What happened to the Montreal Expo? Phil and Ricky tell all on Oct. 17

next overcast progress (#039)

Planning

 

overcast #031

posted by overman — Fri 13 Jun 2008 9:57 am

 
icon for podpress  overcast #031 [53:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (325)

Ricky and Phil discuss Acting, particularly as it relates to voiceover work for machinima. This first of two parts of coverage discusses acting history as well as the approaches and philosophies of the craft which are prevalent today (and where they came from). Whether you’re an experienced actor or completely new it, we think you’ll find the information covered here to be both helpful and practical.

Thank you for listening! Your feedback sculpts this show, and is both welcome and greatly appreciated.

This Week’s Hot List (URLs from the show’s content):

28 Comments »

  1. Comment by Johnnie Ingram — June 13, 2008 at 10:47 am

    Hey guys, I’m still only a little way through the episode, but I just wanted to say that I would pay good money to hear Phil read Lucky’s speech from Godot :-)

  2. Comment by digitalphil — June 13, 2008 at 11:49 am

    The perfect way to start my day while enjoying a hot cup of java in hand. Both of you provide some great content and insight to Machinima-related topics. Ricks sound bites are a wonderful addition to show!

    I was not aware of the weekly webinar with Antics, so I’m glad you mentioned it.

    Keep up the great work. See ya around . . .

  3. Comment by Ricky Grove — June 13, 2008 at 12:08 pm

    Hah! I was going to use the Lucky speech for next weeks cold reading in part 2, but opted for O’Neill’s “Hughie” instead. Now I’m regretful. On the other hand, working on the Lucky speech should only take, what, a week? I think even Hugh would balk at a podcast that lasts that long. Where will you find the time?

    Amusing idea, Johnnie, but you know the Lucky speech is a great one to work on for combination of craft and inspiration. When it works right on stage it’s a perfect blend of sheer terror ala Munch’s ‘the scream” painting and wonderful vaudeville slapstick. Putting those two styles together is the essense of Beckett. God, I’d love to see something like that in Machinima.

    @dp. Thank’s for the support. The session was hard to do because there was so much info to cover, but I think it works well. The second part is more practical.

  4. Comment by Johnnie Ingram — June 13, 2008 at 1:04 pm

    What a great episode. I thoroughly enjoyed this. I could listen to Ricky talk about acting until the cows come home, and Phil is as informative and entertaining as always.

    The phrase “acting is storytelling” is a very apt and important one. I had a Theatre Directing tutor who refined it slightly. “Theatre,” he said, “is storytelling. Acting is lying.” I found that very interesting, and have remembered it even now, years later, partially because of the way it sits in opposition to much of the Stanislavski/Strasberg schools of thought.

    The same tutor was responsible for one of my own favourite pieces of advice, which I used to shout regularly at actors when I was doing a lot of theatre direction and teaching: “Stop acting!” (The idea behind this of course being - as you alluded to in the podcast - that if one approaches a role with the intent of “I must act”, one is doomed to artifice and failure).

    I’m really looking forward to Part 2 of this. If Phil does in fact attempt Lucky’s speech, he’s a braver man than I am. I spent about a year studying Waiting For Godot, and I still have no bloody idea what that speech means or what its purpose is within the text.

    During a rather drunken evening at Hugh Hancock’s flat after a long day of BloodSpell work, I jokingly suggested that Strange Company’s next project should be a rendition of Waiting For Godot performed live within World Of Warcraft. What I didn’t realise was that Hugh had an interview with the UK newspaper “The Guardian” the next day. When asked “What’s next for Strange Company?”, his mind blanked and all he could think of was my crazy suggestion. So he said it. And the friendly journalist noted it down and quoted him in her article.

    That made me laugh for days.

