Reflection of Viewpoint

During class next week and this week, we worked on the actors' viewpoints. Viewpoint helps and encourages both actors and directors but mostly actors to focus less on the psychology of their characters but more on the use of space, movement of their body. In class, we did many different viewpoints exercises and learned about several vocabulary terms you needed to understand before participating in actor viewpoint. Some of the terms we learned were Tempo, Duration, Kinesthetic Response, Spatial Awareness, Topography, Shape, Gesture, and Architecture. Tempo is how fast or slow something happening on the stage. A gesture is an expressive shape that has a beginning, middle, and an end — doing a movement with your body is considered as a gesture. A tempo can affect the action of the performer. When acting on stage, everything you do means something to the audience. Going fast, slow, or moving your body differently, tell the audience what you want them to know. Duration is how long movements last. If a person stands still in a show, it means they are going to do something, or are we waiting for something to happen. Repetition is when a recreate something they have done or seen.

We worked on some cool things in class that we had to use all the terms and techniques we learned. One of them is finding a block on the ground and moving around while you're on the block. You had to maintain a soft focus. A soft focus is not paying attention to anything around you. Sometimes we change around by doing something different. Mr. Hunton, sometimes divide as into two groups of four, tells us to do some kind of performances with all the space around us. The other group sits and observe and give feedback to the group after their performances. Both of the groups made some interesting scenes that they didn't plan for it. It came naturally to them while they were performing, which was really cool to watch. My group had some interesting show yesterday.  We were all walking around confused, and then one of the group members went up on stairs and starting clapping to get everybody's attention. This was so interesting because it came naturally to everyone to give their attention to the person clapping. We learned how to express sadness, war, and afraid using just our bodies without making a sound.

I liked we worked on soft focus because we didn't have to focus on anything or a specific thing. Sometimes you only focus on the people in your eyesight range. You focus on their motion. Soft focus helps actors to know their surroundings while performing in a show. They need to know everything that's going on. What the other actors are doing, how the stage looks like but at the same time focusing on their character. Learning about viewpoint helps us to work better as a team. Viewpoints are really important because acting is not just about your face but your body too.