Improve Your Commercial Technique

By Rob Adler | Posted June 25, 2015, 3 p.m. Kevin McCorkle has appeared in more than 300 commercials from Gatorade and Taco Bell to Blue Cross and Lipitor. He also has worked in big-budget films, indie films, had recurring roles on television series, and has been in dozens of plays, short films, and Web series.

Having long escaped a starving artist mentality, McCorkle makes money so that he can make art, and commercials are his means. “Commercials give me the freedom of time and money, allowing me to pursue every aspect of an acting career,” he says.

While commercial work can be a great way to pay the bills, you’ll need more than beginner-level acting skills.

“The pressure, urgency, and need to tell a story in less than 30 seconds, combined with creating an emotional connection to a service, product or idea often with a script that is full of carefully crafted legal and expositional wording can be daunting,” McCorkle adds.

Commercials come in many forms, but they often feature characters with a problem, and the product provides a solution. The moment where the solution is offered, characters typically jump emotions, from misery to joy or discomfort to relief.

To practice making the product the commercial’s hero and the required emotional switches seamless, we use Viola Spolin’s “Jump Emotion” game. Here’s how it works:

Write down a character, location, and activity (a dad on a baseball field playing catch with his son or a son playing Xbox with his buddies in the basement, for example). Now pick two emotional categories, like fear and bravery or frustration and joy. Do the activity as the character in the location, while physicalizing the first emotion. Using the scenario above for example, you might tap the controller buttons nervously, thumb the joystick fearfully, then pull the trigger buttons in terror.

As you continue the activity, stay focused on finding a moment to instantaneously switch emotions. Try not to pre-plan when, but the moment you sense it, jump completely to the new emotion. You can heighten the game by writing emotions, who’s, what’s and where’s, on slips of paper and randomly drawing one from each category as a way to exercise the same acting muscle in different circumstances.

Play it a few times and you’ll notice that you go on a real journey as you play in the first emotional category, exploring and heightening the physicality until the switch comes.

This preparation tool isn’t reserved for just big national commercials and dialogue heavy spots though. Even auditions for parts requiring the smallest of gestures can benefit using this technique.

“While there are spots where you just open a door or wave to someone, if you look at the performances carefully, you will see years of improv training behind what looks like a simple gesture,” says McCorkle, who knows that it takes more than good luck to defy the odds.

“Musicians train, athletes train, dancers train, singers train. Actors need to train, too,” he adds. “They can’t just show up and expect the magic to happen. More commercials are improv-heavy, telling the story without words, so one of the tools in the commercial actor’s toolbox is confidence in their improv ability.”

Dustin Hoffman famously noted that acting is very difficult to practice by yourself. This game is a simple, fun way to strengthen a vital muscle so you’ll be in good shape for commercial (and all) auditions when they give you the given circumstances—with or without a script.

Now get to the gym.

Use Your Whole Self!

By Rob Adler | Posted April 22, 2015, 3 p.m. Everyone who performs at a high level understands there are critical differences between training and performing. Boxers don’t jog because they’ll jog in a fight. They do it because it builds stamina. Ballet dancers stretch so their bodies move fluidly and land safely on the day. Many actors spend 80 percent of class time sitting in the audience watching other actors and another 10 percent listening to a teacher talk and still expect themselves to perform at a high level on set or in auditions. An actor’s instrument is their whole self—mind, body, and intuition—and they should train accordingly.

The 21st century has brought with it an epidemic of incomplete concentration—short attention spans that mock mental rigor as passé. The ability to focus one’s inner energy, memorize, occlude distractions, and explore for details are primary skills for an actor. There are many ways to go about sharpening the mind, all of which begin with putting down your “smart” phone. Read a book, go to a museum, or study a foreign language. All of these will help strengthen the mental muscle.

