I trained for 10 weeks on Middleweek Newton's 'Acting For Film' course.

The course teaches us about acting, script work, producing, editing and many more invaluable skills for those wanting to work in film. I have only completed the first term and am waiting to do my second.

Each week during the first term my skills progressed exponentially, and by the end of the 10 weeks I personally felt like I had improved massively from when I began. On day 1 we were asked to come straight in and read a scene as if we were in a casting room, and we read it without delving into the script, loosening up or feeling comfortable. Since coming from a theatre background, the scene looked diabolically over-acted on screen, and over the 10 weeks I was slowly weaned out of my theatrical habits and taught how to appear natural on screen.

By the end of the course, we'd been taught how to ad-lib, look natural and feel comfortable in a film/ TV casting situation. The most important thing ingrained into us was that we should never be a character, we should be an extension of ourselves and react how we would react in the given situation. As we get stronger at film acting we can delve more and more into the realm of being a character and away from ourselves, but as beginners we are just not believable when we are entirely playing a character, as we are not drawing on anything within us.

Film acting is entirely about being real and believable, for example nobody talks in real conversations without pauses or the occassional 'um' or 'er' and coming straight from a theatre background where everything needs to be big so the audience can see it, it was rather tricky having to rein it in for the screen. However I personally feel like I met the challenge head on and absorbed a lot from the training.

The second term focuses on script work and producing, which I am greatly looking forward to, as it is this area of film that I would like to pursue. We are able to choose scene from our favourite scripts and get actors to play them out for us, working on the scenes and scripts to try and make them appear as natural as possible.