Robin Nielsen, often referred to as the ‘Guardian of the Process’ in these parts has been intro­duc­ing peo­ple to our ‘CORE-​Applied Process’ for years. He was around through the dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment of what we teach, and con­tin­ues, week after week, class after class to intro­duce actors to the beau­ti­ful sim­plic­ity of how it all works.

In this video, Robin describes week by week how his Fun­da­men­tals class runs – it’s two weeks longer than the other classes, and here he explains why.

…from Matthew Har­ri­son – Teacher, Par­ent, and Actor.

THE INDUSTRY

Donʼt lis­ten to the ʻHYPEʼ pro­duced by ʻTMZ, US mag etc etcʼ if you stick to the art,
and craft and keep your head away from the trap­pings of the biz (red car­pets et al -
addic­tive silli­ness and hol­low shal­low empti­ness) you real­ize thatʼs not actu­ally what
this is about, and the kind of peo­ple you end up work­ing with are kind, art­ful, gen­er­ous,
mas­ters of a beau­ti­ful craft.

AUDITIONING

Remove the expec­ta­tion of book­ing and mak­ing audi­tions job inter­views to get on set
and instill the love of act­ing itself and make audi­tion­ing a joy­ful expe­ri­ence. Donʼt for­get
the point is to enjoy play­ing. So often, par­ents teens to suc­ceed and book as opposed
to mak­ing it a joy­ful and artis­tic expe­ri­ence. Those par­ents need to know that it is
indeed a busi­ness, but that to suc­ceed at this busi­ness, the act­ing must be first and
act­ing is a fun-​filled art form.

At the audi­tions them­selves, young actors need to know itʼs a col­lab­o­ra­tive expe­ri­ence -
youʼre col­lab­o­rat­ing and co-​striving and cre­at­ing a com­mu­nity with other young actors.
They ARE NOT COMPETING AGAINST OTHER ACTORS.

Act­ing is not a com­pet­i­tive sport, itʼs a col­lab­o­ra­tive art-​form.

ART

Young teen actors need to learn that act­ing is not about pre­sent­ing a char­ac­ter or
pre­tend­ing. Itʼs an art about ʻbeingʼ so the excit­ing aspect of this craft or art for teens is
that itʼs an art form of healthy self explo­ration and healthy explo­ration is exactly the
pre­scrip­tion for what every teen needs.

Many par­ents push teens to suc­ceed are (for very good rea­sons) actu­ally End up
hurt­ing them. If you take the fun approach it becomes an incred­i­bly healthy con­duit of
teen energy – mean­ing it will lead into healthy and pro­duc­tive life choices. i.e. if you do it badly you can pres­sure your kids, but if you do it right, itʼs a healthy alter­na­tive to
drugs and video games. Itʼs a dan­ger­ous line because if you push it to the busi­ness
side you can frac­ture a kid – the key is to always make it about the art, com­mu­ni­ca­tion
and self explo­ration and make believe, then it becomes one of the most pow­er­ful and
joy­ful things a young per­son can be immersed in.

BUSINESS

Par­ents tend to look at Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts and think ʻthereʼs no wayʼ theyʼre
prob­a­bly right. but for every movie star there are hun­dreds and hun­dreds of peo­ple mak­ing very good liv­ings in a thriv­ing indus­try full of work.

When you do this right itʼs a won­der­ful fun thing to do, but when you do it wrong it can
turn ugly quickly. The busi­ness is beau­ti­ful, not ugly. The peo­ple who are really
suc­ceed­ing are actu­ally kind and gen­er­ous; the sto­ries you hear about the ugli­ness sells mag­a­zines, but are actu­ally quite rare. For every ʻprob­lem actorʼ there are HUNDREDS of work­ing actors who are find­ing joy in this explo­ration of life, which is what we do.

