A PICTURE PAINTS A THOUSAND WORDS

Using 2 dimensions to enrich your work

I was on location, wearing my headset and listening to the actors perform on set. The work was really great, but there were a couple of lines that just did not sit right in my ears. They sounded like lines, not like conversation. How could I quickly help the actor to own the text, own the lines and own the performance so that it sounded simple and authentic?

"I gave her a gift. A gun. It was an ivory-handled magnum revolver, cost me 75 bucks."

Facepalm — this is a tricky line to say, especially in another accent! You have to get your mouth around a whole bunch of sounds. Easy to get distracted by the challenge of getting it to sound right.

But ultimately, it is not about getting it right. It is about getting it real.

The real problem here was that there was no image behind the line, so the emotionality, the history of the gun did not resonate. If you are a reader of these Substack articles you will recognise the phrase "internal landscape". Well, there was no internal landscape here in …