Babies can't act; they can only be honest and authentic with their current emotions, and they're always in the moment.
Case in point, "Sling Baby" by Kevin Willson, which shot in my backyard. If for one split second, a mother in the audience thought that baby wasn't happy, the filmmakers would have received so much hate email (even more if it involved a dog, just ask Kevin). So, how did we get that baby to fly through the air and grab that chip with a smile? By keeping him happy, of course. Paying attention to his comfort and safety (even while being puppeteered on strings), meeting all his play and nutrition needs, and good ole Pavlov's conditioning. I'll save this for another post.
But if the child actors are a little bit older, how do you get the performances you want? Same thing (because they're still too young to want to learn the craft of acting): keep them playing, know their hunger and sleep needs, and practice bad-parenting manipulation.
And cast your own children. Now that our children are in high school, and seem well adjusted, I feel I can share some behind the screen secrets of "Who Wants Lemonade?" The original idea was to shoot the scene of Jackson (age 5) and Kiran (age 3) right before lunch, when they'd be most hungry for Doritos' snacks. Jackson was typically a mean older brother, so we (my wife Clarice and I) hoped they'd run out of chips, then get greedy and hopefully start arguing, and then Mom would come out to break up the fight and lean on the table, which would flip into the air and throw the lemonade everywhere.
Why? Because this was for Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" ad competition and all the best spots had a surprising twist at the end. So, I rigged the table to have a fulcrum so that everything would toss into the air and cause chaos. The lemonade jug and the bowl of lemons were lightweight plastic.
I knew with child actors, I would not be able to repeat anything, so I had three cameras overing the wide and an angle on each child. I coached the actors to stay in character and knew I could always turn the camera around on them to get an overlapping, continuity shot for editing. All was going swimmingly and on the 3rd take, Kiran said the most adorable thing; "Who wants lenomade?"
Then on take four, Kiran leaned on the shaky table and spilled the ice-cold lemonade all over her!
No big deal, we rescued her quickly and got her happy again in another outfit. But we only had one of that pink dress and I loved that 3rd take. So we rinsed and dried it, which took 45 minutes. By then both kids were hungry and we had to feed them. Now their attention spans were gone. And Kiran was cranky. By the time we got Jackson and Kiran out to the set, neither were too cooperative or collaborative.
So, I skipped to the second half of the spot where they needed to be upset. You know what I did, I made _____ out of ___. The new plan was to do reshoots in a week when they would be happy again. Kiran was tired so we knew it wouldn't take much to set her off, and we gave her some cutie orange slices to persuade her to stay in her chair. With all three cameras rolling, we asked Jackson to take an orange slice from Kiran and hop on his go-cart and ride off. To his credit, Jackson knew this was wrong and didn't want to do it. We, the Bad-Parenting Filmmakers, persuaded him to do it. For the art! Amiright?
The rest is history. Kiran only lasted long enough for the Lady, Joanie Marx, to try cheer her up with the dog. A week later, we shot the missing parts with happy Jackson and happy Kiran. There's one line that I tried to ADR with Kiran, when she tells the lady "No," because I had too much road noise from the freeway near our house and she was so quiet. I got her to repeat it a few times outside her daycare, and it's better but obviously replaced audio.
Bad Parenting to the rescue!
Ian
