Chapter 135 [Bonus ] 135 - Big improvement!
Chapter 135 [Bonus Chapter] 135 - Big improvement!
Haven\'t I seen this girl somewhere before? I asked myself, truly confused.
When her eyes met mine, the girl froze.
And seeing her frozen expression, I finally remembered who this girl was.
Especially when Julian and Evelyn kept talking about how she was the reason most of the school knew about me.
"BlackVelvet?!" She asked in shock as she looked at me, causing everyone to stop and look at me as well.
Many showed surprised expressions, others nodded as if mentally confirming that they were right about something.
"Yes...?" I replied uncertainly. "You\'re the girl from my Boyfriend video, right?" I asked.
Seeing that I confirmed it was BlackVelvet, she was shocked and embarrassed, and hearing my question, she was even more embarrassed as she nodded slightly.
"Yep..." She replied shyly.
"All right, stop chatting, now that everyone\'s here, let\'s start the lesson." The teacher said as he stood up, making everyone stop and look at him as he stood in the circle we had formed.
Charlie ran into the circle as well, but froze for a second when he came into my line of sight and saw the little girl next to me holding my hand and staring at me.
But despite his shock, Charlie didn\'t react any further and began warming up and stretching while listening to the teacher\'s explanation.
Mr. Anderson first looked around the circle, staring at each student\'s face for a few seconds until he looked at Laura and raised his eyebrow slightly, then continued to look at the other students.
"Today we\'re going to talk about authenticity in acting. It\'s important because the audience knows when we\'re not being real, and that can break the connection with the story. So let\'s do a simple exercise. Pick an emotion and express it without words. Remember to really connect with the emotion, not just fake it. The key is to feel the emotion on the inside before expressing it on the outside. It makes the performance more authentic. He said, getting a nod from everyone.
For the first time, Laura took her eyes off me and stared at the teacher, her expression slowly changing from the curiosity she had felt before to hatred.
It really looked like she hated Mr. Anderson very much and wanted him to die right now, which shocked the hell out of me!
Looking at Laura, Mr. Anderson\'s face, which had been dying of boredom the whole time, changed to a small smile and a nod of his head.
"Well done Ms. Miller, you can get back to normal, a great presentation." He said, making Laura return to her normal curiosity as if it had never happened.
This left me completely shocked, her acting skills were probably at an extremely high level!
Ignoring the look in her eyes that came back to me after the exercise, I started to imagine an emotion to feel and try to act it out.
Thinking about the persona I was doing for BlackVelvet, I thought I\'d try something closer to what I would use with him.
So I started trying to show arrogance and contempt.
I slowly changed my expression, trying to act as natural as possible and change my face, but as soon as Mr. Anderson looked at me, he shook his head and corrected me.
"Black, that was a bit much. Arrogance and contempt are subtle, they don\'t have to be so obvious. Try it again, but this time keep your posture upright, give a slightly superior smile, and look down subtly. The key is to show superiority without looking like a caricature."
Hearing his correction, I nodded and slowly began to change into something closer to what he said.
Although he seemed like a lazy teacher, when Mr. Anderson started to really teach, he became very serious and was able to help the students with small details that we hadn\'t even noticed.
After this exercise, Mr. Anderson gave me other different practice exercises that stimulated different areas of acting, things I didn\'t even know were important in the training I was doing on my own, which added to the 80% buff in my learning speed, made me improve very quickly.
[Acting Mastery Lv 5 -> Lv 9].
In just two hours of training, I had gained 4 levels of Acting Mastery, which was really twice what I would gain by learning a skill below Lv 10 on my own.
I knew it would slow down after leveling up, but it was still twice as fast as learning it on my own at home!
Not to mention, as the skill level increased, the speed at which I learned things also increased.
[Acting Mastery Lv 9:
In just two hours of training, I had gained 4 levels of Acting Mastery, which was really twice what I would gain by learning a skill below Lv 10 on my own.
I knew it would slow down after leveling up, but it was still twice as fast as learning it on my own at home!
Not to mention, as the skill level increased, the speed at which I learned things also increased.
