FORMAL, PROFESSIONAL TRAINING FOR ACTORS
People dream of coming to Hollywood to become professional actors.
They never dream of how difficult it is.
Training at Los Angeles Acting School won't make it easier but it will make the serious pursuit of your dreams realistic.
There are three things you have to learn to do in your life as an actor: Act, Read Scripts, and Audition. Occaisionally you will work.
You will never stop learning more about acting, you will never stop reading scripts and you will never, ever stop looking for your next job.
TRAIN, CAMPLAIGN AND AUDITION
At Los Angeles Acting School you will learn what is demanded for success as a professional actor and you will train to meet those demands.
First, learn to act. Learn to act and you learn to audition. An audition is just another opportunity to act, to prove you can act, and to what depth.
An actor is a private contractor.
Learning to market, advertise, and promote yourself should take place in acting school and it does at Los Angeles Acting School.
HOW GOOD DO YOU WANT TO GET?
At Los Angeles Acting School you learn gradually, progressively, organically, at your own pace.
Take the time to cultivate your talent, your imagination, your instinctual responsiveness, and your emotional depth and range; the characteristics that all great actors share.
If acting were the Olympics this is how you would train (and acting is every bit as competitive as the Olympics).
If you are going to compete against world-class players then you are going to need to train seriously.
DISCOVER YOURSELF AT LAACT
The 'Beginning' training at Los Angeles Acting School is a process of self-discovery.
You'll discover what being 'connected' with your partner can produce in you emotionally. You'll discover what your imagination can produce in you emotionally. You'll discover your personal range and depth of emotion.
Being connected with your acting partner means being in constant new adjustment to the other person's behavior and emotional state (from moment to unanticipated moment).
Learning to use your imagination exclusively to meet the emotional demands of a given role is healthy and repeatable, take after take.
MEISNER FOR MOVIES
Graduates of Meisner classes will gravitate to this work immediately.
The points of difference are in making an immediate connection instead of working up to it and in working very quickly on one, and two minute scenes for film and television work.
To train for a career as a modern professional actor you have to bring the full measure of the human experience, in two minutes, for a minimum of three takes.
ACTING IS A "NO-BRAINER"
Acting is not thinking or planning out your actions and lines in advance. That's the way amateurs work. Getting actors to stop thinking (primarily about themselves) is the first hurdle in training to work professionally.
Acting is about emotion, imagination, and instincts. Cultivating those things takes training.
Turning off your thinking, analysis, and rationale when you act, takes conditioning, practice and the guidance you recieve at Los Angeles Acting School.
EVERY CLASS IS A CLASS IN AUDITIONING
From your first day of class at Los Angeles Acting School to the last you will be building the habits that serve you in every audtion and acting assignment, for life.
Start by listening and responding, you'll do that in every scene and audition. All acting takes place in imaginary situations so you have to learn how to use your imagination when you act, exclusively.
When working or in an audition the camera is running. When the camera captures your instinctual response it's magic. Permitting your instinctual responses when you act takes training.
The writer gives you the words, you provide the instinctual responsiveness that gives those words meaning, the real experience, and furthers the story.
That is what we train toward at Los Angeles Acting School.
LEARN TO "WORK THE CAMERA"
Working the camera means knowing how to look into the camera (and with which eye) and act. It means knowing how to "turn into frame" without looking like an actor hitting a mark and turning.
Working the camera means knowing how to create tension, glee, compassion, or shame, etc., with nothing more than a glance.
Working the camera means knowing how to take direction, deliver it to the camera, and to do so artistically and creatively. Using the camera to capture the human experience galvanizes audience and actor, script and screen.
At Los Angeles Acting School every class contributes toward those things.
100+ HOURS ON-CAMERA
Do a scene, look at it, see what needs fixing, do the scene another way, watch that one -- try it one more time, watch again, and see what you can learn from the final take.
Do forty or fifty scenes like that and you will begin to understand your job, and prepare yourself to do that job, in a way in which your competition cannot.
At the same time as your camera work you must read hundreds of scenes and learn how to extract the acting and meaning of a scene so that you can do that on demand.
That describes the Intermediate work at Los Angeles Acting School.
GET COMMERCIAL AT LAACT
"Commercial" is an industry term.