Research suggests playing games might be the fastest way for actors to enhance concentration, memory, and intellectual acuity all at once. Sociologist Neva Boyd noted, “Playing a game is psychologically different in degree but not in kind from dramatic acting. The ability to create a situation imaginatively and to play a role in it is a tremendous experience…We observe that this psychological freedom creates a condition in which strain and conflict are dissolved and potentialities are released in the spontaneous effort to meet the demands of the situation.” Or as Shaun White put it “Skateboarding is training, but I don’t think of it as training. It’s fun.”

Here’s a news flash: You don’t need a six pack to be a movie star. An actor’s skill is measured in part by their talent to communicate physically, non-verbally, the life of a character in a scene. Transformation is enabled by the ability to hold the body in ways that are true to the character. So much of Eddie Redmayne’s Academy Award-winning performance in “The Theory of Everything,” for example, was communicated by adjusting his physical life. Watch Kevin Spacey’s Oscar-winning work in “American Beauty” for a subtler example. Hidden beneath the detailed physicality of the award winners is a secret tool of great actors: Being in your body helps you get out of your head.

When the mind is focused and the body engaged, keen and quick insights leap from within us and creativity is liberated. It is these stunningly intuitive discoveries that allow actors to express the most beautiful truths: a pensive glance out the window, a pep talk in the mirror, even a preemptive laser-gun shot under the table. Although intuition is often viewed as mystical, using a system of games can make accessing it a trained skill.

Viola Spolin’s Singing Dialogue is part of the sequence of games I use in my scene study classes. The focus is singing with your whole body, from the tips of your toes to the back of your knees to the top of your head. Aside from heightening vocal action, it playfully coaxes the actor to further explore what they are saying and how it affects their partner. Amidst the joy of play, the mind is exercised, physicality is heightened, and new discoveries are made.

Training is not acting. Training is preparation for the job. Good training should engage every fiber of your being. Now sing with your feet.

3 Differences Between Acting on Stage and Screen

By Rob Adler | Posted March 26, 2015, 3 p.m. When the cast of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” first saw the film, many of them were shocked. In post-production, Director John Hughes and Editor Paul Hirsch decided to tell a very different story than what was filmed in production. The original Ferris was a darker character. Ferris was a cigarette smoker and they filmed many scenes with him smoking. They cut all of that out in post. In the original draft, Ferris even delivered a monologue about smoking pot from a submarine and in production they ran out of time before they could film the scene with Cameron and Ferris at a strip club. No wonder the cast was so surprised.

In film and on TV, actors don’t create their own performances, editors and directors do. That’s one major difference between stage and screen acting. In the rehearsal process for the theater, it is not uncommon for an actor who is in control of their performance to sense something has gone “wrong,” stop, go back, and fix it to get it “right.” On a film set that’s someone else’s job. Actors don’t call cut.

Well-prepared actors may find themselves filming a scene when they forget a line or something happens that changes the direction of how they thought the scene should go. This could send them into their head and stop the take. But the director might have liked what they were seeing or had a vision for how the footage could be used elsewhere in the storytelling. In transitioning from stage to screen, actors need to practice letting go of control. This doesn’t mean letting go of preparation. Far from it. Rather, when they arrive on set, actors must have the ability to trust the other artists they are working with as collaborators, and play along. Being fully prepared and simultaneously able to stay relaxed and in the moment is a vital skill for film and television acting.

Preparation for the lens is different than the stage. In film, there often is no rehearsal and sometimes you don’t meet the rest of the cast until shortly before filming. Furthermore, because of camera angles or scheduling, your scene partner might not even be there to respond to, but you are still responsible for making each take look as though it is alive in the moment and for the first time. Great scripted acting looks improvised (and great improvisation looks scripted).

Camera actors must have the ability to think actively. So much is communicated physically and vocally on the stage that could be communicated with a closeup in a film. One tool I use when coaching to help actors achieve this is to choose a specific point of concentration to follow during the take. There are many that we teach at the studio, but one we frequently use comes from Viola Spolin’s Preoccupation games: While doing an activity, be totally preoccupied with an off-screen event and follow your flights of thought from it, using your inner energy to springboard from one thought to the next, irrespective of the scene’s text. Think of how rich Cameron and Ferris are because we see Ferris fantasizing about driving the Ferrari and Cameron obsessing about getting caught:

Cameron My father spent three years restoring this car. It is his love, it is his passion.

