the 12 steps

1. Overall objective

What does your character want from life more than anything? Finding what your character wants throughout the entire script.

2. Scene objective

What your character wants over the course of an entire scene, which supports the character’s OVERALL OBJECTIVE.

3. Obstacles

Determining the physical, emotional and mental hurdles that make it difficult for your character to achieve his or her OBJECTIVE.

4. Substitutions

Endowing the other actor in the scene with a person from your real life – that makes sense to your OVERALL OBJECTIVE and your SCENE OBJECTIVE. For instance, if your character’s SCENE OBJECTIVE is, “I need to get you to love me,” then you find someone from your present life that really makes you need that love – urgently, desperately and completely. This way you have all the diverse layers that a real need from a real person will give you.

5. Inner objects

The pictures you see in your mind when speaking or hearing about a person, place, thing or event.

6. Beats and actions

A BEAT is a thought. Every time there’s a change in thought, there’s a BEAT change. ACTIONS are the mini-OBJECTIVES that are attached to each BEAT that support the SCENE’S OBJECTIVE and therefore, the OVERALL OBJECTIVE.

7. Moment before

The event that happens before you begin the scene (or before the director yells, “Action!”), which gives you a place to move from, both physically and emotionally.

8. Place and fourth wall

Using PLACE and THE FOURTH WALL means that you endow your character’s physical reality, which, in most cases, is realized on a stage, sound stage, set, classroom, or on location, with attributes from a PLACE from your real life. Using PLACE and the FOURTH WALL creates privacy, intimacy, history, meaning, safety and reality. The PLACE/FOURTH WALL must support and make sense with the choices you’ve made for the other tools.

9. Doings

The handling of props, which produces behavior. Brushing your hair while speaking, tying your shoes, drinking, eating, using a knife to chop, etc., are examples of DOINGS.

10. Inner monologue

The dialogue that’s going on inside your head that you don’t speak out loud. Those thoughts that are vulgar, inappropriate, self-indulgent, self-deprecating, paranoid and generally not politically correct. Those thoughts you can’t speak out loud because there would be some form of repercussions.

11. Previous circumstances

Your character’s history. The accumulation of life experiences that determines why and how they operate in the world. And then personalizing the character’s PREVIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES to that of your own so you can truly and soulfully understand the character’s behavior and become and live the role.

12. Let it go

While The Chubbuck Technique does use an actor’s intellect, it is not a set of intellectual exercises. This technique is the way to create human behavior so real that it produces the grittiness and rawness of really living a role. In order for you to duplicate the natural flow of life and be spontaneous you have to get out of your head. To achieve this you have to trust the work you’ve done with the previous11 tools and LET IT GO.

From ”The Power of the Actor” by Ivana Chubbuck