After giving some thought about what makes actors good or bad, I decided that all the theory in the world was fine but it wouldn't necessarily tell me what normal audience members who simply digest films on a regular basis thought of what made acting good. The logical way then for me to get this kind of feedback was to conduct a survey. I did this through Survey Monkey's free service which was extremely useful and well presented, the only issue was that it affords you only 5 questions unless you pay the premium price, which I decided against. Having only five questions I had to maximise the value of these questions and try to extract the most information I could so here are the questions and why I asked them.
The first question was to establish the demographic of the answers and to see what degree people engage with film. For example if I hadn't asked this question then I may be getting replies from people who don't watch films, thus meaning that there would be little to no point in me listening to their opinions on acting. It would be like me giving an opinion on The olympic sport of hurling, I know what it is and I've seen it maybe once but I couldn't give you any kind of confident thesis or opinion on it (well I could but that's more about my character than the point I'm trying to make). The second question is to establish whether or not people hold acting in such a high regard and its importance and also its craft, if someone has not been blown away, it means they are either not watching good acting or they do not regard it as highly as perhaps they should.
The next question is to allow me to research further into what has been said and look for myself the kind of performances that people are considering to be the best, this also means that I can diversify my own views of 'good' acting, as it is true that people will have their own perceptions and from this question I can see a diversity of answers and see a kind of spectrum of acting people consider good. This then links to the next question because from here I can see why people like these performances so much and I can then synthesise these answers with my own opinions and get a broader understanding of what good acting looks like for a wider audience
The final question was to really nail down what it was that made a performance so good, admittedly this was based upon some of the factors that I look for in a good performance and I will say that I did wish to add an optional box to add your own suggestions about important acting factors but the software wouldn't allow me to unfortunately. That being said, I can still use this question to see what people believe to be the best qualities and factors in a performance.
So that is the survey I have put out there for people to answer, I will look at the results after it has had time for people to respond and I will no doubt do a post analysing said results.
ps. if you would like to take the survey here is the link, it would be a great help if you were to do so:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/BMLPGVJ
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