  5. Comment by Tom — June 13, 2008 at 1:22 pm

    Phil, Ricky, this is incredible. I could listen Ricky talking about acting whole day. I always loved your podcast as great sound background while I am working on some movie, but now I was forced to stop work and just listen a show.
    Well, thank you are lot for that…who need enemies when you have a friends…
    Ricky, I am collecting BBC television series and radio dramas for years, with big respect for British school of “invisible” acting, but I never figured out what are the main principles of this type of acting, how this work.
    Can you explain us a little about that? What is the main difference in acting approaches of Method and, well, “invisible” acting (sorry, I can’t find better word for this British -or European?- acting but I am sure you understand).
    I know this is complicate subject to explain in couple sentences, but it will really be interesting to know what happens when Laurence Olivier meet M. Monroe (in The Prince and the Showgirl) or D. Hoffman (in Marathon Man)?

  6. Comment by Ricky Grove — June 13, 2008 at 4:25 pm

    Well, I wrote a long, detailed response to both Johnnie and Toms post, but lost it because of “invalid security code”. Drat! I’ll try again later tonight. Thanks for your positive feedback and interesting comments guys.

  7. Comment by Overman — June 13, 2008 at 5:48 pm

    I’m really sorry about that, Ricky. Apparently the plugin which provides the antispam images relies on a session variable, and it’s timing out on longer comments. I’m experimenting with the code to have it use a cookie instead to see if that helps. I’m testing it once with this comment, and I’ll run some timeout tests tonight to see if I can get it repaired. If I can’t get it to stop happening, I may just try turning off that plugin and see how Akismet does on its own controlling spam. (Akismet currently withholds thousands of spam comments each month, but I’m not sure how many are stopped before that by the image, which is intended to frustrate bots a bit.)

    Thanks for the feedback, everyone! I, too, could listen to Ricky talk about this stuff all day.

  8. Comment by Overman — June 13, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    Actually, I just read something which suggests this plugin might be what is blocking “trackbacks” to the site; so I’m going to go ahead and turn it off now and see what happens.

    Anyone who knows how to do it want to throw a trackback at this post to see if it’ll come through now?

  9. Comment by Xanatos — June 13, 2008 at 6:37 pm

    Great themed episode! Gonna need stuff like this to listen to as i’m going on a week long vacation and logging lots of travel time.

  10. Comment by john martin — June 13, 2008 at 10:01 pm

    Hey guys! Thanks for mentioning HypoHeretic in the podcast. The film was made with iClone 2.5, as we have not yet unleashed iClone 3. The feedback is spot on regarding the cameras, and I’m very eager to introduce everyone to the iC3 enhancements, especially with cameras and the new live-cam recording which is pure Machinima. We’ve got more projects in planning now and look forward to sharing with the community as production kicks off. Great to hear Ricky on the show! Keep rocking.

  11. Comment by bllius — June 13, 2008 at 10:26 pm

    Only 2000 years of acting?

    The Neanderthals probably died out because of bad acting.

  12. Comment by Ricky Grove — June 14, 2008 at 12:16 am

    I figured it was probably a plug-in issue, Phil. Thanks for trying to fix it. I should also to remember to save my longer posts. Unfortunately, it was so brilliant I forgot what I said.

    @ Johnnie. I would have liked to work with your tutor. He sounds like my kind of Theatre person. Yes, acting is lying, but looking at it that way is really best for theorists/philosophers since while you are actively working on your part/play it’s more productive to look at your acting as true to the story that is being told. The old “is it a mask or is it a face” duality has long been relegated to the scrapheap, I believe. It all depends upon the story/material you are working with. After 4 years of avant-garde drama (Mueller, Brecht, Ionesco, etc) I’ve come to find that approaching my work as a storyteller is very useful. I suppose one could attempt a method approach to “Waiting for Godot”, but I don’t think I’d like to see the result since so much of it was based on Beckett trying to keep warm during the winter and watching endless Keaton shorts in the warm Theatres. Your comments about the Lucky speech makes me wish we would have given it a shot in the cold reading section. Much to Phil’s terror.

