It was really interesting in class watching the other class’s exercises, as Gina observed the ones we saw had been more experimental with their narratives, and how this strange occurrence had happened from what seems to be such a arbitrary separation of students.

After watching the sources of the exercise robin made a point about their pacing, this was my epiphany moment this week as it became so obvious that previously almost every exercise and group had rushed through their lines leaving very little moments for a simple pause of contemplation for the characters. I think this could have been mainly from two reasons, apart from the fact that we didn’t seem to greatly consider it when thinking of our direction. Firstly, time constraints, I think perhaps one of the first things to go out the window at our level was the pacing once time constraints became involved. It became easy to see how many of us had shot our lines out or quickly cut away when we were were under the pressure of the clock. This brings me to my second point that many of us probably have little to no acting experience and so even as actors we were not considering pacing as an aspect of our performance, although I’m not sure if these techniques are actually taught to actors or if it is more the result of directors input.

By making this point before the exercise I think we saw immediate results in todays task as pretty much everyone when directing in my group took much more consideration for the pacing of the action and performance. I think it worked well with this task as well because we didn’t have to worry about getting the next shot so much which let us take our time with our singular shot.

Finally why not talk about faces. I reconsidered the value of an still shot featuring a face with little to no action of someone today, my first thought was maybe not so effective if we don’t have the right acting training, however at second thought I remembered the Kuleshov effect. This made me reconsider that in some cases it doesn’t matter about acting as long as we can get good coverage we can utilise the Kuleshov effect to draw associations for our viewer, minimum acting skills required.