At The moment of creation : an exploration of how directors know and assess screen performance
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2012
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This Doctor of Creative Arts project consists of a major creative work, Gingerbread
Men, a 29 minute film, an additional creative work attached as an appendix, 10 Days
to Die, an 87 minute feature film, a set of filmed research interviews presented on
DVD, Research Interviews, approximately 70 minutes and this exegesis At the
Moment of Creation.
This doctoral project is an enquiry into how directors read, know and assess the
actors’ performance on a film set while the camera is rolling. The major creative
work, Gingerbread Men, serves as an experimental tool to explore the manner in
which a film’s visual style impacts on the nature of the actors’ performance and in
particular as a method of understanding where agency lies for the creation of the
characters in that film. Research prior to the production of Gingerbread Men lead to
the selection of the long-take, single shot per scene filming style as a means of
forcing myself, as the director, to only be able to make decisions regarding the
actors’ performance on set at the moment they were being created and not in the
editing suite, as is typical in modern filmmaking. 10 Days to Die then experiments
with the clash between these two filming styles in a feature film context, however
this is only lightly touched on in the exegesis.
The exegesis explores particular aspects of film directing to better understand how
the role of the director impacts upon the methods used to know and assess the actors’
performance. In looking at the role of the director on a film set, how directors
perceive themselves as an audience for the actors’ performance, what directors and
actors consider are indicators of an unsatisfactory performance and how recent
discoveries in cognitive science and neuroscience further our understanding of
people’s ability to distinguish facial emotional expressions and the manner in which
directors know and assess the actors’ performance are investigated and discussed.
The exegesis concludes that knowing and assessing the actors’ performance is a
complex higher level function that relies heavily upon tacit knowledge, embodied
knowledge, acute perception, empathetic projection and emotional experience in
distinguishing authentic complex human behaviour.
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