On Camera Acting

Stage acting and screen acting look similar from the outside but are built on different assumptions: the camera magnifies subtlety, kills theatrical scale, and shoots everything out of order, so this course retrains you to perform for a lens and a crew rather than a live audience. You'll spend most of the semester rotating through director/actor teams on a sequence of taped scenes — monologues in varied frames, two-person dialogues, an intimate scene, a police drama, a sitcom, and a final horror or chase piece — followed by playback sessions where you learn to give and receive non-judgmental feedback. It sits naturally after foundational acting and scene-study work, and is the bridge for performers who want to move into film and TV, where understanding framing, blocking, and DP collaboration matters as much as the inner life of the character.