Ferris It is his fault he didn’t lock the garage.

Michael Caine offered great advice: “Be like a duck—calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.” Of course, planning your thoughts could lead to the most controlled, unspontaneous performances (talk about being in your head). In life, thoughts happen and life is improvised, so actors must find a way to remain in in the frame and stay moving on the inside. When you get stuck in your head remember what Ferris said, “You’re not dying, you just can’t think of anything good to do.”

On Living Truthfully in Imaginary Circumstances

By Rob Adler | Posted Feb. 23, 2015, 10 a.m. When my nephew was 5, I caught him running on top of the furniture in my parent’s living room, with my jacket over his shoulders. When he saw me, he suddenly stopped.

Caught in the act, I thought. Then, with arms extended, belly down, he leapt from the sofa in my direction. I caught him. Still in my arms, he was now reaching and twisting. Without saying a word, he showed me he was a superhero and I was to fly him around the room, which I gladly did. When he “landed” (I put him down), he instantly cast his beloved uncle into the role of super-villain. Humoring him, I played my part, donning a deeper voice and a wider stance to support my mischievous cackle. As I began chasing him, the fear in his breath was real. He sought cover from the downpour of sofa cushions as though it were hailing fire. He “killed” me twice before I tucked him in that night.

We were playing, living truthfully in imaginary circumstances, and communicating them. We were acting.

Children play. Adults censor themselves. Our mind very quickly tells us no—we can’t or we shouldn’t. As a result, actors tend to think too much, get in their heads and get in their own way. And heady, analytical approaches to actor training can reinforce the limiting mind. We need a viable way to get out of our heads.

Using games to study acting can liberate us from the “constraints” of adulthood. Just like acting, games have agreed upon (imaginary) rules (circumstances) in which the player (actor) must spontaneously (in the moment) improvise how (actions) to survive the onslaught of sofa cushions, get the basketball in the hoop or Juliet off the balcony (objective). Games are childlike, but can be more than kid’s stuff.

Here’s an analogy: I studied acting in Chicago when Michael Jordan was still playing basketball. Imagine if, while dribbling down court, three seconds left on the clock, approaching the foul line, surrounded by all five members of the opposing team, he stopped, analyzed the situation and thought to himself, What should I do now? The clock would’ve run out and the world might never know him as “Air” Jordan. Or, what if he called a time out and consulted with his coach. Do you think Phil Jackson would’ve thought to say, “Why don’t you just fly to the hoop?” Instead of thinking through it, Jordan played the game and, in the safe crisis of the moment, his body did something new. He discovered he was capable of more than anything anyone could dream up and he changed the game forever. You can’t think that kind of creativity. Play can do the same thing for your acting.

When we play, time seems to slow down, concentration sharpens, and an underlying joy carries the action. There’s also a full spectrum of real emotion. When was the last time you experienced that at an audition?

By using play as an acting tool, we can discover ways of expressing things that are not limited by our adult thinking. You may find yourself laughing at an inopportune moment, or glaring at someone with heat, or effortlessly flying around in front of a green screen. Games are the essence of acting. The pioneer of improvisational acting, Viola Spolin, who developed a way of training actors through play and games, said, “When the rational mind is shut off, we have the possibility of intuition.”

Play liberates intuition. It is an altered, maybe even higher state that has some very valuable properties for actors. Great acting, like play, is attractive to watch, reduces self-consciousness and leaves people with the desire for more. Play is filled with primal excitement, anticipation, and passion. These are all qualities of the best acting. The play’s the thing.

Lights, Camera, Relationship!

3 Tips for Developing Character Relationships

By Rob Adler | Posted Dec. 3, 2014, 10 a.m.