    @Tom. So glad you like this first part of the acting series. Your question about the “invisible” style of acting is a hard one to answer in a comments section. Briefly, I’d offer the idea that the British acting tradition is much, much longer than the American one and the idea of “style” is accepted and encouraged much more so than Theatre/Film in America. British actors have developed a craft that allows them to focus solely on interpreting their parts with the larger story, so that everything seems to fit together (design, direction, etc). One only has to look at the work by Mike Leigh (Naked) to see what I mean. It’s a kind of “acting without appearing to act”. The audience is so involved in the story that they don’t have time to notice the actors acting. Derek Jacobi in “I, Claudius” comes to mind. Of course, these comments are mostly generalizations, there are many British actors/directors who admire and use the “method” and revolt against too much craft in a part. But on the whole, I’d say the British tradition of acting is much more flexible than their American counterpart.

    @bllius. Actually, it’s more like 3,000 years. Your comment about the Neanderthals is an apt one. While I was in graduate school I researched the most active play producing period of the Neandians (as we called them) and just reading their most popular play, UR TOWN, makes your realize just how badly their acting and play production must have been. No surprise that Homo Sapiens just stopped coming to see their work. I’ve got a short clip of my attempt at the Neandian acting style, if I can dig it out of the mess here. Perhaps I’ll post it.

  13. Comment by Overman — June 14, 2008 at 1:52 am

    “UR TOWN” Are you having a laugh? Is he havin’ a laugh? ;)

    Maybe we should do the Lucky speech as an extracurricular piece of bonus audio some time? Just for fun (and insanity).

  14. Comment by Russell — June 14, 2008 at 6:53 am

    Really appreciate your time, guys, to give us this. I din’t know about the background and styles and where they came from. Now I can’t wait to hear about the technicalities and what we can do to improve our acting.

  15. Comment by Kate — June 14, 2008 at 10:47 am

    I bought an MP3 player just so I could enjoy the Overcast & still get a break from the PC (I agree with Tom who can work and listen to this?) I think it has been so successful bringing Ricky in as co-host, and I loved the show as it was anyway.

  16. Comment by Tom — June 14, 2008 at 4:27 pm

    Thanks Ricky. You know your stuff.
    Acting is one of the most difficult crafts of arts I can imagine. I hope you will talk a little about stage blocking from actor point of view, work with directors, continuity, all this wonders of, for me, most mysterious part of film making.

  17. Comment by Ricky Grove — June 14, 2008 at 5:06 pm

    Thanks for your positive feedback, Kate & Russell. I’m looking forward to future shows with Phil. Once we get the tech down pat and are in-sync with each other, the length of the shows should come down a bit.

    Tom, you ask good questions, but they are not easy to answer here. I’m going to open up a thread on the forums here to answer you. We didn’t talk much about Theatre/Film blocking for live actors since we were focused on Machinimma/animation, but I’ve got some ideas you might find interesting. Check in later tonight on the Overman forums.

  18. Comment by todnyc — June 15, 2008 at 9:33 pm

    Great show fellas.

    I am loving the new format.

    You talked a bit about the sanctity of the script, I’m wondering how often you improv for a director? Without the shared rehearsal space, I’m wondering what kind of things you can do to keep it fresh for the director. While working with Ricky for our series, I found it incredibly useful to let the actor play.

  19. Comment by John Martin — June 16, 2008 at 1:00 am

    Hey guys, the movie you couldn’t think of is, ‘Reich & Roll.” Created by Hurlook. It was nominated for Best Visual Achievement in the 2006 Machinima Festival in NYC. http://youtube.com/watch?v=F5X6IvQj1t0

  20. Comment by Trace — June 16, 2008 at 6:19 am

    (You will be pleased to know that I actually listened to the show before writing this comment :D lol).

    Wow what a great show, Phil and Ricky you work so well together. I cannot act at to save my life, I found the whole section on acting thoroughly fascinating!

