Bright young things with stars in their eyes

Some actors trained in theater become very tense when they get in front of a camera, Parks says. For each of her classes the students are required to do a series of improvisational practices in the classroom, with a camera recording their performance for self-evaluation.

Zhou You, a student of Parks' master class and an aspiring actor with Chen Kun's talent agency K-Artists, greatly impressed Parks with his classroom performance.

"We were doing an improvisation, and there's a young woman in front of him, and Zhou You is very strong, with a tough face, a little scary. She had to be silent, apart from the one line she was assigned. He could do anything (he wanted) with her.

"What he did was that he came running on. He took her by her shoulders and put a 'gun' to her head. But her only line was, 'I'm pregnant.' And he immediately went: 'Oh, how wonderful!' And the whole classroom burst out laughing. It's very dramatic. It broke our early impression of him from always just being a bad guy, a criminal and a drug addict, and all of that to a beautiful, loving, sensitive man in about a minute."

Zhou says Parks' approach was insightful and practical.

"She taught me how to calm down before each casting and stop feeling so nervous, that we can convert our nerves to positive energy. In future castings I'll be able to simply focus on my interpretation of the character."

The key to acting is to completely believe in yourself, Parks says.

"Acting is a beautiful profession because it asks of the actor to keep looking, keep understanding, keep telling us what you've seen. You're unique, you're special. Do and say and be nobody else. There's only one of you."

While the classes of Parks put each individual under the spotlight, the workshop by Christopher Bayes is almost always filled with a hubbub of screaming and shouting. In his course, students are allowed to laugh, cry and even swear as much as they want, the sole aim being to liberate themselves from the limitations of their physical selves.