Sometimes actors show up to set, are introduced to their co-star and have to hop into bed together like they have been lovers for years. In the fast-paced world of film and television, especially during auditions, chemistry reads and network tests, there often isn’t time for actors to create detailed relationships the way they’ve been trained. Many actors wind up substituting pre-planned emotions/feelings for relationship or otherwise try and cram a backstory into their head, which, in the allotted time, only keeps them in their head.

In my last article I suggested playing a game to help actors get out of their head in scripted scenes for the camera. Several people emailed asking me to elaborate.

Instead of spending your time stuck in your head with relationship backstory or focusing on feelings (which change, e.g., sometimes I love my brother, sometimes I hate him, but he’s always my brother), consider the ways people demonstrate relationship more consistently. Try these tips to stay in the present and truthfully communicate detailed relationships regardless of how you feel in the moment.

1. Name the relationship. To avoid the trap of pre-planning feelings, label the relationship so you can be free to explore the way the characters relate to one another in a truthful context. If you’re playing Hamlet and Gertrude, the given relationship is mother and son. As artists, we can also choose to paint with different colors. As actors in relationships, we may want to use a metaphor. Laurence Olivier explored and heightened Shakespeare’s text without changing a word by famously communicating that Gertrude and Hamlet were lovers. Or in “American Hustle,” Christian Bale and Jennifer Lawrence are husband and wife, but there are scenes where he treats her like his child.

2. Physicalize it. If the scene were dubbed into a foreign language, how would the audience see the relationship? This is important for getting your choices out of your head and into the frame. What can you do to truthfully reveal the relationship? How can you show the relationship so that it’s unmistakable, even if it were dubbed in Mandarin? Even a detailed backstory is useless if it remains in your head. One way to explore this is to make physical contact with your scene partner. So much is revealed through touch. You can increase the challenge by finding ways of making contact without your hands; even if it’s out of frame, it will inform the relationship. Touching toes under the table, for example, can spark a sparkle in the eyes. Watch Richard Button and Elizabeth Taylor in Mike Nichols film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” on mute. You’ll see every nuance of their relationship.

3. Seek tension. In a recent class, two actors were playing sisters in a power struggle. Tension built as they got closer to each other. They were nose-to-nose at the climax. Although the older sister won the beat verbally, the actor stepped back, so it appeared visually like she lost. In truth, the actor felt the physical discomfort of tension and released the tension by stepping away.

Another common relationship trap is when actors view their scene partner as an opponent on the other side of a boxing ring or chessboard. While this might encourage the fighting spirit, it also may overlook the very important collaborative role of relating with your partner while in conflict.

To explore working together to create tension, play Viola Spolin’s Tug-of-War game. Put an invisible “space” rope between you and your partner. The rope illustrates the high level of connection it takes to relate in conflict. Use as much energy as you would to pull a real rope to your side. If both players pull, but don’t collaborate, the space rope will stretch or slacken and there is no conflict, just sound and fury signifying nothing. If instead, both players are unified and seek to pull the rope (physicalize) while simultaneously maintaining tension in the rope together, a magical thing happens: A previously invisible relationship fills the space between them.

Today’s TV and film auditions are moving at hyper-speed and require quick, clear action to land the job. And when you’re on set, you’re often working with strangers. The next time you need to show the camera complex, detailed, truthful relationships fast, keep these tips in mind. Together, with a partner, you can make something greater than just a winner and a loser. Remember, it takes two to tango.

The 1 Brain Exercise You Need to Create Spontaneity

By Rob Adler | Posted Nov. 3, 2014, 10 a.m. Brains! Ever get caught in your head in the middle of a scene and want to eat your own brain for getting in the way? Or find yourself wracking your brain for inspiration to magically appear? Or pleading with your brain to stop hijacking your performance?

Speaking of brains, I think we’d all agree that playing a zombie is fairly easy. Single focus: eat brains. Why can’t other roles be that simple? They can, actually. Simple. Not easy mind you (pun intended). Like everything else in nature, the mind abhors a vacuum. In the absence of a clear, simple, focused point of concentration, the mind fills itself with whatever is available. Too often that’s self-consciousness, insecurity, and other things that hinder high-level performance. The beauty of a clear focus is it quiets the mind and frees the body to act spontaneously and live truthfully in the scene.

