- For my STEP Signature Project, I took acting classes through the local Columbus acting studio Broadway2LA. During this 8 week acting course, I learned techniques that helped advance my skills as an actress, practiced scenes from different genres of cinema, attended my first red carpet event, and met incredible people throughout the entire process. At the end of this course, our skills as actors and actresses culminated in our final acting showcase, where our pre-filmed scenes were premiered for family, friends, and talent agents on Saturday, March 13th.
2.) While completing my STEP Project, I feel that my view of myself has completely changed. Growing up, I had always wanted to pursue a career in the acting field. However, I decided to pursue a different career path upon attending college. Since given the opportunity to take these acting classes, I feel that I’ve been able to dig deep and find those passionate qualities within myself again. I didn’t even realize how much I’d missed acting until taking these classes. During these classes, I felt so free to be myself and to express myself more openly than I had been able to in a long time. By trying to solely focus on my academic goals for the past few years, I feel that I lost a bit of that creative aspect that I’ve cherished for so long. I’ve come to realize that my passions don’t have to be separated from my career paths, as I’ve found that the best way to be happy in life is to combine passion with my skill set and always pursue my dreams.
3.) Throughout my entire STEP Project, I had so many incredible experiences that helped to shape my personal and professional transformation. One of the largest contributions to this transformation was the fact that each week, we were able to practice and perform scenes together as a group. We were able to work on different scenes with different combinations of actors in order to help advance our skills as individual actors and actresses. I was able to perform scenes of different genres, including romance, crime, drama and non-fiction. Additionally, my acting instructors were able to use their knowledge of the field to teach us different acting techniques and exercises to further improve our acting skills.
Throughout the 8 week course, I was able to work with different actors to perfect different aspects of my practiced scenes. However, for a few weeks of the course, we were divided into groups of three people to work on one particular scene together to perform for the final showcase. For my scene, I was assigned Taylor and Philomena as my scene partners, and we were basically a combination of the characters in Mean Girls and The Three Stooges. For our scene, the three of us girls played three friends who just committed a murder by pushing an SUV over a cliff. This scene contained a great deal of humorous dialogue mixed with the comedy of the three inexperienced murderers who just happened to find themselves in this situation. After weeks of practicing and preparing this scene, I found myself extremely comfortable when filming for the final showcase. By having the ability to practice in-person with my fellow actors, I was able to advance my own skills by learning to work with other people on the big screen. After this course, the friendships I made have continued to hold strong, and I’m more than excited to see the next projects my classmates will be working on in the future.
The final showcase for my acting course occurred this past Saturday, March 13th. For this showcase, our final scenes debuted in front of family, friends, and casting directors. Each of our three-person scenes premiered on the big screen, as we all sat in the audience of the Dublin Theatre, watching ourselves on film for the first time. After our scenes premiered, we made our way to the red carpet, where a photographer took amazing photos of those in attendance. Being in the moment and attending this premiere, I took a moment to reflect within myself. I had never thought that I would be attending a red carpet premiere, much less watching myself on the big screen. The moment was absolutely surreal, and I realized that this was something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life. If a movie premiere event in Columbus, Ohio was this thrilling, I couldn’t even imagine what a Hollywood premiere would have in store!
4.) Personally, I think that taking this acting class has given me one of the most valuable and incredible transformations of my life. The opportunities this acting class gave me were unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. I feel that my eyes were once again opened to the passion that I had experienced in my life growing up in the theatre world. My mom always used to tell me that I was a natural onstage, therefore I found my home once again by taking this acting class. Moving forward, I know now that I always want acting to be part of my life. I want to explore my options onstage, while pursuing my academic passion of becoming an attorney as well. I haven’t yet learned how I would like to mix these two together, but I’m very excited to figure it out.