Highly Recommended

This book is written as advice to screen actors from a film and television director. Much of the book is focused on what the actor can do to make his or her performance work best onscreen. This is fascinating information for anyone interested in visual communication; it is particularly useful for those who work with moving images of people.

When Tucker talks about how an actor should relate to the camera, he is in effect describing how the camera is used to record different types of scenes. He thus reveals how a director wants a shot to be staged, which can be broken down to character positions, size of action and vocal delivery, and lensing and action of the camera.

This book revealed to me the extent to which people cheat placement and eye contact. For example, consider a two-shot with a woman in profile on the right side of the screen, looking left, and a man is presumably next to her: he occupies the top-center. They are both looking at a book in her hands. He is turned towards the camera, though he ought to both be in profile: this way we see his reactions. She is therefore in front of him physically, on the set - when he looks at her, he sees her ear. So he directs his gaze at her eyes - as if he could see them through her head. And we accept this as perfectly natural, although it is highly contrived.

This has implications for 3D animators. When building a 3D scene, one often works from multiple points of view, in order to make sure that everything is "in the right place." We check that sight lines between characters are unobstructed, and that characters sitting side-by-side on a bench really are in that position. But one of the lessons of this book is that such situations are not normally the ones that are shot; the entire geometry of placement and action is designed not for objective accuracy, but to match a conventional alteration of reality that allows for better storytelling. Here, increasing "accuracy" does not necessarily increase the power of communication; it can actually work against it.