of anxiety. When HI actors flub a line, anxiety is more likely to creep in, an emotion that breeds discomfort in others. LI actors are more likely to brush off the flub and move on or laugh their way right back into the scene, having reset a more relaxed tone in the room.

  One of the simplest ways for HI actors to achieve this kind of relaxed state is the common advice “just don’t care” about the outcome of your auditions, a sort of actor nirvana few are able to reach and maintain over the long haul. The lofty highs an actor gets from the intermittent rewards of screen acting raise the stakes and anxiety level. Getting to a point where you don’t care about the outcome is the most direct route to achieve this kind of ease under pressure, but certainly not the easiest to acquire. Subsequent chapters outline a way for HI actors to ease anxiety under pressure.

  Pressure, Tension, Dynamic—David Razowsky

  I have never liked the pseudo dictum that all good drama is rooted in conflict. David Razowsky, a wonderful improv instructor for screen actors, coined the phrase “pressure, tension, dynamic.” All great scenes have these three elements. An example of a scene with no conflict but with plenty of pressure, tension, and dynamic would be the type of scene where good friends are awkwardly trying to discern if the other has romantic ideas about them. Certainly if pressed, you could say the scene is about the character’s inner conflict. At that point though, I’d say you’re starting to do some heavy lifting to justify an expression better replaced with the dramatic requisite of pressure, tension, dynamic.

  Chapter Endnotes

  1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870).

  2 Andjelkovic, Ivana, “Brain Tag,” UC Santa Barbara, n.d., mat.ucsb.edu/~ivana/200a/background.htm, accessed March 9, 2014.

  3 In this model, arousal doesn’t mean sexual arousal, it means the level of intensity in which a person tends to experience their emotions.

  4 I have not conducted a formal study so I want to emphasize that this observation is strictly anecdotal.

  Part III

  Mechanics of Screen Acting

  Cultivating Photogenia—A Face Sculpted by Habit

  The white, corded phone on the built-in by the fridge was
ringing. I placed my tea on the table in the kitchenette and answered it. The unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line announced he was a police officer looking for a friend or relative of Roberta Morris. My mother had drifted happily out the door only a few hours earlier, kissing me on the head, saying she was going to go check out the Los Angeles Central Library downtown. Now the hairs on the back of my neck bristled as I told the officer I was her daughter.

  My mom was on an escalator when she discovered she had epilepsy. The head trauma from her fall down the escalator, coupled with the repeated smacking of her head against the metal ridges, landed her at the University of Southern California’s prestigious neurology teaching hospital where she remained for a few weeks, slipping in and out of consciousness and working through temporary retrograde amnesia.

  I reached her with only the officer’s brief recap of the incident, having no real idea what to expect. Under the bright florescent lights of the ER, my mom lay on a gurney, her head bandaged and bleeding. She was awake, her eyes fluttering, scanning the faces and beeping apparatus.

  I caught her eye when she noticed someone pushing through the crowded ER making a beeline for her. She didn’t ask who I was, but it was clear she didn’t know. For sixteen years my mother had only ever looked at me with a handful of facial expressions, expressions children know well. I had become familiar with my mother’s expressions of love, anger, impatience, devotion, surprise, sadness, and pride, but I’d never seen her look at me with confusion empty of any emotional connection.

  A lot of strange things happen when someone close to you loses their memory. But the most perplexing thing wasn’t that my mother didn’t recognize me; it was that I didn’t recognize her. Static things like her hair color and the lines in her face were the same as the day before, but every feature on her face looked like they belonged to someone else. Her eyes, ears, nose, cheeks, and chin were a different shape, relaxed, soft, like unsculpted clay. They moved differently. The muscles in her face had forgotten how to hold themselves. Over the next few weeks my mother’s memories swirled back into her consciousness from wherever they’d been stopped up. For each new flood of memory, a corresponding muscle group in her face would shift and recalibrate back into position. After a month when almost all her memory had returned, her face was once again my mom’s.

  This is how I came to understand that through habit and repetition, sometimes conscious but mostly unconscious, we shape our faces over the course of our lives. I figured if we do it once passively, we can do it again with purpose.

  * * *

  “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

  Will Durant, summation of the works of Aristotle1

  * * *

  Reprogramming habits

  You’ve likely experienced how difficult it is to change a habit. The stubbornness of habit is also why habit can be so effectively relied upon. Once habits are formed they are so ingrained in our brain (basal ganglia), so immutably etched into our hardware, that we cannot erase them.2 We can only reprogram them. In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg offers a solution for overwriting habit that involves using the same cue and reward from the original habit while substituting a new, preferred routine.3 For bad screen-acting habits, reprogramming is relatively straightforward when working with the camera. If the cue is “action” and the reward is a strong performance upon playback, adjustments to the routine are simply necessary to produce the reward. For this reason, I am suspicious of whether there are any screen-acting habits, the good and the bad, that haven’t been intentionally created and cannot be easily overcome.