[Acting Mastery Lv 9:
Effect: Develop an enhanced understanding of acting techniques, increasing your confidence and skill by 9%. This level includes advanced skills in technique, emotional expression, and character interpretation. It also improves your retention of theatrical theory and its practical application in performance by 9%. Gain a tangible advantage by absorbing the fundamentals of agile and expressive acting].
I had gone from a student with only 5 months of acting experience to someone with 9 months of experience.
The only time Laura let go of my hand in class was when the teacher had her do an exercise with another group of students.
That was a bit of a relief.
Not because I didn\'t like holding the hand of a pretty girl like her, but because every time my skill went up a level, Laura looked at me with even more curiosity, as if she sensed my improvement in skill!
As far as I could tell, she was the only one who noticed how fast I was improving, since only I had a tangible number for my skill, even though I was twice as good as before, since most of the people in this room with the Acting skill were possibly around level 17 and level 25, my going from level 5 to level 9 wasn\'t surprising to them who couldn\'t see the number going up like I could. Only Laura noticed, and she got more and more shocked every time my skill went up a level, so I started to get a little worried that she would notice something she shouldn\'t.To my surprise, the last Acting exercise was a pair exercise, and the pair I was assigned to was Charlie."Hey." I smiled as I nodded at her."Hey," she replied a little shyly.
"I guess you\'re the reason I\'m famous at school?" I asked laughing.
She got even more embarrassed and nodded. "I\'m sorry, I told my friends when I saw you come to school last week and they told the rest of the school."
I was surprised to hear that since I didn\'t know anyone had recognized me the day I came with Selena. "So this is the third time we\'ve seen each other?" I asked.
"The fourth time..." She answered quietly.
"Fourth time?" I asked confused. "On Isabella\'s birthday, my little brother went to the party too, I saw you there with your little brother too when I went to pick him up." She said, making me look surprised."Woah, so our brothers go to school together?" I asked surprised.
"Yeah... I think this might even be the fifth time we\'ve seen each other," she said, leaving me confused."What do you mean?" I asked."Were you riding a motorcycle with your brother on the back yesterday?" she asked.
Hearing that, my eyes widened as I looked at her."Is your brother the little boy my brother pointed his middle finger at?"
"Yes..." She laughed as she lowered her head.
"I can\'t believe it...haha, I\'m sorry, I\'ll tell Ethan not to do that to your brother anymore..." I apologized.
"Don\'t worry, it\'s just a kid\'s fight." She said worriedly as she stared at me.
Seeing that she was finally looking me in the eye, I smiled as I nodded.
After that, we started doing the exercise the teacher had given us, and Charlie took the opportunity to give me some acting tips.
Although she didn\'t have as high a skill as Laura, she was still very good at it, with a skill of maybe Lv 25 or so.
This helped give me the final push I needed to get the skill up to Lv 10!
[Acting Mastery Lv 9 -> 10].
This last level gave me 3 months of experience in Acting, which finally made my improvement from the beginning of the class more obvious, to the point that even Charlie in front of me was shocked at how much less mistakes I was making.
As my eyes wandered around the classroom, I noticed Laura staring at me again with suspicion in her eyes, but maybe she didn\'t notice such a drastic change since she wasn\'t holding my hand anymore.
I just smiled as I went back to practicing with Charlie, who started telling me about Trevor, her ex-boyfriend, who probably hated me after I told him my class schedule for tomorrow and she told me that the three of us would be taking English together.
The thought of having to deal with a spoiled, arrogant boy made me lazy for tomorrow, but thinking about how much I\'d improved in acting in those three hours of class and how much I could improve my singing skills tomorrow, I got excited again.
At the end of the class, we got together to chat and I took the opportunity to meet other students to make friends, where many gave me their phone numbers and we added each other on Instabram.
I noticed that many of them were only interested in me because I was an E Rank artist with hundreds of thousands of followers, while even the E Rank artists in the class didn\'t have half of what I had.
But I didn\'t worry about it and pretended that I didn\'t know about their interest.
It was better to just accept their interest as long as it didn\'t hurt me than to make enemies on the first day of class.
Two of the few students who really had no interest in me were Charlie and Laura, who also exchanged contact numbers with me to talk about acting after class.
Charlie, I felt, was more interested in me than in acting, while Laura was still almost entirely driven by her curiosity about me, without having the space or time to feel anything else.