SUMMING IT UP

Both the art and the busi­ness can be fun and ful­fill­ing, though itʼs sold some­times as a
neg­a­tive busi­ness and and art, it does not have to be that way and through dis­ci­pline to
the craft, a com­pas­sion­ate col­lab­o­ra­tive point of view, and a healthy under­stand­ing of
how the busi­ness works thereʼs no rea­son this canʼt be a beau­ti­ful beau­ti­ful thing to do
for your life.

by Jeb Beach

It’s an excit­ing time at the Actor’s Foundry. We’re approach­ing the com­ple­tion of our 5^th year. It feels like an instant and an eter­nity ago that we first set out on this jour­ney. Back then, one of our ‘we’ll know we’ve made it when’ dreams was ‘one day cast­ing direc­tors will look for Actor’s Foundry on resumes’. Rather than focus­ing on that result, we sim­ply work very hard to be sure that our actors shine, and that cast­ing knows to expect a cer­tain level of work qual­ity from Foundry actors. In our weekly meet­ing this week, we were reflect­ing on the fact that we sur­passed that goal long ago, really with­out evening notic­ing it (inter­est­ingly that’s how great act­ing feels as well – you have no idea it’s hap­pen­ing, because you’re focused on the doing, not the result). Through the years, we’ve con­tin­ued to focus on ‘what more can we do’ – and, not sur­pris­ingly, it turns out that there is ALWAYS an answer to that ques­tion, no mat­ter what the state of the indus­try is.

I think (actu­ally, i know from expe­ri­ence) that often times, actors feel intim­i­dated, frus­trated, and help­less when the indus­try isn’t pro­vid­ing them the answer to the only ques­tion that mat­ters: ‘What do I do now?’. They get lost and often times give up. This is because they are buy­ing into (and there­fore cre­at­ing) a line between indus­try and art. They envi­sion that ‘The Indus­try’ (my agent, cast­ing, pro­duc­tion, LA pro­duc­tion, Ontario Tax rebates etc etc etc) is some entity that decides their fate, and they decide on some level that they don’t belong. What these actors fail to real­ize is that the peo­ple on the ‘other side of the line’ feel the exact same dis­con­nect and feel just as frus­trated, and lost. The truth is that there is no line between indus­try and art – there is a line between the ini­ti­ated and the pas­sive. ‘The Indus­try’ is noth­ing more than a col­lec­tion of peo­ple with com­mon inter­ests fight­ing to get their projects made.

YOUR project is your act­ing career. As long as you stay ini­ti­ated, it is being made. You won’t even notice it hap­pen­ing – the result will take care of itself.

Lately, we’ve been keep­ing more and more influ­en­tial com­pany (Corinne Clark, Stu­art Aikins, Michael Nankin, Anne Wheeler, Ron Under­wood, Junie Lowry-​Johnson, Libby Gold­stien, Paul Weber and Gary Har­vey for exam­ple). More impor­tant than the fact that we’ve been doing work­shops with these peo­ple is the fact that as our col­lec­tive rela­tion­ships grow, as we con­tinue to work together, that imag­i­nary line is being erased. Why? Because it didn’t exist in the first place. It’s not the line that’s being erased, it’s our col­lec­tive per­cep­tion that the line is there that’s being dis­proved as we learn more about each other’s func­tions, chal­lenges, oppor­tu­ni­ties, and frus­tra­tions, and we uncover how we can all focus on our com­mon goals.

This con­tin­ued eras­ing of the con­cept of the line is the ongo­ing mis­sion of the Actor’s Foundry. We’ve got some big things lined up for the next lit­tle while, a lot of it is going to be a sur­prise, but suf­fice it to say, we will con­tinue to demand of our com­mu­nity what it should demand of us: Account­abil­ity (drop in on the Actor’s Deliv­er­ables some time to see that in action), Focus (you’re read­ing it – watch for more), and Col­lab­o­ra­tion (two Film and TV direc­tors, the busiest Van­cou­ver Cast­ing Direc­tor, and the Head of Cast­ing for MGM are all work­ing with us this month).

One of the most col­lab­o­ra­tive expe­ri­ences occurs when we have direc­tors in house. This month Michael Nankin (CSI, Flash For­ward, Bat­tlestar, Caprica…) is teach­ing the Foundry’s answer to a Cam­era Tech­nique class: Audi­tion to Wrap. Recently though, we also launched ‘Set Day’. There’s been a lit­tle con­fu­sion as to what the dif­fer­ence is. Sim­ply put:

Audi­tion to Wrap – is about LEARNING THE PROCESS of cast­ing to get­ting the shot from the Director’s POV. Under­stand his/​her thought process, learn about hit­ting marks, open­ing to cam­era, and other cru­cial tech­nique from a major Hol­ly­wood direc­tor. Makes sense that an actual direc­tor and not an act­ing teacher should teach this stuff, doesn’t it?

