A Life-coaching Approach to Screen Acting

About the Book

Combining life-coaching and screen-acting tools and techniques in one accessible handbook, this guide empowers actors to overcome personal inhibitions and approach their work, characters and careers with the assuredness to produce powerful, real and believable acting on screen.

Structured to build confidence and understanding of yourself before you take on the role of someone else, this book offers the tools and techniques to give you the necessary conviction and self-assurance to perform uninhibited. Dresner then examines essential elements of a screen actor’s craft, such as emotions, imagination, nerves, focus, listening, improvisation and line-learning.

Published in partnership with The Actor’s Centre, the book includes online videos of coaching sessions with professional actors and is ideal for readers and teachers looking to replicate the method in their own training.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

PART ONE WHAT IS HOLDING YOU BACK? 5

1 Get Out of Your Own Way 7

2 Values and Fulfi lment 11
Identify your values 13
Fulfi lment 14
The wheel of life 15

3 Saboteurs and Limiting Beliefs 16
Saboteur words and phrases 17
Limiting beliefs 19
A note on your inner critic 20
Use of language 21
Fear 23
Getting help from your captain 23

4 The Impostor Syndrome 25
What can you do about it? 27
Some quotes from people you may respect 28

5 Perfectionism 30

PART TWO MOVING FORWARDS 35
6 Confi dence, Success, Perspective and Reframing 37
Confi dence 37
Success 39
Perspective 41
Reframing 42

7 Learning Something New 44
The four stages of learning and creating new habits 44
Believe you can develop 45
What are habits and how do they form? 46
Neuroplasticity 46
The theory of marginal gains 48

8 Trust and Creativity 50
Trust list 52

PART THREE AS YOU ARE MOVING TOWARDS SOMEONE ELSE 53

9 Screen Experience 55
10 Focus and Concentration 58
Milestones and anchors 60
11 Emotions 63
Pushing and indicating – trying too hard 67
Affective memory 67

12 Imagination 70

13 Listening 74

14 Nerves and Nervousness 77

15 Lines and Learning Them 80
The potential limitations of actioning 84
Playing stakes and consequences 85
Some ways people learn lines – a non-exhaustive list 86

16 Adjusting Your Vocal Levels 88
Volume 88
Speed 90

17 Size Matters 92
Less is more 92

PART FOUR TOOLS TO LIVE SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE 97

18 The Inner Actor and Inner Character 99

19 Truth: It All Starts With You (and a Little About Method Acting) 105
Method acting 107

20 The Senses and Sense Memory 111
A sense of place 113

21 Thinking and the Inner Monologue 119
Thinking and the eyes 120
A kaleidoscope of thought 120
A third entity 122
Inner monologue 123

22 Improvise and Personalize 128

23 Meet Your Character 135

24 Mind, Body and Soul (Thought,
Physiology and Emotion) 136
The pressure cooker 137
Emotion through physical manipulation 138
Keep it simmering 141

25 Wrapping It Up 142

Appendices 143

References 155

List of Video and Audio Links 157

Index 158

About the Author :
Daniel Dresner is a leading UK acting coach. He regularly teaches at the Actors Centre and drama schools as well as coaching privately. His clients range from actors starting out to Hollywood stars. His approach has been developed over more than 20 years as an actor, director, teacher and life coach in London, New York and Tokyo. He studied the Method at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York and life coaching with the Coaches Training Institute.

Review :
Daniel Dresner sets out to offer the student of film acting valuable support both as a fledgling artist and as a person in his book A Life-Coaching Approach to Screen Acting. I can report that he succeeds … A Life-Coaching Approach to Screen Acting is an excellent guide to truly important fundamental life skills. Life skills such as identifying your values, understanding what fulfillment means to you, how to avoid Imposter Syndrome, how to avoid perfectionism, are grouped with ‘knowing yourself,’ which most film people would call ‘knowing your type’ in the first part … These subjects are treated carefully and well, and then backed up with plenty of exercises. They are also reinforced with links to brief, pithy learning videos created with The Actors Centre. You can read about the work, do the exercise yourself, and watch Daniel Dresner work with students on the same material. This all adds up to an excellent resource for developing confidence in oneself and in the work. It also makes it easy to see why Daniel Dresner is considered a top private acting coach and teacher. "Know Thyself” proclaims the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and “Be Thyself” responds Oscar Wilde, many centuries later. It is with masterful insight that Daniel Dresner connects these simple but profound directives and brilliantly draws his revelatory parallel with well-being and the craft of screen acting. This original and timely book introduces the benefits of life-coaching to the stressful and uncertain lives of many actors, especially those who perform on a screen. This book not only transformed my approach to acting, it transformed my approach to life. Full of refreshing techniques that allowed me to simply get out of my own way and truly be the very best I can be. Written in a way that is extremely easy to take in and apply, a powerful tool that I will be using on every project I’m involved with.