"Actors are usually pretty good at holding their breath, but there are things they can't control like their heart beating," Vukovic says. You don't want to be the corpse whose stomach is clearly moving up and down." "Then you'll need to take a deep breath just before the director says 'Action' and hold it for the duration of the shot until you hear 'Cut.' This way, you'll avoid being seen breathing during the take. "I think the key to believably playing dead on screen is, first of all, to really let your yourself go ― release all tension and energy, and go completely limp," Harris instructs. One person with experience as a deceased character is filmmaker and actor Matthan Harris ( The Inflicted, For We Are Many, the forthcoming Baphomet). The Method approach would not work here ― you can't actually die for your role ― so you need a good strategy. Many are tranquil, and there are times that an extended take is needed and an actor must channel their inner corpse. If you're blowing a character's entire head to smithereens then sometimes the most effective camera angle is the one that best captures the details of the f***ing mess flying at the screen." Again, it depends on how you are making them dead. "Sometimes you can use a real actor and other times you have to use a dummy. "It depends on the level of dead we're talking about," notes Jovanka Vukovic, director of Riot Girls and "The Box" segment of XX. Some tricks can be used to work around these issues, such as specific camera angles, camera movement to show the dead body first before moving onto something else or even trying slow motion to get more out of the take. There are aspects of living human behavior that are hard to control, like the twitching of eyelids or the pulsating of an artery. When the rotating shot finally returns to the victim, he blatantly blinks. A deceased man, eyes open, sits against a wall as the camera does a full 360-degree pan around the flesh eater's lair. A great example is a circular pan shot in the entertaining 1972 film Raw Meat (starring Donald Pleasence with an appearance by Christopher Lee) about a cannibal roaming below the London Underground. Let's face it: Plenty of scenes have been marred by a supposedly deceased person… breathing… or twitching.Ī good dead performance is something audiences take for granted, but a dicey one can pull them out of the realism of the scene. The trick is to make sure that the real actors look dead, especially during long takes. At other times, prosthetic bodies can be used in place of real people, depending upon how ravaged their body is. Naturally, actors whose characters die have to go limp and convince us they are lifeless. Horror and sci-fi films, not to mention myriad episodes of the Law & Order franchise, are often littered with the corpses of victims of slasher stalkers, epic battles, and other unfortunate circumstances. In this lesson, we're talking about how to play dead - convincingly. Welcome to Geek School! This SYFY WIRE series provides practical lessons in writing, producing, and selling the nerdy projects of your dreams, with advice from some of the top creators and professionals in the business.
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