The key to achieving a good sense of weight

When we have to go about a scene in which a character has to lift something heavy, we usually tend to address it in a purely physical fashion. We try to figure how much the object weighs and consider how much physical effort should the character put into lifting or moving it. However in order to achieve believability in an acting performance there’s more to it than simply following Newton’s Laws. The following video is from the movie ‘Little Fish’ where actress Cate Blanchett plays the role of Tracy Heart, , a woman living in the suburbs of Sidney who struggles to turn her life around away from the criminal world that surrounds her.

While she’s at the train station she gets a phone call from her ex-boyfriend. Her mother takes his phone unexpectedly and uncovers her plans. She lowers the cell phone as if surrendering and when she lifts it up again to resume the conversation it’s as if the phone weighted a ton. A cell phone doesn’t weigh more than a hundred and fifty grams, but what’s really weighing on Tracy is resuming the conversation. Her bad mood is what’s actually making the phone’s weight increase.

We always have to keep in mind that a character’s physical actions are always conditioned by their internal motivation.

Therefore, if we want our physical acting to work, the first thing we have to consider isn’t Newton’s Laws, but the laws that dictate our characters mood, his/her inner motivations and what happens within his/her mind.