Minor project: Survey Results

Following my survey, I have regularly checked the results to see if the income of results has stagnated and at this point it has, therefore I felt this was an adequate time to put the results together and to start drawing conclusions on them. Without further ado, here is the responses and conclusions of the survey.

Not the most important of questions but it does give an idea of the demographic I was working with and specifically, I can see from this that my audience had at the very least some degree of acting knowledge and as such this was useful because it meant that everyone would have some idea of what good acting was and on top this a large number of people said they watch and analyse films often, thus meaning that I could expect some insightful, informed responses, in theory. 

 The second question was to further gauge the audience so as to see if they appreciated acting to a similar degree to myself and also to see if it was a big factor for my audience. I found from this that performance for most people has blown them a way somewhat, aside from a few people who said they haven't been blown away but do appreciate acting and one person who said they don't really appreciate acting. This means then that again, I can hope for some strong responses from people on the subject because they all fit the idea criteria for the kinds of people I want to be answering the questions on acting.

 The next question (which I have accidentally cut off) was essentially, if you have been blown away, what performances did this? This question then allowed me to gain some understanding of what good acting looked like to people because now I could go away (and I will) and analyse some of these performances to see why I feel they are good and couple that with the responses to the next question to hopefully pick apart a good performance and therefore go into the practical side of this module and from there help me to have a quality of acting to strive for. The answers themselves were varied, from common blockbuster films to indie foreign films, however, there were some common recurring names, most predominant of which was Tom Hardy, followed by Eddie Redmayne and then Leonardo Di Caprio. These are all actors that would be considered to be in their prime at the minute so it makes sense that they would be at the forefront of people'e thinking when we talk about quality acting performances. There were other replies which I have seen that I had already identified such as Daniel Day Lewis, who I did a post about, this was reassuring for me as it confirmed I was already on something of the right track. Upon looking at the actors people were choosing as well, I also noticed that there was a very strong and extremely relevant theme running through them, this was method acting. The majority of the performances people were referencing were that of method actors. This then suggests that this would be the best way to go about acting, based solely on this survey, however, I do recognise that this relatively small sample is not enough to generalise such a big statement.

 Question 4 was to further expand upon people's idea of good acting by then finding out why they thought the particular performances were good. This is hard to generalise what the consensus was because there was such a wide range of answers and the question was very open to a person's view. However, there were a few recurring themes that were given in different ways. The first of these was that the line between actor and character be invisible, this means that the actor must make you believe that they are the character and you must essentially forget that it is a performance. This idea is tricky because as soon as you begin to forget it is a performance, you then stop praising the performance and instead become emotionally invested in a person. The second thing that people said often which is fairly similar to my first point was that the emotion of the actor feel authentic and real, the opposite of which I would guess is what people describe as wooden acting. I think that it is important for emotion to feel real so that audiences can feed off of this and get invested into the characters and have an enjoyable, emotional experience.

The final question was for the person taking the survey to rank the above characteristics in order of importance. If we take the values of these at face value, the ranking goes as follows:

1. Ability to show strong emotion
2. The actor's voice i.e. diction and accent
3. Facial expressions and eye movements
4. Movement and gestures.
5. How much the actor looks like the character (i.e. costume, make-up etc.)

The first thing I would like to say about this is that I am in no way surprised that the fifth on the list is costume and make up. I was expecting this because this is not really to do with the acting, it is just the exterior of the character, sort of like an outer shell that the actor then fills with thought and emotion, which they can do without the necessary look, That being said, four people did still think that this was the most important factor. This is the main issue with this question, it is entirely subjective and the results reflect the fact that different people will look to different aspects. None the less it is still valid research. The number one on the ranking came as no real surprise given the feedback on other questions, emotion is key to a good performance, the reason I limited this to strong emotion is that all of the other available aspects are means of portraying emotion, but I feel that strong emotion is a skill of its own and as such I added it to the list and people responded by naming it their most important aspect.
Voice and facial movements were fairly close when it came to what the second most important aspect to people this to me is extremely interesting as these are the two ways that actors can portray emotion in a subtle manner, therefore it is somewhat telling that this appears to be divisive because it essentially splits people in two about how they want the actor to portray the emotion they're looking for. Some people want passionate speech and strong dialogue, others want subtly in an actors face and the emotion to shine through their eyes. That is what this tells me, and while there is no real conclusion to be had from this, I feel as though this split is fine and the answer is that an actor should have mastery of both and neither is more important. Finally there is movement and gestures in 4th place, I feel like this is unfair, I genuinely think that the reason this is so low is that people simply undervalue it, I know that is the nature of this question, but the way that a character carries themselves is so important to a portrayal, I can't help but feel that  this has been undervalued. That being said, the questionnaire has reflected what people think and clearly they think that movement and gestures isn't a pivotal part of acting in the same way that the others are, perhaps I should acknowledge my own bias in this and say that the survey has proven me wrong.