Memorizing Lines

May 15th, 2011 by hmatt

Most of my acting anxiety is from having my lines memorized. It seemingly takes me forever!

For a while now, I’ve been collecting all the ways other people memorize lines, and trying to figure out what works best for me.

One such way has been to write out my lines, so then I can go back afterwards and see what words I messed up on.

The tried and true method is to ask to have someone read lines for you, but I always felt bad because I would constantly need my lines fed to me. I needed a middle ground.

Then a while back I saw an iPhone app called Rehearse, which had this awesome feature that allowed you to highlight your lines on a pdf and then press a button and the highlight would turn black, leaving just your cue lines. Great! This works a little more elegantly than using a card to cover your lines.

The drawback was that the app was ‘free’ and they had a subscription model which meant that you would have to always pay for the scripts to be put in the app. Boo I say! This subscription price was WAY overpriced.

I turned to the clunky hollywood helper app, but there was always some sort of formatting issue with that little guy.

Then today I was preparing all the scripts I have to have memorized for my BC2 class, and I wondered if anything had changed with Rehearsal.

Yes! They’ve done away with the subscription fee and now I can pay a one time price of $20! FINALLY!

Now to get memorizing! I hope this app helps me overcome my memorizing mental blocks!

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