How To Create A Knock Out Performance Using 'Sense Memory'

Building sense memory: Smell

Building sense memory: Touch and feel

Do You Want To Be A Good Actor And Give Conceivable Performance To Stun Audience?

Situation In A Scene

• Your script and the scene demands you are in a jungle near Manali Himachal, confined in a hut. It's snowing outside. The cold is terrible. There is no food or water and you are hungry. You have to act now and show how do you feel in extreme cold without food or water.
•  However, the fact is you are shooting in a studio in Mumbai where the temperature is 38 degree Celsius. Very very hot indeed!

How would you bring about feeling extremely cold and hungry?

A. The question is how to create memories? Which instruments to use?
The answer is in recollecting and using all your 5 senses

Touch, Hear, See, Listen and Taste

B. In the above situation, if you have gone to a cold place in your life and experienced cold with all your senses and can recollect, you can do the scene. Because, in spite of studio being hot and humid, you will be able to detach and start feeling cold on your skin, the sound of wind and snow, fog, and snow outside seen from the window and mouth becoming dry

C. This is called re-calling "Sense Memory"

However, to recall the different life situations, you must have them in your memory and this is only possible when you remember them using your senses.

Therefore, keep remembering your activities using your 5 senses and practice them regularly by just recollecting them
For example

• You should remember your blue shirt: It's texture, it's smell, buttons and so on. So, when you get a role of a blind girl or a boy, you pick up just by touching it.
• Look at a tea cup. Feel it: color, smoothness, design, base, handle and it's circumference. Now you are sipping a hot tea. Remember the feeling of  when hot tea touches your lips and tongue. Because in an actual shoot, there may not be any tea but just water and your expressions should be as if you are sipping hot tea.

The Reality

Now, what happens when you don't have any experience of a particular situation?
Then you have use magic
 "IF"

The Power Of Imagination

IF I'm a police officer, IF I'm a beggar,  IF I have consumed 5 large whiskey, IF I'm feeling sexually aroused..... how will I feel and behave? Start visualizing that situation or a person or an item

It's absolutely necessary for an actor to develop THE POWER OF IMAGINATION

AND YOU WILL DO IT

Updated Post

Join Us And Learn  Acting Techniques