Acting Face To Face

Acting Face to Face: the Actor's Guide to Understanding How Your Face Communicates Emotion for TV and Film is the first book to define the significant difference between acting for the stage and acting for the camera. That difference being how your face communicates thought, feeling and emotion. The actor who has the tools and skills to create and control how and what their face communicates is the actor most suited to work in front of the camera. Acting Face to Face is also the first book in a series about the "Language of the Face" - or how the face communicates nonverbally. The book is particularly useful for actors transitioning from stage to screen, by clearly defining the difference. On stage, you communicate with your body and voice; on camera you need to add a third means of communication - your face. When you understand this difference, you also understand why only a small percentage of actors get the majority of on-camera work. Acting Face to Face reveals the tools you'll need to level the playing field.Acting Face to Face exposes the myths and misconceptions about on-camera while addressing some of the major challenges most actors face when relying solely on their stage acting training to work in front of the camera. The book contains detailed photos and experiential exercises; it also helps you understand how you personally communicate and what's missing or misunderstood about your facial expressions, so you can take your acting to the next level.After working with thousands of actors and studying the work of leading researchers in the field of emotions for over 10 years, John Sudol - a veteran actor, director, casting director, Hollywood acting teacher and audition coach - has developed this book series, which stands to change the face of acting.Though developed specifically for actors, this book is also helpful to anyone in the communications business who would benefit from knowing how their face nonverbally speaks to others.* The second book of the Language of the Face series, Acting Face to Face 2, How to Create Genuine Emotion for the Camera is now available. Whereas the first Acting Face to Face defined the challenges of On-Camera Acting, Acting Face to Face 2, reveals a step-by-step process to overcoming those challenges.

Acting Face to Face 2: How to Create Genuine Emotion for TV and Film (AFF2) is the second book in a series about the "Language of the Face" - or how the face communicates nonverbally. Building upon the work and concepts of many leading researchers, including famed Dr. Paul Ekman, that were introduced in the first book. AFF2 expands on the science of emotions offering practical exercises guiding its readers to true Emotional Alignment. Acting Face to Face 2 is not just another book on acting theory, it's a complete course in emotion training and developing. It contains links to videos, audio as well as detailed photos, explanations, descriptions and reference sheets of each of the muscle groups associated with the seven universal emotions. AFF2 goes even deeper, with a guided method to reveal how you personally express emotions, how others perceive you and what could be interfering with your emotional life in your character work. For the first time, you are presented with how the science of emotion and the art of expression are interwoven to assist the professional actor in achieving the real and genuine emotion necessary to not only move the story along but to captivate the viewer. This is where you will have the long awaited opportunity to learn to speak the Language of the Face, John Sudol's groundbreaking set of tools for on-camera actors and business professionals alike. "And when we do it correctly it allows the viewer to read your mind" is Sudol's emphasis when he teaches and coaches his students and clients. AFF2 contains ALL and more of what you were never told about on-camera acting!

Actor Anthony James has played killers, psychopaths, and other twisted characters throughout his Hollywood career. In the summer of 1967, James made his motion picture debut as the murderer in the Academy Award-winning Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night. His role in the 1992 Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Unforgiven, culminated a unique, twenty-eight-year career. Behind his menacing and memorable face, however, is a thoughtful, gentle man, one who muses deeply on the nature of art and creativity and on the family ties that have sustained him. James's Acting My Face renders Hollywood through the eyes and experience of an established character actor. James appeared on screen with such legendary stars as Clint Eastwood, Bette Davis, Gene Hackman, and Sidney Poitier, and in such classic television shows as Gunsmoke, The Big Valley, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie's Angels, and The A-Team. Yet, it is his mother's heroic story that captures his imagination. In an odyssey which in 1940 took her and her newly wedded husband from Greece to a small southern town in America where she bore her only child, James's mother suffered the early death of her husband when James was only eight years old. In the blink of an eye, she went from grand hostess of her husband's lavish parties to hotel maid. But like the lioness she was, she fought with great ferocity and outrageous will in her relentless devotion to James's future. And so it was, that on an August morning in 1960, eighteen-year-old James and his mother took a train from South Carolina three thousand miles to Hollywood, California, to realize his dream of an acting career. They possessed only two hundred dollars, their courage, and an astonishing degree of naiveté. After his retirement in 1994, James and his mother moved to Arlington, Massachusetts, where he concentrated on his painting and poetry. His mother died in 2008 at the age of ninety-four, still a lioness protecting her beloved son. Acting My Face is an unusual memoir, one that explores the true nature of a working life in Hollywood and how aspirations and personal devotion are forged into a career.

