From Guesswork to Scaffolding

Once an actor passes the audition process and is hired for a screen role, she has a great deal of preparatory homework to do before she arrives on set. This work differs from the audition preparations because she will now have to navigate the performance affordances of narrative options across the entire screenplay. This means that the audition’s frantic preparation and narrative guesswork expands to uncovering and stockpiling a long progression of referenceable bodymind associations and appresentations along the situational character’s intentional throughline, as part of constructing the character’s cognitive scaffolding.

This extensive and overarching preparation is important because many film and television productions are filmed out of narrative sequence, which can mean that an actor may have to perform her most demanding scenes before shooting or even rehearsing the crucial scenes that set up these narrative climaxes. Actor/producer Lauren MacKinlay justifies this type of shooting schedule as a matter of industrial practicality:

It is often more efficient for a whole film production to complicate the actor’s work rather than extend a shooting schedule to allow for creative exploration on set. These disruptive shooting schedules place a premium on the actor’s advance preparations so that the actor can establish some level of character creativity despite performing their scenes out of narrative order.

The disjointed narrative progression throughout the shooting process can pose a great challenge to actors who have not established a firm intrasubjective connection with their character, both on the scene-by-scene level and across the screenplay as a unified narrative progression. Although most of the pre-shoot homework is focused on the intrasubjective work that the actor can control on her own, she can also anticipate crucial intersubjective and performative work that will be of great help once shooting begins.