Our acting school provides a real-world approach to acting in Los Angeles that gives you the professional skills you need to effectively compete to get film and television acting work. At the heart of all creative endeavors, including great acting, is taking the risk to follow your instincts. Our acting classes teach you how to perform a scene by expressing your instinctive emotional responses to everything that's going in the scene. At our acting school, you learn through doing, not intellectualizing. You find your best performance choices through expressing your instinctive emotional responses during rehearsal. You're supposed to express the most personal, private feelings you have while you're doing a scene. This is the process you're supposed to go through to develop the best performance you're capable of doing. Letting go and expressing everything we're feeling requires courage and maturity. Because many of us have defense mechanisms, ways we control our feelings and ways we control how other people see us. It is a challenge to let go. But it's an exciting challenge!
Here are two examples of the results from two of our acting students:
I just worked on a film called "The Mechanic". I had ten pages of copy, and it was a difficult part in many ways, emotionaly and spiritually. The audition was on a Wednesday, and we started shooting on Friday. So, I had no choice but to do what we do in class - jump in. Things were hitting me in all kinds of unexpected ways and I went with it. And it was so much fun. I was playing an agorophibic, which might have had me distraught and doing all this research (if I had the time), but I had no choice but to trust my insticts and it was everything we've been doing in class and I loved it. Thanks for everything." Louis Iacoviello
Work has been good lately, nice guest stars on Close to Home, Studio 60, Standoff, and a probable recurring on E.R. My agent keeps commenting on how excellent my booking percentage is and I must say, my latest key to rocking an audition is doing the excercise that we do in class in the audition! Don't look down at the page untill your cue has landed and affected you and don't start your line till you're looking at the reader. Period. It takes a lot of bravery for me to not look down and try to protect the next moment, but when I do it, the room falls still every time because I begin to have an experience in front of them instead of just reading the scene. Best, Scott Lawrence (Scott Lawrence has done 3 series regulars.)
For more student comments click here.
CLASS SIZE AND STRUCTURE There are a lot of classes in Los Angeles. To train with acting instructors at our level you may only work once a month or less because there are 50 or 100 students in each class at other schools, and you seldom get videotaped. Unlike those classes, at our studio there's a maximum of only 12 people in each class and you work twice every single class. Also, while some of the schools in L.A. advertise that they're taught by well-known actors, in reality those working actors generally only have the time to actually teach the classes a few times a year.
ON-CAMERA CLASSES All the on-camera classes are 2-camera video classes where you're videotaped on a split screen so that when you watch your tape you can see yourself and your partner. That's very important because one of the things critical to all acting, and especially film acting, is that you see what's going on with your partner emotionally and you respond emotionally to what you see. And you respond emotionally to all the little emotional changes in your partner. So when you can see both yourself and your partner on your tape, you can see very quickly when you're doing that and when you're not. All camera classes use a cold-reading format. You arrive at class ten minutes early. Sometimes, you will read your scene ahead of time to yourself before you get up and do it. We want you to read it only once so that you don't formulate a lot of concepts and ideas about how to do the scene ahead of time. We just want you to have some sense of what it's about and the facts of the situation without preplanning any emotions. Then, when it's your turn to do the scene, you sit in a chair opposite your partner and you and your partner are both filmed in a tight close-up on a split screen while you perform the scene. Each scene partner has all the work recorded on his or her individual videotape that you get to take home with you. After you've finished doing the scene, the instructor may ask you to do something else with it to get you to go beyond what you already did. Your entire critique is also recorded on tape. This is very helpful because it's one thing for a teacher to tell you what they saw, but when you see what we're talking about for yourself, it gets very clear, very quickly. Next, you choose 2 pages from the scene you did the first half of class and do those 2 pages memorized for the second half of class. And then we go through the same process again, getting you to go beyond what you did if needed. And then you take your tape home with you each week between classes to study it.
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