  21. Comment by Nahton — June 16, 2008 at 6:22 am

    Is anyone else having problems with this download? I can only get 37 minutes of the show and iTunes lists it as being 57 minutes long. I tried a direct download from the link and got 17 minutes one time and 37 a bunch of other times.

  22. Comment by Overman — June 16, 2008 at 10:11 am

    @Nahton, the episode is 53 minutes and 52 seconds long. Your download must be timing out if you’re getting less minutes than that. I’m not sure how to troubleshoot reasons for dropoffs on downloads, but you *might* try making use of a download manager like GetRight or something which can sometimes resume interrupted downloads.

    Anyone else have better/other suggestions for Nahton?

  23. Comment by Ricky Grove — June 16, 2008 at 12:49 pm

    Thanks for your comments, Todd. In the second part of the podcast, I go into more detail about improv. It all depends upon the director’s approach to the script, but I always recommend that the last take a machinima actor does is an improvised one. After recording several takes of the lines as written, the actor should have a good idea of the flow of the scene. Being able to say the lines (or invent new ones) in your own words frees up an actor who might be having trouble with the wording of particular sentences. I’ve found that this gives the director much more leeway in editing the voice performance. So, yes, improv is definitely on my list for the actor.

    And thank you Trace for listening to the show first! You know, you are the perfect person for this podcast (and the next, which is more specific on machinima acting). My goal is to get people like you interested in acting in your own films or those of your friends. So much of it is just attitude and positive thinking. Hope you find part 2 interesting.

  24. Comment by Nahton — June 16, 2008 at 6:41 pm

    Thanks Phil,

    That was strange. I am on Comcast Broadband and I never have trouble with downloads. IE would get various lengths of the Podcast and iTunes would truncate the download at the same point everytime: 37:37. The wierd thing is that I could play all the files as they were not corrupted or invalid. They would just stop playing at the various point in the broadcast. I decided to try Firefox before using a download manager and I was able to get the complete podcast.

  25. Comment by CD — June 24, 2008 at 4:29 am

    Amazing. What a gift to us Machinima filmmakers, we have Ricky inspiring us with all his knowledge and talent. Great to have him in the show and he gets the space and time to teach us some basics. I could listen to him for hours and enjoy it. Tnx Phil for presenting.

  26. Comment by Mongoose — June 30, 2008 at 4:14 am

    It’s taken me a while to catch up with this, but I’d just like to say, “nice one, Ricky!” I honestly never expected to hear the name Maria Ouspenskaya in a podcast about machinima, let alone a discussion of her contribution to the art of screen acting.

    I’ve just been reading a book by King Vidor on various aspects of film-making, and he has some interesting comments on actors, particularly the silent actors. The whole “star” system was very much based around creating an image for an actor, and then type-casting them. There was little point asking them to act against type, as they just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it. He argues that much of the craft of silet acting lay in putting a known actor on the screen, and then everyone knew what they were meant to represent, without them having to mime it. Throw in some stereotypical costumes and you have instant character.

    This is much like early machinima, where we use game characters as stereotypes to set up an instant impression in our audience. We may occasionally subvert those stereotypes for comic effect, but most of the time the audience knows who those characters are without any explanation or acting.

    And when we get to acting, the exaggerated postures and gestures of Sims-type characters really are as melodramatic as any performance by Lillian Gish or John Gilbert. Much machinima has little or no voice acting, and so it relies very much on these extreme body movements to convey emotion.

    I’m very much looking forward to the second half of this, and also to chatting with you over a beer next time I’m in LA!

  27. Comment by Mm — July 1, 2008 at 10:56 am

    I liked the comments about airplanes on the playground. It gives a whole new meaning to “playing” the part. Improvisation and emotional involvement seems so daunting until you realize that we all used to do it quite well as children without any formal training. :-)

  28. Comment by ACTORSandCREW — July 20, 2008 at 1:24 pm

    Wow - great list of resources! Thanks!

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment... or, take it to the forum (click here)

powered by wordpress 2.5 and podpress by mighty seek