  Many unwanted behaviors on-camera are more likely a product of not having watched yourself and applied conscious attention toward adjusting certain behaviors. Or perhaps the unwanted behavior is being repeated because it has become top of mind after you witnessed yourself doing it during playback. Whether changing an actual bad habit or simply paying attention to what the camera sees, the fix is usually pretty simple.

  An actress once contacted me about her blinking problem. She claimed she blinked too much on camera. She couldn’t help it. I filmed her. Sure enough, the blinking was distracting. She turned to me after playback and asked, “How do I stop that?”

  I asked her, “Do you see yourself blinking?”

  “Yes,” she said, “It’s as bad as I thought it was.”

  “So you don’t like the way all that blinking reads on-camera?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Then stop doing it.”

  She looked confused for a moment, then laughed. “That’s it?”

  “For many problems, that’s pretty much it.”

  We continued to work on various other aspects of her on-camera performance and we never had to address the blinking again. With only rare exceptions, feedback from the camera is all you need to completely and permanently eradicate unwanted behavior and habituate desirable behaviors. These too can be reworked and made unconscious once again as needed. Again, adopting behaviors that appeal to the camera is not about vanity in this context. Although sometimes adjustments correlate with physical beauty, photogenia for the screen actor simply means conveying your art in a way that looks beautiful on-camera.

  This next section offers general techniques for improving your rapport with the camera. Beyond these, the best way to truly improve your unique relationship with the camera is by dedicating the time to rehearse on camera and analyze during playback. This morning I read an obituary of the great “Tony Gwynn, Baseball Scientist.”4 Pro baseball players strike out an average of 18 percent of the time, but Gwynn’s career average was only 4 percent. As author Jon Bois states, “Gwynn, whose nickname was Captain Video…had every single one of his plate appearances on videotape…He measured time in frames. Maybe he looked at his swing in frame five and was satisfied. If his shoulder was too low in frame seven, he would frown and go about the business of solving himself.”5

  Fear and Confidence On-Camera

  A common problem that comes up for screen actors is the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) leakage of anxiety or fear that creeps onto your face under pressure.6 Any number of things can cause this: frustration over how you feel the scene is going; distractions during a casting session or on-set; pressure from representation about booking; pressure from your landlord about overdue rent.

  Fear itself is neither good nor bad. Its value depends on the context and whether it helps or handicaps. When the actor’s nerves cannot be productively channeled into a role, it spurs the inner critic who interrupts the free flow of impulse. The first step in on-camera triage is prevention from hemorrhaging fear under pressure. Varying degrees of anxiety plague most actors, especially when it creeps past your immediate awareness unchecked. Many actors bolster themselves in an attempt to project confidence and protect themselves from the harsh appraisals actors endure. Unfortunately, bolstering can prevent you from seeing what everyone else sees. Like the cautionary tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes, actors delude themselves into believing they are projecting their ornate self, when the truth is that on-camera you are naked. During playback actors who think they are projecting a cool self-image are frequently confronted with the painful truth, watching themselves display the telltale signs of fear that have bypassed their internal levees and trickled onto their faces.

  ***

  Author: “Do you find it easier to detect the subtleties in facial expressions if you’re a nonparticipant? If you are watching on a screen and not interacting with the person directly? Is it more difficult for a screen actor to pull off a convincing performance because the actor’s audience is able to dedicate their attention to scrutinizing the face in close-up?”

  Dr. Ekman: “Absolutely. If you’re a participant, part of your mental energy is going into the task of figuring out: what did that person say? What did they really mean by it? And how should I respond? Other research I’ve done shows that people who know someone are much less accurate
in reading their macro or micro expressions because they have preconceptions and commitments. And they particularly don’t want to see things that someone is trying to conceal from them, because if they are involved with that person as a friend, as a lover, they have a commitment to a certain view of them and they don’t want to have it contradicted. So total strangers often see more than someone who knows the person quite well.”

  Author: “I’ve noticed, when an actor is trying to conceal an unwanted emotion, often a small muscle in one area of their face will contract, and for an extended period of time, throwing off the symmetry. With fear, it’s a muscle group in the forehead that contracts and this one small movement is a major ‘tell’, throwing off the symmetry and making it quite challenging to believe them.”

  Dr. Ekman: “Yes, we call that a mini expression. It’s a small expression, it need not be brief and it’s usually in just one region of the face.”

  ***

  The camera sees everything and shares every detail with an audience that observes more going on in your face than those sitting right next to you who know you better than anyone. It’s to be expected that the camera would induce varying degrees of anxiety in anyone who gets in its field of view. A nonanalytic approach is the strongest foundation for overcoming nervous tension on-camera. The next set of exercises goes the rest of the way in training your physiology against any indication of an actor straining to reach peak performance under pressure. A fundamental task in preparation for these next exercises is to expose your vulnerabilities to the light of day. Acknowledge and accept all. Use the Eric Morris exercises described in Part One to let impulse expose your true fears and insecurities. Confidence, real confidence, is just as much about earned respect and admiration as it is about full disclosure of those aspects of yourself that cause you the greatest fear, self-loathing, and shame. Real confidence does not have to fear exposure because you are hiding and denying nothing. You’ve emptied out. There is nothing left to expose. Real confidence is a quality the camera loves.