Being commercial means meeting a certain level of technical expectation. Lighting, cinematography, make-up, special effects, script, action, and acting, all have to meet the expectations of both the industry and the ticket buyer.
Meeting the technical expectations of a professional actor is at the root of every effort at Los Angeles Acting School.
HAVE DIPLOMA, CAN'T WORK?
The cure for college graduates who are not getting work comes in the form of a bitter pill. Additional training is required to compete for work as a professional actor.
It's heartbreaking to sit in a casting session and see hundreds of new actors (over half of whom have their degrees), and know that they will never work as long as they hang onto their arcane training.
It's not their fault, they were badly trained.
Your degree will open doors in arts organizations and civic theater.
In the motion picture industry there is only one door, "Ready."
OUR MISSION: TO ACT AND INSPIRE
From the first waking moment of every day we act, we take action toward your career goals by preparing you to meet all the demands of
the life of an actor. To inspire you we set tangible, practical goals then provide the tools and training necessary to meet those goals.
The Los Angeles Acting School Training
"Artist ... It is hard to find another word to mean simply some-
one who takes uncommon responsibility for what he does."
-- Jonathan Benthall
Like barre work for the dancer and scales for the musician, the actor at Los Angeles Acting School has a progressive exercise that establishes habits of correct work. Acting is different from real life in many respects and requires new training. You are who you are in both cases (you cannot turn yourself into someone else and the attempt to do so is unhealthy) but when you act you use more of yourself.
The way you respond when you act is more honest than real life permits, that's the fundamental difference. You have to practice that fundmental until it's second nature. Your daily classes at Los Angeles Acting School ensure that you are practicing correctly.
The fundamentals that are built into every exercise at Los Angeles Acting School and what you can expect in your discoveries are as follows:
Listen and Watch -- Discover what listening and watching can produce in you emotionally and instinctually.
Take What You See and Hear Personally -- Discover what taking things personally can produce in you emotionally and instinctually.
Eliminate the Logic -- When you eliminate the logic, analysis, and rationalization from your responses you discover your instinctual, emotional responses.
Be in Adjustment to Your Acting Partner -- Discover what adjusting to your partner's emotion and behavior, moment to unanticipated moment, can produce in you emotionally and instinctually.
Really Do What's Written For You To Do -- Discover what really doing something, even under an imaginary condition, can produce in you emotionally.
Express Yourself Emotionally -- Discover your personal emotional range and depth.
You have to listen acutely when you act. The casual, analytical way we listen in real life will not serve you when you act. By acutely watching your acting partner you'll begin to see beyond the superficial way we observe in real life. Making your acting partner more important than you gets your attention off of yourself. With your attention off of yourself you are free to respond instinctually.
You have to take things personally when you act. In real life if you took everything personally you'd be a wreck. When you act, if you don't take your acting partners' emotion and behavior personally you'll be in a wreck. Acting is not about saying lines, reading aloud is about saying lines. Acting is not thinking or talking, acting is about feeling and responding. When you take personally what you see and hear it enables your instinctual responsiveness.
When you eliminate your logical responses the only thing left is your instinctual response. Real life teaches us to hold back our instinctual responses in but when you act you have to let them out. Your honest instinctual response is the premium when you act. Real life disconnects us from the human experience by asking us to be polite, to analyze and rationalize other people's, and our own, responses. Acting is entirely instinctual and when you train this way you cannot get it wrong, every take is a print. The writer will come up with the words, the actor has to have the human experience that supports those words.
By being in a state of constant adjustment to your acting partner your instinctual response, your organic response, becomes your first response. Acting takes place between you and your partner, not in spite of them. In the movie business this is called chemistry. In the training at Los Angeles Acting School we call it being connected with your partner and it's in every moment of every practice.
The best actors know that if you really do something it makes you behave real and if you fake doing something it makes you behave fake. Using your imagination to make what you are doing personal and meaningful is what makes up the best acting. If you have to yell, "Dinner's ready!" out the back door and you fake that, everyone knows it was fake, you didn't fool anyone. They'll just have to call in a looper in post production to get a real dinner call. The actor who fakes is expensive to a production. The fake actor needs more takes and costs more to shoot around, cut around, and post. The actors at Los Angeles Acting School train so that every take is honest, real, and works.
