Actors Workshop

We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces! (Sunset Boulevard)

I’m involved in various types of workshops on a semi-regular basis, so when Halohid put out the call to organise more workshops, I was ready to leap in and be a part of it. This time the plan was to hold workshops specifically for actors! Halohid had a theory – actors already had all the tools to be amazing models, but didn’t have actual modelling experience, so they would surely excel if they took their acting talents and focused their powers for the good of modelling!!

From the original invitation:

Following the success of the Bushfire Fundraising workshops, Jeff Paine (of Photograjph.com, this site!) and Halohid are running another workshop, this time for actors in working with photographers. It will be with a semi-studio set up and we will have either a stylist or makeup artist present. The workshop will cover everything from posing for fashion to doing bizarre avant garde experiments and will be very much aimed at utilising the training and methodology of actors. We will shoot throughout the day and you will own all the images, which you can use for whatever you wish.

We aren’t after people who necessarily look like models in magazines: we are after actors!! You all have the perfect tools to be amazing in front a camera – the ability to tell stories with your bodies and faces and this is what we find most exciting.

How did it go? In summary – WOW!! Actors not only make great models, but they have an amazing awareness of their own bodies, so all the little things like hand/finger placement, head/eye position and curves vs angles all get automatically taken care of!! Actors also understand basic lighting concepts, so you can tell them which is the key light and what the image needs to look like, and they just make it happen!!

As a photographer, one of the challenges I know we all face is communicating the image we have in our heads to the model, so that they can help us convert the concept into reality! Every shoot I’ve had with actors has been lower stress, more productive, with higher shot keep rates and much more creative energy throughout the session. Actors make excellent collaborators, as they have a lot of artistic experience to contribute to a shoot. There is still a place for commercial models – pure fashion/beauty/glamour shoots require a different type of model mind-set, it is a skill and talent that requires the right kind of person to get the required outcome.

If you are a photographer and have some broad concepts in mind that could use some input from an artistic or creative direction, I highly recommend you consider actors as a model option. If you are in Melbourne and want to be put in contact with actors we know make great collaborative models, drop me a note here via the contact page!!

Thanks to Halohid and everyone who participated across the day, I had a great time and the feedback we received indicates everyone who came along got something positive out of it!