At its best, actor training responds to the needs of the current profession but also helps shapes its future. Central to this is the need to keep abreast with the convergence of live and digital. Many training institutions have shifted their focus, creating a balance between theatre and digital/recorded mediums, which includes working in motion capture (MoCap) and virtual production environments.
Mia Bird is the founder and creative director of ICTheatre (part of BIMM University), one of the UK's newest and most advanced educational institutions for actor and performer training. ICTheatre places a focus on the integration of live and digital throughout its programmes, rather than seeing it as an added bolt-on towards the end of the training calendar. ‘Students start to work in front of the camera from week one,’ she explains. The organisation has just installed a MoCap suite to allow students the opportunity to train in this digital environment, ‘engaging with a range of vocal and physical styles’. They worked intensively with MoCap company Target 3D to build an in-house 10-week curriculum for their second-year students to support what their graduates need to sustain a career in the performing arts.
A changing climate
Training environments will always be playing catch-up with different technologies and software, so building students’ confidence in these environments is key. Teaching the principles rather than focusing on the software is the priority for ICTheatre and other similar organisations. Staffordshire University has recently installed a virtual production suite to complement our MoCap studio, where actors, animators, film makers and games artists will be working together in interdisciplinary collaboration.
As industry continues to explore what the future of virtual production could be, it is more vital than ever to train students to respond openly and organically in these ever-changing environments with ease and confidence. Bird wants students to be empowered to embrace the full range of possibilities for employment within the performing arts industry.
The digital generation
Phillip Edgerley, head of acting at ICTheatre, is keen to impress that ‘technology doesn't intimidate’ this generation, so it's not a huge leap to imagine that students can easily build their skills in these digital environments. Voice, body, imagination and textual analysis skills underpin all the actor-training at ICTheatre, where skills can be applied and adapted into any performance or production environment. ‘We took the old training model of working in theatre, TV, film or corporate environments and expanded this into everything a contemporary graduate would need, with a focus on graduate attributes’, explains Edgerley. ‘All of our movement and acting for camera work leads into MoCap’.
The ethos relies on the fact that the ICTheatre students can sustain a career, and that they are as ‘open and adaptable’ for a career in acting and performing as possible. Students also can opt to specialise in an ‘Acting for Video Games’ module in their third year, building on the techniques they have learnt in previous years. ICTheatre has exciting plans to work towards full-scale productions bringing together live and digital elements for students to make work in these hybrid environments.
A merging of live and digital worlds
Sarah Perry is the founder of Shapes in Motion, a movement and performance coach and a leading exponent of MoCap training. Like Edgerley, she believes it is vital for students to gain confidence in these learning environments. Sometimes, she says, ‘it's not about always needing a studio’, as students can build up movement skills and principles that can be applied in a MoCap environment further down the line. She believes ‘you can't do MoCap without your theatre routes… you still need to create your character and research the script. This all then feeds into motion capture performance, so it's all about balance’. As a coach herself, she refers to Rudolf Laban and Constantin Stanislavski as the two key practitioners whose practices can be applied to this work.
Our live and digital worlds are more enmeshed than ever before, but theatre and the arts remained stubbornly analogue for some time. This is no longer the case. Jonty Claypole, the BBC's previous director of arts, stated in an article for The Stage in September 2020 that the ‘gap between media and the arts has closed significantly’, particularly in relation to the live and the recorded mediums. Educational bodies are now leading the way in MoCap and other forms of digital culture, with arts organisations like ICTheatre at the forefront of these technological developments.