F#@k The Specs Week 3

Directors: Samantha Paris, Brian Sommer

Length: 12-hour four-week workshop

Class Notes: This course includes homework assignments.  Students must have home recording capabilities.

The specs on a piece of voice-over copy have long stirred epic debates on how much or how little to pay attention to them. Are the specs a barren wasteland that say, “friendly and conversational”? On the other end of the spectrum, are the specs verbose (longer than the actual script even) and conflicting, making it easy to get caught up in them, getting in the way of a truly connected (translation: bookable) performance? So, what do you do? Every time you look at a new script the FIRST THING you should be asking yourself BEFORE you look at the specs is “what are the words in the script telling me?” In this workshop, you’ll get the answer to that all-important question. Samantha and Brian will take you through various spec-centric exercises with commercial and characters scripts respectively including reading the script without benefit of the specs to see if you naturally SEE the specs in the script. Find out what happens if you let the words on the page tell you what to do instead of relying on the specs. Take your script analysis skills to the highest level by making strong acting choices that result in a SPEC-tacular performance. See what we did there?