SUMMER ACTING FOR FILM CAMPS:
Acting for the Camera Intensives

• New York City Campus: Age Groups 13-16 & 16-19
• Los Angeles Campus: Age Groups 13-16 & 16-18
• Vermont Campus: Age Groups 13-16 & 16-18
• High School Actors: Earn College Credit for our Three-Week Intensives

OVERVIEW
SOCAPA’s Acting for Film Program is closely tied to our Advanced and Introductory Filmmaking Programs. When the filmmaking students go out to make their assigned films each week, they utilize the talent in the Acting for Film Program. This provides our acting students with immediate on-camera experience and allows them to walk away from the program with a DVD portfolio of films in which they have performed. Our filmmaking students are shooting on both 16mm film and state-of-the-art digital cameras with sync-sound and are cutting on nonlinear digital systems so your reel will look slick and professional.

CURRICULUM
Classes are designed to prepare our students for being on camera as quickly as possible. Many acting schools will spend weeks, months, even years on theater games and exercises before they give their students actual scenes to work on. At SOCAPA, we instead choose to prepare you immediately for the films you will be performing in during the program and the auditions you will be going on once you graduate. Casting directors will give you scenes at auditions and filmmakers will give you scenes in their films; our focus, then, is on scene preparation. This is not to say that we will not teach you exercises and tools to draw upon, but rather that these exercises and tools will always be taught within the context of preparing for a scene.

TECHNIQUE
SOCAPA embraces two major closely-related Acting Techniques which we use to help our students “live truthfully” under imaginary circumstances: the “Meisner” technique, which involves fully immersing oneself in the moment of a character and experiencing all sensations as the character would, and the “Method” technique, in which one uses their own experiences as springboards into the emotional life of the character.

MONOLOGUES & HEADSHOTS:
An actor without a monologue is like a photographer without a camera or a dancer without feet. At auditions, casting directors will often ask actors to perform a monologue of the actor’s choosing. A prepared actor will have an arsenal to choose from. With this in mind, SOCAPA has each acting student select a monologue from our library of favorites. Monologues are memorized and rehearsed during the final week and are performed live on the last day of the program. In addition, acting students at our New York City campus are scheduled a block of time in the studio to have their headshots done by the Photography Program (see Photography Program for more info).

-Sample Headshots taken by SOCAPA Photography Students [ see more headshots ]

 

THREE-WEEK CULMINATION SCENE (aka "Your Reel"):
In addition to performing in the many student films, each three-week SOCAPA acting student will be directed by one of their instructors in a scene of their choosing. This culmination scene will be professionally filmed and edited by a SOCAPA directing instructor and will be shown at the Showcase Festival at the end of the three-week program. The culmination scenes will be uploaded to each actor’s portfolio webpage along with the many student films. In this way, each acting student will leave the program with an online portfolio featuring their headshot, a short bio and a showcase of all their summer work.