Emotional depth and range are the actor's stock in trade. That means it's what you offer in the marketplace. Emotion is the vocabulary of the actor. Actors communicate with emotional responses. The words actors have to say ride along the top of that emotion. Your emotion and behavior support the words and make what you have to say real. Greater depth and range of emotion make you more castable.
When you practice these fundamentals, progressively, over time, you develop the practical skills you need when you act. These fundamentals will serve you for your entire life in art.
Click Here to See More Articles
Click HERE for Schedule and Map to FREE Classes
Los Angeles Acting School - The Big Picture
"Artists stretch the limits of understanding. They express ideas that are sometimes unpopular. In an atmosphere of liberty, artists and patrons are free to think the unthinkable and create the audacious...
Where there's liberty, art succeeds. In societies that are not free, art dies."
- Ronald Reagan
The training at Los Angeles Acting School is best described as a process of self-discovery. By going through this process you will make certain discoveries and learn how to apply them when you act.
Some things will make you emotional and you don't know why. Those things have to do with your individual values and character. The exercise employed at Los Angeles Acting School allows you to discover what emotionalizes you, personally, even in an imaginary situation. These discoveries allow you to be able to invent emotionally around situations that are not of your own creation.
Discovering what you genuinely, intuitively, value gives you healthy areas around which you can invent via your imagination. In the pursuit of these discoveries you exercise and strengthen your imagination. All acting is imaginary and emotional in it's nature. Imagination and emotional depth & range are the greatest assets of the professional actor. As in any training the objective at Los Angeles Acting School is to strengthen and develop your greatest assets.
For the purposes of your training we will define character as those things you stand for and those things you will not stand for. These discoveries aid you in the way you respond. It takes progressive practice to allow your instinctual responses when you act. Instinctual responsiveness is a common quality among the best actors.
The talent of the actor is humanity; the value of being emotionalized by, and instinctively responding to, some external human condition. Cultivating your talent requires a specific process in which you progressively permit yourself to be affected by the behavior and emotion of your acting partner.
Practicing those things, daily, over time, builds a way of functioning that becomes second nature when you act. This is the training at Los Angeles Acting School.
At the end of your training, if it may be said of you that you are talented, imaginative, instinctually responsive and possess great emotional depth and range, then you are ready to work. This is the direction in which we train at Los Angeles Acting School.
Practicality
The best actors are given lead roles in a project for one of two reasons; reason one, they're 'box office.' That means having your name on the marquee will bring ticket sales. Signing an actor who is 'box office' helps the producer get funding, distribution, top directors and better scripts. Actors at the beginning of their careers cannot offer ticket sales as a motivation for bringing them on board a project (unless they're already on the covers of five magazines a month).
The second reason actors may be given lead roles on a project is creativity. Having creative people on a project means more possibilities in directing. Movies are made by taking what was shot and editing those shots in a way that tells a story. More choices in the editing room affords more flexibility and possibilities in telling the story. Even actors at the beginning of their careers can offer something in the way of creativity, if that's how they trained.
At Los Angeles Acting School the approach is built on creativity. By training to work in a way that is improvisational and free of preconceptions the actors from Los Angeles Acting School build their reputations on the creativity, spontaneity, and "directability" they bring to a project.
That's the big picture.
Specific to the task of acting, here are the practicalities of the actor's job that are addressed in the training at Los Angeles Acting School.
You begin with a script. The actor's job is to take that script, words on a page merely, and translate them into a meaningful human experience. So, at Los Angeles Acting School we train in a way that turns every scene into a meaningful human experience.
The actors who train at Los Angeles Acting School are conditioned to work consistently, take after take. When you train to this degree you organically reject anything false or fake in your responsiveness. This is a practical matter of film-making. The camera catches everything and blows it up the size of a barn. If, what the camera catches is fake or predictable, the entire effort is a waste of time. Better actors make better movies.
It doesn't take very long to realize that via the approach at Los Angeles Acting School you're training to work as an artist. At the absolute bedrock foundation of our approach is the principle: Art expresses human experience. So, that's what you learn to bring to every acting assignment, the human experience. When the camera catches that, it's gold, and your value to the production is quickly realized.
Schedule and Free Classes
|
