Mark Finbow - Talk and Workshop February 11th 2020

Mark Finbow - Talk and Workshop

In February, we had film and theatre maker Mark Finbow (The Keeper's Daughter) arrive at our college to have a talk and workshop about film making and theatre production. He informed us about his history in film making and how his career began, looking at the short films that he created (A Thousand Empty Glasses, The Black Shuck, Roadside Oddities) as well as his life in the theatre.

Throughout the time Mark was having the talk with us, he spoke about how the current financial climate will affect our creative businesses and that it was something to consider when creating our businesses. He also spoke - primarily towards any budding actors - that acting school was not a necessity but a suitable choice if they wanted to be considered for on-screen acting as well as trying to find a suitable agent. Finbow discussed with us about finding an agent was needed for the acting business as its difficult for actors to find work by themselves and that a suitable agent would not only help an actor find a good production for an actor to audition for but to also provide better opportunities in film and TV production.

During the talk, we showed Finbow our screenplay for our upcoming short film Caged In to gain feedback from a professional peer as well as consider any changes to the screenplay. The advice we primarily took away from him was the script-to-screen timing of the film, looking at how long each scene is, how each page is roughly a minute on screen and how that would affect our 58 page screenplay for our short film; so our take from that was to cut down anything that wasn't largely necessary and to make sure each shot during filming didn't extend past the time limit it should have been constrained to. 

Towards the end of the workshop, Mark had the class stand up and move to an open area in the room and show us a breathing exercise to help with on-screen acting. This, he had said, was to help with delivery of lines as well as calming the nerves to make the whole filming process of a scene much easier. It was something he and others had done on previous rehearsals and shoots for both film and theatre productions, showing that it was applicable to both arts.