Our guest bathrooms have vanity designed with you in mind /resources/media/dt/RDMFADT/en_US/img/shared/full_page_image_gallery/main/DT_guestbathroom02_11_677x380_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center.jpg DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Bend, OR - Guest Bathroom 10
Set in the heart of historic downtown Bend in Deschutes County, Oregon, the contemporary DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Bend is just steps away from numerous recreation areas, shops, restaurants and government offices and offers incredible views of the Cascade Mountain Range. Local attractions, including the Mt. Bachelor ski area and the Les Schwab Amphitheater, are just a short distance away. Our hotel offers onsite complimentary bike rentals to registered guests at the front desk. Enjoy comfortable accommodations, modern amenities and impeccable service during your stay at this Bend, OR hotel. You’ll even be greeted with a signature DoubleTree chocolate chip cookie on arrival.
Each spacious guest room features a refrigerator, microwave, sumptuous bedding, a sofa bed, 39-inch HDTV, and remote printing to the business center. Hilton Honors members enjoy complimentary WiFi. Upgrade to a suite for wonderful views of downtown Bend, and additional space and amenities including a balcony, fireplace and hot tub.
Hosting an event with us is easy with three flexible conference rooms featuring the latest A/V technology. We also offer a complimentary 24-hour business center and a dedicated staff, who will work to guarantee the success of your meeting or social function. Work out in the complimentary 24-hour fitness center or take in beautiful downtown views as you swim in the heated indoor pool and hot tub. Sip locally brewed ale or a cocktail as you enjoy the fresh flavors of the northwest in the stylish Press NW Bistro & Bar.
Boasting an ideal location just off Highway 97 in the center of historic downtown Bend, OR, DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Bend is only a short walk from many shops and tempting restaurants. Nature lovers enjoy hiking, mountain biking and fishing in the beautiful Deschutes River State Recreation Area, and thrill-seekers jet boat or whitewater raft down the Deschutes River. Sample a variety of ales in one of Bend’s many microbreweries or brewpubs including deschute brewery and bend brewing company, or pack a picnic to enjoy in Drake Park. Attend a concert at Les Schwab Amphitheater, an outdoor riverfront amphitheater in Bend’s historic Old Mill District. Visit the impressive 97 ft. Tumalo Falls or take to the slopes of the Mount Bachelor ski area, open from mid-November until the end of May, weather permitting.
Set in the heart of historic downtown Bend in Deschutes County, Oregon, the contemporary DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Bend is conveniently located within walking distance of over 50 shops, restaurants, and microbreweries.
Take to the slopes of Mt. Bachelor ski area, enjoy complimentary bike rentals, pack a picnic to enjoy in Drake Park, and enjoy the breathtaking views that our Bend, OR hotel has to offer.
Its said that there are only two people on a film set that don’t need any experience to be there: the production assistant, and the director.
Which means that in the strange kingdom that is a film production, the serf and the king sometimes have the same amount of experience.
Many first time directors that I’ve met attempt to remedy their inexperience by learning everything they can about the technical aspects of production, so that they don’t look stupid when talking to their crew (I was guilty of it too).
While knowledge of the technical aspects are important, for the most part you don’t really need to know what a C-47 is (pro-tip, its this) when you’re starting out.
But you do need to know at least two things: how to tell a satisfying story, and how to work with actors.
Needing to know storytelling is obvious, but a surprising amount of directors that I talk with don’t know how to get consistent performances from actors.
Good directors are each unique in their processes with actors – but bad directors are all the same. Bad directors give inadequate, confusing, and contradictory direction to their actors – because they don’t know that effective communication with actors requires empathy.
But directing actors – even child actors and inexperienced actors – doesn’t have to be hard, and when broken down there is actually a very simple process to it.
First let’s go into why you need to think about directing actors differently from directing any other position on the set.
Think about the last time an emotional event happened to you – either a positive event, such as graduating from college, or getting married, or a negative event like a pet passing away, or being fired.
Go into that moment in your mind’s eye for a second. Picture the scene – Where were you? Who were you with?
Now picture smaller details, if you can remember them: What was the weather like? What were you wearing? What were you thinking about?
You’ll notice that by remembering more and more details of the event, your emotions are responding to the event as though its really happening right now (maybe a bit less intense, but still similar).
As you recall more and more details, you might find yourself even starting to smile as you remember a happy memory, or tear up if an unpleasant or sad memory was what you conjured.
