1. Ensure your actor understands who they are

This sounds like common sense, but it’s important you work your way past the shallow depths of your character archetypes and really dig deep into who your characters really are. You can study any great film and find that much of the brilliance of strong story telling is exposed through great performances. Essentially the backbone of any strong story is strong performances. In order to get your actors to give strong performances they must both attach to the script and the characters in the script.

In order to create colorful, textured characters your actors must know their character’s back-story. This means they need to study (or create) their past relationships, embarrassing moments, proud moments, accomplishments, bad habits, style of dress, influences, favorite TV shows, hobbies and political views to name only a few examples.

The only way you’re going to create great characters is by bringing them to life through giving them depth… and a lot of it.

Character depth is created through study and understanding. That is why it’s important to get your characters to understand who they are. The screenwriter should have already created character biographies  for all of the main characters. Give these  character biographies to your actors and allow them to use this as a jumping off point in their quest to design and understand their character.

As a guideline you should always aim to make your character biographies no less than 5 pages but generally 10 pages or more when possible. However, it’s important to let your actors breathe their own life into the character. Give your actors the opportunity not only to study, but also help create the character they will embody in your film.

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2. Make sure you actor knows who they are speaking with

Once your character understand who they are they’ll be able to shape their behavior in social settings. For example, how would your character interact with their:

Boss?
New girlfriend?
Old girlfriend?
Mother?
Father?

Or what about interaction with strangers or interaction with a co-worker they find annoying?

Issues of power, control, love and compassion enter into all of these relationships. By ensuring your actors understand who they are speaking with you will help ensure cohesive character development. When an actor approaches a scene they should ask themselves 2 questions

- How do the other characters in the scene make them feel? (be as specific as possible with the answer to this question)
- How would they describe their scene partner(s) in one word?

3. Make sure your actor knows what their objective  is

Alfred Hitchcock once said that “Drama is life with all the boring parts cut out of it.” You must remember this when you’re creating your scenes. Don’t simply show the mundane elements of day to day life to show how great your grasp on “reality” is. You need to focus on your film’s themes and get to the point(s) your film is setting out to explore. One way to help you do this is to ensure your actors know what their goals are in a scene. Before an actor approaches any scene they should ask themselves “what do I want from my scene partner”. What are they trying to get out of this scene in particular? Just like the film as a whole will have a goal, so will your smaller individual scenes. It’s important that you identify what those smaller goals are. Are others in the scene stopping them from them getting what they want? Are they active in pursuit of their objective or are they passive? Are they successful? Do they fail?

Tying it all together

Let’s look at an example that helps tie all three of the points discussed above together. For simplicity’s sake we’re going to keep the example short and 2 dimensional. It should, nevertheless, help illustrate the point we’re trying to make.

Example: Imagine your protagonist on the phone with her mother. Her mother is inviting her over for dinner while at the same time cautiously pry into her life.

1. Know who you are:
Following these three steps above both the mother and daughter would have worked extensively on their character back-stories. Maybe the mother is a 60 year old divorced mother with one daughter. The mother is dependent on her daughter for both emotional and financial support.

Her daughter was competitive in sports growing up. She took dance lessons and her younger daughter played both basketball and co-ed soccer in high school. He graduated with Honors and when to Berkeley to get her degree in business administration.

2. Know who you’re talking to: The mother is intimidated by her daughter’s intelligence and success. Gone are the days of the mother’s authority. Yet she’s still managed to maintain her motherly concern for the well being of her only daughter and she takes the liberty to pry into her daughter’s life when she feels it’s necessary.

Even though the daughter seems like she has her life under control, her mother senses something is wrong (her suspicion is that her daughter is lonely and this, of course, concerns her). The daughter on the other hand feels abandoned by her father and doesn’t ever “want to be accountable to a man” as she puts it.

3. Know your character’s objectives: Lastly, we need to look at what the character’s objectives are. In one sentence what would you say the character’s goals are? Be specific and commit to your ideas about objectives and goals. Don’t say things like “maybe” or “perhaps”. It’s also best to get your actors to say what their objectives are.

For example the mother’s objective is to get her daughter to open up to her without upsetting or annoying her.

The daughter’s goal is to get her mom off the phone as soon as possible without being rude while avoiding the conversation about relationships.

I hope this helps you work towards strong performances with your actors.

Best of luck

1. It exposes story structure
2. It exposes the technical attributes to the film / video
3. It exposes compositional elements to the film / video

Today we have deconstructed the Bjork music video entitled “All is Full of Love”. It was directed by music video director genius Chris Cunningham. We hope you find our music video deconstruction helpful. The video can be viewed below:

Below, we’ve outlined how we’ve deconstructed the video. We’ve counted locations, scenes (i.e. edit points), we’ve identified the color palette, the length of each shot and the compositional attributes to each scene (i.e. whether the shot was a close up, medium shot or B-roll). It should be noted that some numbers needed to be estimated or rounded for simplicities sake. However, we’ve tried to make the numbers as accurate as possible. Enjoy!

Number of Shots:
There are a total of 60 edits points. The entire video is made up of 60 clips fitting within 4 minutes and 10 seconds.

Camera movement:
8 of 60 shots (roughly 13%) of shots are moving. The remainder (roughly 87% of shots are static).

Color palette:
There is a strong color palette composed of blues, whites and blacks with small highlights of oranges and reds.

Number of locations:
There is only 1 location with camera coverage from different angles

Length of each shot:
The shot length ranged from less than 1 second in length to 24 seconds. There were only 6 scenes that were over 10 seconds long (roughly 10%) and only 4 shots over 20 seconds in length (roughly 6%).

1 second in length: 20 shots (33%)
2 seconds in length: 14 shots (23%)
3 seconds in length: 8 shots (13%)
4 seconds in length: 3 shots (5%)
5 seconds in length: 4 shots (6%)
7 seconds in length: 1 shot (2%)
10 seconds in length: 6 shots (10%)
20 seconds in length: 4 shots (6%)

Composition of shots:
This music video uses great pacing and editing. The composition of shots is normal for a music video. Many interesting and artistic cutaway shots were used. We refer to these shots as “b-roll”. This includes shots of the equipment moving, the liquid hitting the floor etc. Most of the “b-roll” in this video is of the robotic equipment moving and really showcased depth, lighting, texture and movement.

8 close ups: (13%)
18 medium shots: (30%)
8 wide shots: (13%)
26 B-roll shots (mostly close ups / abstract etc): (43%)

We hope you find this exercise in  deconstruction helpful. As filmmakers it’s rewarding to watch the works of your favorite directors, DOP’s (Director of Photography) and editors to see how they design and structure their films and videos. It’s a time consuming exercise but you’ll learn a lot from the experience.

Best of luck on your future music video projects!