Actor Aaron Marcus breaks down his script memorization method: print and bind the script, highlight your lines, calculate how many you need to memorize daily, and rehearse in small blocks from the top each day. He records other characters' dialogue to practice cue timing.
Hi, my name is Aaron Marcus, and I am a full-time actor and a commercial model. I've been making my living in this business since 1986. I'm the founder of howtomodel.com, as well as the author of How to Become a Successful Commercial Model, and I also give workshops throughout the world, from Mexico to Australia, all throughout the US and Canada. And this is a lesson that I wanted to share with people about how I go about memorizing a script. I guess the very first thing that I wanted to say is there, there is no one right way of doing this. Everybody has their own method, and what you really need to do is figure out what works best for you. There are some people that like to actually write the script out in longhand. Some people like to record it and just listen to it over and over again. Some people listen to it when they go to sleep. They find that very, very helpful to them. Some people just pound away and just try to just do the lines over and over and over and over and over again. Other people really don't like doing that because they feel that it gets stale for them. There are many, many, many different ways of doing it. So what I want to do is just share with you a way that I find very helpful to me. It's a little bit unusual, but— I'll share it with you. So I just got cast in an independent feature and got the script, about 100 pages. And so first thing I want to do is I want to print it out. So I don't want to print it out on my own printer, it's too much ink and paper. So I took it to a local printer, had them print it out, and had holes placed— 3 holes on the paper— and that way I can put it into a binder. Then certainly I'm going to read Everything. There are some actors that I've seen that will just specifically read their lines and who cares about the other lines, and then they read their lines and memorize them and they don't care about the other lines. To me, that is a bad way of doing things. Quite often I will learn so much more about my character by reading the other person's lines. And also, certainly, you need to know who you're talking to in this script. In any project that you're doing. So you want to read the entire script through. Don't even think about memorization at this point. You're just reading it and maybe even read it through a couple of times. Then what I will do is then I'll start reading it through after a couple times and I'll start highlighting my lines just so I have a very clear idea of where I come up on the page. And then here's something that I do that I don't know of other people who do it. I find it's helpful to me. I don't memorize quickly. It takes me time. There are people I know who have photographic memories, and they can just look at things very quickly, and then instantly they have it memorized. So what I need to do is I really need to plan things out. So like, for instance, if I know I've got 2 weeks to memorize a line— to memorize lines for a project— what I will do is I will actually count out the lines that I have. And I don't mean like full sentences. Wherever that line ends going across the page, even if it's mid-sentence, I consider that one line. And I count up all the lines that I have in the project. And then I figure out, well, I want to have everything memorized at least 3 days prior to the shoot. So what I will do is simply do a little math and figure out how many lines a day do I have to memorize prior to the 3 days before the shoot. And if it's 10 lines a day, if it's 20 lines a day, if it's 5 lines a day, depending on the size of the part, that's how I work it out. And I write out a little chart for myself, and I need to get through pages 1 through 5 on Monday, and I need to get through pages, you know, 6 through 10 on Tuesday. That's how I work it out. Then every day I sit down before I get started with any other work, as long as I don't have an audition or a job that day, and I start going through the amount of lines that I need to that day. Once that's done, set it aside, and then the next day I start over from the very beginning. And I will start from the beginning, do those 5 lines that I need, if I needed 5 lines that day. And if I struggle with it, I'll go back a number of times until I get it. Then I do my next 5. Then third day, start from the very beginning, do the first 5, then I do the second 5. If I'm struggling at all, make sure I've got it really nice and smooth, then go to the next one. And so basically by the end, and I might be like a couple of days before the project is about to shoot, I might spend an hour, I might spend an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours just going through all of my lines because there's a tremendous amount at that point. So— or could be. So anyhow, that's the way that I do it. I just break it down so I know I'm doing a certain amount of lines per day. That relaxes me. I know I'm going to get this done. And that's what I find to be very, very helpful. Sometimes what I will also do, especially if there's a lot of dialogue going on with many different people, just to help me with cues, I will record everything minus my lines. And so I'll record everybody else's lines, and that way I can play it back, listen to the other lines, say my lines, and then listen to the other lines and keep going that way. So anyhow, once again, I just want to make sure you know There are— there is no one specific way that you have to do this. This is a way that I find very helpful to me. And if you have any questions at all, I have a forum at my website. It's Aaron— well, actually, my email address is Aaron, A-A-R-O-N, at howtomodel.com, H-O-W-T-O-M-O-D-E-L dot com. Or you can go to my forum, which is howtomodel.com/forum. Howtomodel.com/forum. and just click on the forum and ask me any questions that you have. And I'm really good at getting back in touch with people. So, hope you found this helpful, and if you have any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them because that way I can share them with other people. Okay, bye-bye.