Aspiring film and television actors will discover exercises for relaxing the face to achieve maximum expressiveness; maintaining proper eye focus in front of the camera and conveying the "beats" of a scene, even in the shortest takes. They'll also learn tested techniques for adapting to the styles of different directors; modulating voice and breath for maximum effect; preparing for the first day on the set; enduring multiple takes and on-the-set waiting; and much, much more. For any performer who intends to make a living in front of the camera, Acting for Film is the most authoritative resource!

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ACTING INDUSTRY - CONVERSATIONS WITH A VETERAN HOLLYWOOD CASTING DIRECTOR New Second Edition of this significant book on the casting process for TV and film, told with compassion, wisdom, and brutal honesty by a veteran Hollywood casting director. Casting credits include "Frasier," "Arrested Development," and former Manager of Casting at NBC. Topics not found in any other book of it's kind include: The Different Styles of Auditioning For Each Type of TV Show, Film, Commercial, Webseries What is Sex Appeal, and How To Project It? Ten Secrets of Charisma: What We Are Drawn To and How To Enhance Your Own The Transition from Theatre to On-Camera Work. The Demystification of the Audition Process. Current Trends in Casting That Have Changed the Way We Cast. Revealing interviews with Broadway & Hollywood Actors. A Special Section for Parents of Gifted Young Actors. How to get jobs in TV and Film and Keep Them. REVIEWS FROM FIRST EDITION: Blessing to Actors!, June 12, 2012 by Great, the Alexander "This is a great education coming from a Pro, well established and fresh in the business! Why CDs think and act the way they do. Etiquette in the room, Agencies worth noting, Even hotspots in LA Night Life!! She writes so that you feel like you're actually in front of her, having a conversation. I met Cathy shortly after reading her book for the first time and can testify, there is nothing fake about her! She represents everything she teaches and thus practices what she preaches. In her book she talks about loving actors who are genuinely great people inside. She is this, in the form of a casting director and educator." "There is SO much valuable information in this book for actors with all levels of experience. I keep it with my audition materials and handy for inspiration. Read this book, re-read, and use it as a reference. It will change your life, or at least your acting career for the better!"

This book is a wonderfully accessible introduction to a fresh and innovative acting technique for actors, theatre-makers and teachers to use in training and rehearsal. A mask releases the actor to be playful, and playfulness generates ideas, finds meaning, develops characterisation - and is infinitely more fun than traditional training.Rather than a dry guide to making masked theatre, it is about, for instance, playing Lady Macbeth in Red Nose, or Hamlet in the mask of The Victim, The Ogre or The Fool, or even Romeo and Juliet in grotesque half-masks... All in the name of liberating your creativity and, ultimately, improving your performance.Extensively illustrated with a rich variety of masks, this inventive and pragmatic book is full of invaluable games and exercises drawn from the author's own workshops, his experience as co-founder of both Trestle and Told by an Idiot, and his pioneering mask and clown work in many professional productions.

“A thesis of a play, unafraid of complexities and contradictions, pepped up with a light dramatic fizz. It asks whether race is skin-deep, actable or even fakeable, and it does so with huge wit and brio.” -TimeOut London “A pungent play of ideas with a big heart. Yellow Face brings to the national discussion about race a sense of humor a mile wide, an even-handed treatment and a hopeful, healing vision of a world that could be” –Variety “It’s about our country, about public image, about face,” says David Henry Hwang about his latest work, a mock documentary that puts Hwang himself center stage. An exploration of Asian identity and the ever-changing definition of what it is to be an American, Yellow Face “is by turns acidly funny, insightful and provocative” (Washington Post). The play begins with the 1990s controversy over color-blind casting for Miss Saigon before it spins into a comic fantasy, in which the character DHH pens a play in protest and then unwittingly casts a white actor as the Asian lead. Yellow Face also explores the real-life investigation of Hwang’s father, the first Asian American to own a federally chartered bank, and the espionage charges against physicist Wen Ho Lee. Adroitly combining the light touch of comedy with weighty political and emotional issues, Hwang creates a "lively and provocative cultural self-portrait [that] lets nobody off the hook” (The New York Times). David Henry Hwang is the author of the Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly, Yellow Face (OBIE Award, 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Golden Child (1997 OBIE Award), FOB (1981 OBIE Award), Family Devotions (Drama Desk nomination), and the books for musicals Aida ( co-author), Flower Drum Song (2002 Broadway revival), and Tarzan, among other works. David Henry Hwang graduated from Stanford University, attended the Yale School of Drama, and holds honorary degrees from Columbia College in Chicago and The American Conservatory Theatre. He lives in New York City with his wife, actress Kathryn Layng, and their children, Noah David and Eva Veanne.