Rehearsing & Script Analysis

So I've been prepping a micro-budget short film this past month with my friends that shoots in a couple days. This project is a horror-comedy, and my colleagues are honestly just doing this to get better at our craft. So naturally, I want to come out of this experience feeling better as a director.

Today we had rehearsal with one of our actors, and while I think he understood my direction, personally I felt that I took too long and searched for too many words to describe what I wanted. Basically, I don't have good articulation (yet).

Did any of you had this problem starting out? What can you do to improve it? Should I rethink directing as a career goal if I can't speak well enough?

What should you do to prep a rehearsal before you even meet with the actors?

Thanks.
 
Trust yourself to articulate what you want. It doesn't matter about saying it concisely, it matters about saying it clearly.

Don't trust your actors to understand. Keep testing and pushing their understanding of what you're trying to get across. You should be asking as many questions as you are answering. Actors will often seem like they're 'getting it' even if they're not, so make sure that you get them to explain things back to you. This will also help you to condense your thoughts.

With a short, you're going to have plenty of time to go through things. Take the time to do a table read, to answer questions, to do some characterisation games if that helps. And then start blocking and rehearsing slowly, taking the time again to solicit questions and to ask questions of your actors. Unless you're shooting Birdman, the point of rehearsals into getting everything running like clockwork, but to explore the characters and story, and develop a level of comfort with the script. Get your actors to try things lots of different ways, with different styles, movements, delivery, emotions...etc and you'll start to feel what works and what doesn't – and it'll save you having to articulate that feeling!
 
Honestly, I'll second the above advice:

Take an acting class and read a few of the books that actors read. You will discover so much.

Also, make sure you are not getting tunnel vision by simply chasing what you think the "perfect performance" will be. Be open, and if you have time, get some different things on different takes. You will love that you have some choice in the editing room. It is so much better than having 17 takes of basically the same thing because you are trying to get that one thing perfect.
 
Awesome. I actually have been reading that book. Thanks guys.

I have no opinion on the book. I've never read it. But I would like to know if the book is helping. I'm just personally curious. Thanks.

Rehearsing will take you a long way, in my opinion.

I did take an acting class. And if I'm going to be honest, I learned absolutely jack from that class about actors. But I've been known to be particularly dense. The only thing I learned is that actors are fleeced on a regular basis by people who call themselves experts.

I'll stop now. Before I get into trouble.
 
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Honestly, I'll second the above advice ... Be open, and if you have time, get some different things on different takes. You will love that you have some choice in the editing room.

These two statements are to a certain extent mutually exclusive, baring in mind that the advice above yours was to "work all this out in preproduction and not on the set"! The danger with different things on different takes is that in the editing room one can often be forced into the take with the fewest/least severe technical issues, rather than the take with the best performance and therefore this approach might actually reduce choice in the editing room. It's generally best, as Alcove stated, to sort this all out in pre-production. I'm not saying that one should never experiment with different performances on set but getting full coverage and safety takes for each different performance can get extremely time consuming/expensive, especially if an actor is essentially improvising different performances on the fly and can't accurately reproduce them.

G
 
Just to expand on what APE said, in my on-set experiences you stick with the plan.

IF - and note that I made it a very big if - you have the extra time and budget and motivation and creativity after you have completed everything on your shot list for that set-up, THEN you can go beyond what was planned.

As a dialog editor I LOVE consistent performances. Trying to cut together a great dialog track from scattered approaches and excessive improv is a real chore, and yields only "I can live with it" to fair to decent dialog tracks most of the time.
 
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