In 1963, Viola Spolin, the mother of improvisation released her seminal book, “Improvisation for the Theater,” and expressed an interest in demystifying the intuitive—refuting the idea that the magical force of intuition was unattainable except by chance or endowed only on a select, gifted few. But for many actors today, intuition remains a phantom.

Because spontaneity and humor are inextricably linked, the comedy world seized Spolin’s games. Her techniques became the engine for developing comedic sketch and the foundation for improv comedy. However, the true power of improvisation for many actors has remained largely untapped. Now neuroscience and psychology are finally verifying things that the great teachers have known for years, and Viola Spolin first wrote about more than 50 years ago.

In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman describes the mind as a pair of systems. System 2 is reserved for slightly more laborious thinking, like adding 289 + 7853. You can do it, but you have to do it. In acting terms, System 2 typically shows up when you have difficulty memorizing a line or when and your acting teacher tells you that acting is just “living truthfully in imaginary circumstances,” but you are working in front of a green screen that’s supposed to be a chariot race. The mind often rejects imaginary circumstances the way the body can reject an artificial organ.

But the mind’s other system is effortless, insightful, and instantaneous. It is the part of the mind that just knows certain things, like if someone is sad, what color blueberries are, or who your acting coach is. This is the intuitive mind. It’s there for you when, with the camera rolling, you’re fully immersed, playing, and you make some discovery or reveal some new insight and after cut is called, everybody cheers. You were “in the moment” and all the answers “just came to you” intuitively. But how did that happen and how can you make it happen more frequently?

Most of us have had the experience of moving difficult tasks from the laborious System 2 to the spontaneous System 1, like when you first learned to ride a bike. Or drive a car. Or shave.

It was initially in the effortful System 2, then, over time, it moved to the effortless, intuitive system.

In the fast paced world of film and television, we often don’t have the luxury of time to create a role. But total transformation is possible instantaneously if you have a technique for it. So how do you speed up the process? The trick to quickly and directly accessing your intuition and turning the effortful into the intuitive is crisis. That’s right—crisis. When your bike was about to tip over and you suddenly pedaled faster to stay vertical that first time, your intuition saved you, but only because you were thrust into crisis: steady the bike or skin a knee.

That crisis moment is a very creative time. We open up, new choices are available to us, and we do things that were impossible only a moment before. When faced with a crisis, the mind doesn’t have time to think through the problem. It just clings to the most present thought and intuition is released to solve the problem. Intuition comes in the now. If you were about to tip over and felt gravity make its move, but in the distance (or in your mind) you heard your parent’s voice coaching you to “Keep pedaling,” your intuition kicked in and you did something you could never do before—suddenly and completely.

It’s important to understand that the difference between handling a crisis with panic or with grace isfocus. At the audition, you may feel you’re in a crisis when you look over the lens at Francine Maisler, but unless you have that voice steadying your concentration, all you’ll likely get is panic. Conversely, after waiting on set all day for your scene, having fully prepared, there may be no crisis present whatsoever and your performance may be headed for Zombieland. So, how do you find a crisis on set without causing a crisis for others? Play a game. Why? Games create a safe crisis and thrust you into the intuitive.

The next time the camera’s rolling, try to make fresh physical contact with your scene partner for every line of dialogue. Or discover as many objects on set that you can find. Or try and communicate the relationship to your scene partner as if they didn’t know who they were. In addition to adding more fun, one can easily integrate games as part of a scripted scene.

While brains provide zombies with a fine entrée and a simple motivation, they don’t always help actors achieve their desired results. By using a singular focus and tricking the brain into a safe crisis, it frees up the body to tap into its intuition and unlocks spontaneity.

Keep pedaling!

Rob Adler is an on-set coach, actor, director, teacher, and founder of AdlerImprov Studio in Hollywood. For more information, check out Adler’s full bio!