more ed

Here's wiki's definition of Michael Chehov's psychological gesture: "In this technique, the actor physicalizes a character’s need or internal dynamic in the form of an external gesture. He then mutes the outward gesture and incorporates it internally, allowing the physical memory to inform the performance on an unconscious level."

More stuff from Ed's newsletter

The gesture precedes the word. JoeDimaggio's old coffee commercials are funny because he would look into the camera and say, "Let me tell you what I think." -- and then he would tap his forehead to illustrate where the thinking was taking place. Actually, the tapping would come just slightly prior to, and overlapping, the line.

A good comedy moment, if played with lowered stakes, ought to work on a dramatic level. On one level, a perpetually hungry coyote isn't funny at all, right? It makes you want to leave him a dish of Alpo or something. But when the animator ups the stakes and renders him so perpetually hungry that he becomes obsessive for the bird, we in the audience enter the realm of comedy! But, if on his way out the town gates, he were to pass another guy coming into town that has also killed his own father and married his own mother and had put out his own eyes -- it would become comedy! One Oedipus is tragic. Two Oedipus's are funny. The reason is that we laugh when we cannot tolerate any more pain. Chaplin slipped on the same banana peel and was embarrassed by it! The audience empathizes with the embarrassment. The humor is not in the slip; it is in the reaction. We humans love to see ourselves imitated. It is fundamental to the way we learn how to survive, and it has a name: mimesis. We take a particular pleasure in seeing ourselves reflected on stage or on the screen, and that is another key to comedy. Who among us has not slipped on the banana peel at one time or another? We all are embarrassed, and that is the point of empathy. And so we laugh.

adrenaline moments", i.e. moments the characters will remember when they turn eighty and look back on their lives. When I teach that you can energize a character by converting want to need, I am thinking of increased urgency. Regardless of the action, your character will execute it with more thrust if it is motivated by need rather than want. If you turn up the heat under the emotion, you are going to get a more enthusiastic action. Stage actors learn that it is in fact impossible to act more energetically because that would amount to playing a "result" - and yet "more energy!" is one of the most common directions they hear. The trick to playing more energetically is to simply "care more about the subject". If you care more about the subject, you will automatically act more energetically.

You can't have a space in between the beads in a necklace. If you do, you won't have a necklace.

DEFINITION: AN ADRENALINE MOMENT IS A MOMENT THAT THE CHARACTER WILL REMEMBER WHEN HE OR SHE TURNS EIGHTY-FIVE AND LOOKS BACK ON HIS LIFE. IT IS, IN SHORT, A MOMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE.I am convinced that effective story telling necessarily includes at least one adrenaline moment, and it may include many. An adrenaline moment doesn't have to be a big earth-shaking deal. The world will not change because of the flypaper. but Pluto will never forget his encounter with the flypaper! An adrenaline moment is a factor of character, not of story, it happens to a character not to a story, and not to an audience member, the audience memeber empathizes with the character having the adrenaline moment.

watch how Gollum (Serkis) uses status transactions all the time, to negotiate for what he wants or needs. He will frequently toss his power center into the ground in a counterfeit subservient fashion.

"Thinking tends to lead to conclusions; emotion tends to lead to action." The first thing to understand about audiences is that they empathize with an on-screen character's emotion, not with the thinking. When your character feels something (an automatic value response), he tends to do something about it, and that is what draws the audience in emotionally. Paul Ekman says "It is hard not to behave emotionally when the stakes are high." and "The emotional signals given off by another person ...triggers our own emotional response, and that in turn colors our interpretation of what the person is saying, what we think are that person's motives, attitudes and intentions."

emotion leads to action in pursuit of an objective while overcoming an obstacle

A hero is a regular person who must overcome a huge obstacle to achieve a good of some kind.

A defining moment is usually a small, almost undetectable and private
thing for a character. It goes by in less than a heart beat. It is a
factor of a squint, the refocusing of a pupil, the bat of an eyelash
... But if you, the animator and story teller, can isolate it even
for a fraction of a second, there is a good chance the extra effort
will pay dividends triple-fold. A merely excellent scene can often be rendered profound by the addition of just a few frames. Yhe defining moment of that scene is not for the coyote, but for us in the audience to enjoy.

Audiences only empathize with emotion. In any negotiation, there is a way to win and a way to lose.

basic acting lesson: " A scene is a negotiation.

Your character's behavior is - or should be - influenced by the atmosphere in which he lives. Every scene, every location and every event has an atmosphere of its own. When considering atmosphere, remember that your character has five senses. Michael Chekhov ("On the Technique of Acting" essential reading.