But had I instead told you at the beginning of this section to just “feel happy”, or “start to cry” you’d likely not feel anything at all.
Its because our emotional systems are not logic based and do not respond to direct commands. You can’t tell somebody to be happy and expect them to just switch to being happy right then and there.
Our emotions can only be accessed indirectly – either through imagination, behavior, or through memory.
Actors are no different, so when you’re directing actors you can’t expect to get consistent results by telling an actor ‘you’re supposed to be sad in this scene/you should cry at this moment/come in excited and happy’.
Most actors are used to bad direction, so even though your direction isn’t particularly helpful they’ll still likely try to give you what they think you’re wanting. But it won’t be consistent – it will either be too much or not the right type of emotion.
You already know that film is a visual language, but directing actors is its own language in and of itself.
Many directors readily agree on that, yet short of taking acting classes and therefore experiencing the process yourself, there are very few resources to learn the craft of talking with actors.
When you can find advice on the language of directing actors, the most common advice given is to replace nouns with action verbs. Instead of ‘feel sad’, you tell your actor that she needs ‘to surrender’. If you want your actor to be scary in the scene, you tell your actor ‘to intimidate’ the other actors.
Remember that emotions can’t be directly accessed – by giving your actor something to do, you’re freeing them to focus their attention on the behavior behind a certain emotion rather than the emotion itself, which bubbles up on its own.
When I was in college, the action verb technique was drilled into me by my teachers as the go-to process for directing actors. But I soon became frustrated with it. I realized that action verbs are actually pretty limiting – sure some verbs work well, but not all verbs are created equal, and I wasn’t about to bring a thesaurus with me to every shoot.
Just learning action verbs is like the difference between learning enough Spanish to order food in Spain, versus knowing enough to win Best Actor in a Telenovela. If you want to go beyond the basics, you need to treat directing like an actual language.
Remember the emotion exercise you did before – notice that remembering details from your memory acted as a stimulus that ‘coaxed’ your emotions to come up to the surface.
I’m leaning very hard on this ‘directing as a language’ metaphor, but to beat that dead horse one last time, the grammar of directing actors is actually a very simple formula:
I was taught this formula at the Barrow Group Theater by veteran actor/director Seth Barrish, and I’ve never looked back since learning it.
When you direct a scene, first picture how you want the scene to look like, then give the actors an emotional stimulus that you think will reproduce it, and then watch the scene play out and judge how effective your stimulus was.
If the scene doesn’t turn out how you were picturing it, then you know that you need to give a different stimulus.
Once you start thinking about directing in stimuli, you realize that there are plenty of ways to produce emotions in people beyond action verbs and direct commands. It could be reminding your actor of her character’s goal(s) for the scene. It could be a prop that indirectly channels emotions. It could be reminding the actor of an event that happened just before this scene, that provides more context for their behavior. (I’ll provide a lot of potential stimuli ideas in a later post)
Though it takes experience to know what stimulus to use for what situation, the trick to ensuring that you never give your actors bad direction is to always test out the stimulus on yourself before offering it to your actors.
Before giving any direction, imagine yourself as the actor receiving your direction. Does your direction make you feel what you want your actors to feel? If not, can you give a better stimulus?
Of course your actors are not you, so don’t expect them to respond to your stimulus in the same way that you do. But chances are that if it works on you then it will at least land their performance in the right direction of what you’re wanting.
Once I was working with a very good child actor who, towards the end of his day, was starting to get antsy and wasn’t holding eye contact with his scene partner for long enough.
We were shooting his close-up and I needed him to stay still and appear to be engaged and listening. So I asked him to study his scene partner’s eyes throughout the scene, and each time when I yelled cut I had him come over and draw the eyes from memory on a piece of paper, asking him to provide as much detail as he could.
For every take after that point he looked completely engaged in what his scene partner was saying, because he was engaged – not on the story per se, but on the stimulus that I gave him.
Why did I tell him to draw his fellow actor’s eyes on a piece of paper? Because thats what worked for me when I stepped into his shoes, those of a tired little boy that was becoming bored, and directed myself.
Once you start using your directing on yourself, it will become easier for you to understand what stimuli are effective and what aren’t.
Every actor is different and each will respond to stimuli in unique ways, so its important for you to suss out what each of your actors responds to in the read and rehearsal process. But relying on the formula gives you something to fall back on in that terrifying moment when all eyes are on you to provide the one piece of direction that will save the scene.