A Day in the Life of a TFS Acting Student: Guest Blog by Rachelle Mazzilli
It’s Wednesday morning and, once again, I’m off to Toronto Film School, where I am completing my diploma in Acting for Film, Television & the Theatre. I live in Oakville, a suburb in the GTA about 40 minutes west of Toronto. I take the train to school and on this particular morning, I’ve decided to spend my commute going over lines for a scene I will be filming that day.
Once I get off the train at Union Station, I walk to Yonge-Dundas Square, where the Toronto Film School campus I study at is located. I love being in the Toronto, immersed in the hustle and bustle of Toronto. It’s filled with people who have places to go, just like me. I see all different people from different cultures and there is always such high energy downtown. I like going to school and I love spending time with the people at Toronto Film School. My class has become like family; we didn’t get to choose each other, but we always have support and love for one another.
I walk into my Camera 3 Acting course at 10:00 a.m. ready to shoot my first scene for a film we are working on as a class. I am going to be work-shopping a new feature film script written by my instructor Hart Massey. The screenplay is titled “Death of an Actor” and I am playing the role of Avril Jones, an alternative character in an acting school who struggles to balance her career goals with her personal relationships.
We had to do mock auditions, which, consisted of a cold read for a few different roles, and this is the part I received. I feel like this character is close to who I am as a person, so I feel confident about taking it on. There is, of course, the pressure of portraying the situation as the writer envisioned – since the writer is sitting right there and grading me – but I am using the pressure motivation.
I’m really excited to learn what it’s like to be part of a feature film this term – shooting out of sequence and building a character journey. The scene I will be shooting today is slightly comedic and I feel that is one of my strong suits as an actor. This gives me confidence about the performance I’ve prepared over the past couple weeks.
It’s definitely a lot of pressure when the camera is on me; every person’s eyes watching me can feel like 1000 pounds of expectation to live up to, but I have to admit it’s a really cool feeling at the same time. When you do something funny and you can hear people laughing, it’s not only encouraging but also gratifying.
Since Toronto Film School and my class in such a safe environment, I’m having a lot of fun being able to play around and try new things until I give the performance my teacher and I are looking for. When we shoot, we do the scene over numerous times from different angles. Each time you run the scene, it gets better and better so that hopefully by your close up you’re giving your best performance possible. I can’t wait to see it all cut together. It’s also great I get to have the footage of all the scene work I film at school, so I can show people outside of class the work I have done.
It’s 1:00 pm now and I am walking into my Directing and Producing for Actors course. This class has been much more valuable than I imagined it would be. I have always wanted to create my own acting opportunities when I leave this school and this class is helping me understand how to do that.
Today, we have our poster assignment; we have to create a movie poster for a film idea we came up with. I shot a poster for an original film concept titled “Out There”; about a journalist in the 1950’s who goes out into the wild to find a tribe people don’t believe exists. Shooting this was really fun because I got to take my actor out to Sixteen Mile Creek, which runs through Oakville where I’ve spent a lot of my teenage years, to shoot.
We went in an area of the creek that we were both unfamiliar with and tried to live out the story a bit. I was mostly shooting candid shots and I took almost 450 pictures. A lot of the photographs I took nicely captured the scenery with the subject interacting, but in the end, I felt the extremely close up shot I chose really captured the essence of the character journey.
In class, we learn how a camera works and how to use the different features on it for our own artistic vision. We practice directing other actors for the shots we want, which teaches me how to communicate my vision to other people working on the same project.
It’s rewarding to come up with an idea and be able to bring it to life yourself. It’s hard as a director to gain control of everyone on set and make sure things are being heard by everyone. Getting one person to understand something might need a completely different explanation than another individual. All in all, though, it’s a great way to understand where people on the other side are coming from in a project. Not to mention, as an actor, it’s fun to be the boss and tell everyone else what needs to be done for a change.
My last class of the day is Movement at 4:00 pm. This term we are focused on clown and it’s been an insane experience finding my clown. Yes, we do wear the red nose and it completely transforms you if you commit to it. It’s so great that we all get to be so ridiculous and learn a new way to make others laugh. The energy in this class is always high and the exercises we are doing are thrilling to participate in.
My clown character is named Razzle and she’s about 4 years old. She wears her hair in a ponytail at the top of her head in a big, pink fluorescent scrunchie. It hangs down on either side of her head and she is always laughing and biting on her hair. She likes to play and be sneaky, but she also loves attention.
A clown turn (which is kind of like bit or an act) that I did in this character was Razzle trying to show off how flexible she is – which she isn’t. Razzle ended up using her ponytail for everything she couldn’t do. I’m discovering a whole aspect of myself I wasn’t very in touch with before; who knew there was this whole other side of me as a performer? I can’t wait to see what my clown character will grow into.
I’d be lying if I said I’m not exhausted when I leave school. It’s a lot of work every day that requires a lot of energy. It never feels like schoolwork though because my day is full of what I love to do. When I leave school in the evening, I feel better about myself as an actor than when I had arrived that morning. I learn so much every day that contributes to me being the actor I want to be.
Rachelle Mazzilli is a 22-year-old student at the Toronto Film School. She has completed a degree in the Dramatic Arts at the University of Windsor and is currently in her third term in the Acting for Film, Television and Theatre program at TFS. After school, she plans to write her own films and launch her acting career in Toronto’s entertainment industry.