Set Day – is about GETTING THE FOOTAGE. We work with local direc­tors who are cur­rently shoot­ing the shows you are read­ing for, with mate­r­ial you have done in class. there’s no time to learn the stuff you learn in Audi­tion to Wrap – you come ready to shoot, and get the mate­ri­als. Next one is with Jason Furukawa (The Haunt­ing Hour & Mr. Young most recently) Oct 27^th

Both of these are exam­ples of how we’re (all of us, not just ‘the Foundry’ – the ‘com­mu­nity of the ini­ti­ated’ of which we are a small part) are eras­ing that line. When we do, we facil­i­tate each oth­ers suc­cess, and the ‘state of the indus­try’ becomes an after­thought to the very real career growth and motion that comes from doing what you need to do next.

Onward!

It wasn’t till I started going here that I really started get­ting call­backs. Before com­ing to the Foundry, my hin­drance was really con­nect­ing with any­thing emo­tion­ally and giv­ing that jus­tice to it. The Foundry really helped me get that ‘emo­tion tool’ in every way…because I didn’t have that. It’s really helped me all around the board.

~ Travis “Lit­tle T” Turner, Actor & Musi­cian | IMDB Pro­file

by Jeb Beach
Tw: @JebBeach

I am a fel­low actor who has been through the low­est of the lows – through the hard­est finan­cial and per­sonal times you can imag­ine. Ask any­one who knows me and knows my work; I work from true com­pas­sion and pas­sion to inspire my peers to their poten­tial. I care, and I promise that read­ing this post, fel­low com­mer­cial actor, will be a valu­able expe­ri­ence for you.

What I’m going to address is actu­ally extremely obvi­ous – every­thing is obvi­ous when you see how it all works. What I have done as a com­mer­cial actor, and what I do as a teacher to a large degree is to point out the obvi­ous (but over­looked) and make it prac­ti­cal. That’s what I expect to do with this post.

Read More…

“The sense of com­mu­nity here was just some­thing i responded to…you can’t go about this in any way alone and at the same time you can’t expect or hope that any­one will do the work for you so that being said it’s just so impor­tant to sur­round your­self with peo­ple that hold you account­able, that encour­age the dis­ci­pline, that live the dis­ci­pline and account­abil­ity them­selves. Com­mu­nity is just so important…how would I have had any of these answers and how would I have lived any of them myself so far if it hadn’t been for the Actor’s Foundry? I don’t know…”

~ Leah Gib­son, Actor | IMDB Proflie

by Jeb Beach

Recently, I had the very rare priv­i­lege of observ­ing Stu­art Aikins first hand as he ran 80 audi­tions over four days of week­end work­shops. My level of respect for this man which was already extremely high was pushed to the stratos­phere. I was hum­bled by his acu­men, inspired by his pas­sion, and I must admit, just a lit­tle bit relieved to see how much he loves the same stuff as me.

The thing about Stu­art Aikins is that he cares. A lot. He cares about find­ing, and expe­ri­enc­ing the most inter­est­ing story pos­si­ble. Stu­art has an MFA in Direct­ing, and was trained as a Dra­maturg. He has ded­i­cated 35 years to dis­sect­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing STORY. It’s at least sec­ond nature if not nature to him at this point. He knows it so well that it’s the last thing he wants to see in the audi­tion. As Stu­art says, “You all (actors) want to show me what you’ve done, and you’ve all done the same thing. It’s bor­ing.” Of course it is. It’s pretty hard to amaze a mas­ter magi­cian. But that’s your job. “I want some­thing dif­fer­ent that I’m not going to see from every­one that’s still per­fectly log­i­cal.” Despite the fact that he knows the story, he wants to have no idea where you’re going.

Actors will often mis­in­ter­pret how to meet this chal­lenge. In an effort to be orig­i­nal, or inter­est­ing, they’ll impose a ‘bold choice’ which most often is an arbi­trary dec­o­ra­tion that has lit­tle to noth­ing to do with the story and devolves into a self indul­gent attempt at show­cas­ing the act­ing itself – that audi­tion becomes ABOUT the ‘choice’, and will not succeed.

So then, how do you sur­prise a magi­cian who knows every twist and turn in the story?

Read More…