Workshop
How will this workshop transform my performance on camera?
Do you find auditions terrifying? Are you not getting the bookings from your self tapes? Do you wonder why, when you make it onto set, what you thought was your best performance doesn’t make the cut?
As a Director and Actor I have sat through hundreds of hours of live auditions, self tapes, and worked on many film sets in front of and behind the camera. Everything from big budget movies, to low budget independent films, TV Films, short films, TV soap opera, Serial TV, music ads and commercials and Theatre.
It was in the dim light of the edit suite when I discovered the essence of what works in a performance: whatever budget or genre. It makes no difference. It all comes down to the same thing. ‘Meaningful’ pixels on the screen. These pixels have to engage us, the audience by revealing more story and reflecting humanity: holding ‘a mirror up to nature’ as Shakespeare put it.
In the edit your performance is a bare as it gets. Files of data. Scrolled through at speed, searching for ‘that human moment’. Proving either useful for telling the story and revealing character, or not.
If it has no intrinsic value, for whatever reason – it ends up ‘on the floor’ – chewed up and spat out into the deleted edit bin in the sky!
Having witnessed this with my own eyes during countless edits, I started to develop this method which I sincerely believes addresses this missing link in performance, and have been honing it over the last 30 years. I have taught it at leading London drama schools – RADA, Guildhall, LAMDA.
It equips and allows you the Actor to bring depth, humanity and watchability into your performance, making it far less likely you’ll be overlooked by the Execs employing you, or end up on the cutting room floor.
It will give you a comfortable sense of relaxation on set when performing – a knowing that ‘you’ve got this’: an inbuilt confidence and ease, allowing you to step out of your own anxious performance thinking, and bask in a boundless pool of free flowing creativity.
“I was absolutely staggered to see the difference in my performance. I feel as if I’ve been given a key to unlock a magic door”.
To my mind we can and do overcomplicate the acting process – and in doing so, get bogged down in the intellectual, over analysing thinking mind, instead of tapping our huge inner potential of free flowing imagination. We innocently cover up with technique after technique the natural ability of humans to play. Watch kids. Are they worried about what their hands are doing, or whether they delivered their dialogue correctly, with the right inner intention, or appropriate ‘inner animal’ etc? All that other prep we do is fab, but I’ve so often seen it get in the way. Screen acting should be fun!
This course is about getting back to the building blocks of all creativity, the stem cells, the well from which it all emanates: our own innate imagination. It will enable you consciously to tap into this resource and allow you to create a performance that is free, hugely watchable, intriguing and undeniably human.
It not only gives you the benefit of learning a technique in 3 hours that I have developed over 30 years, but it also gives me the chance to meet you – who I can then consider when casting future productions.
I am confident that this workshop will transform your performances for self-tapes, auditions and when employed on set.
I look forward to meeting you.
Upcoming Workshops – 17th January, 2022. 3pm (UK)
https://jameslarkinmasterclassjan22.eventbrite.co.uk