Acting for the Camera: Revised Edition Book

This is a book I have been assigned for my newest class (with the original name: Acting for the Camera). Hope it is brilliant. I'm going to review it piecemeal as I read the five parts. I'm just going to pull out the parts that were interesting to me, not necessarily the meat of the work. Hopefully recapping will also help me to remember and integrate the tips into my own work. So I guess this is less like a review and more like homework notes.

Part 1: Acting
*In film, your "quality", or the impression people get of you, can be more important than your technique.
*It is improtant to have a "free instrument" so that emotions and reactions to stimuli come to you quickly and naturally. Part of having a free and energetic instrument is treating your body well.
*80% of acting is listening. Listening is perhaps more accurately defined as "sensing" and means using all senses to understand your scene partner.
*"Bring to the role those parts of yourself that are congruent with what is written". I have always been confused by the tension between using myself and creating a character. This definition helps me a lot in terms of suggesting that I should always use genuine responses but I edit out responses that might be genuine for me but not for the character. Our teacher also suggested that, when acting, the characters reaction are the same as our own reactions but that they are triggered by different things than we would be triggered by. Or they may take more or less time to be triggered by something than we personally would.
*The most transformative chapter for me in the first part was on focus and concentaration. Focus is at the heart of listening and the author reccomends practing concentrating on a single object for as long as possible to develop the skill. His hint for remeaining focused is to study the object. (This can be applied in a scene by choosing the person or object that your characteer is focusing on.) This intense concentration has the aded benefit of relaxing you becaue there is no excess energy spent worrying. Brilliant. I spent a long time that night examining the floral pattern on our quilt which turned out to be surprisingly complex. I guess this is what meditation is about. At any rate, this execercise seems to me to be the rememdy for my most profound struggles as an actor; if I focus, I will relax, if I am relaxed the emotions will come naturally. I should probably re-read this chapeter every day. As it stands I will commit to focusing at least on time a day.
*If your face is too animated, even if that is natural for you it can be unnatural on film.
*"Learn how to free your tear ducts so that they are available to you as an actor" Barr recommends seeing and acting coach or therapist if this is a problem. However, he also says that trying to cry often gets in the way of crying and that it is better to try to suppress the desire to cry since that is what we do in real life. This attempt apparently will allow a free instrument to cry. I was so glad for this discussion because not being able to cry is way at the top of my list of acting fears.

Part 2: Working on the Role
*Prepare well before stepping on set so that you don't have to think about the character but will just respond as the character naturally.
*You will probably have very little time to get into character before the cameras start to roll. The quickest way to get to the right emotional level is to spend 30-60 seconds moving or working with a prop in the appropriate rhythm for the upcoming scene.
*Highlight the stimulus for your line in the other character's line instead of your own lines.
*Barr recommends an interesting exercise for learning lines as well as finding similarities and differences between you and the character. His instructions call for you to work with a scene partner but I think it would work just as well alone. Read their line, and decide how it makes you feel, how you think they intend it, and respond. You then compare your response to what your actual line is. If it is the same, your response is how the character would respond. If it is different but the impetus behind the line is accurate you just have to make a minor adjustment in how you express the feeling as the character. If it completely off base, you have found a way the character differs from you and you need to replace our instinctual response with one more appropriate to the character.