Direct Like the Masters

Directing talent for video isn't a craft with a readily explainable set of procedures. Instead, it's an art: a mysterious product of talent and experience that's as fundamentally unexplainable as psychiatry, salesmanship or politics.

What you can't teach through formal instruction, you can often transmit through apprenticeship to a master artist--a modern master like Ron Howard or Steven Spielberg or a classic giant like Charlie Chaplin or Alfred Hitchcock. Before seeing how great directors handled their actors, we need to understand why actors need handling in the first place. While you probably do not have the good fortune of working with professional talent, you assuredly point your camcorder in the direction of human beings from time to time. Motivating on-camera subjects is a skill that is central to making video.

Actors: Who Needs 'em?
You do, unless you churn out programs on redwood trees, locusts or bighorn sheep. Drama, corporate, educational, event, family--almost all videos, are about people, and those people are actors, whether they're playing fictional characters or "just being themselves," (which is often di…

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Jim Stinson | April 1999

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Direct Like the Masters

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