Actor Growth

One interesting I have always found with a lot of actors is that they don’t view their profession just like any other entrepreneur in a different industry. Instead, they treat it more like an employee mentality where they go to a job and get paid to do work.

However, like an entrepreneur you have to promote yourself and have business expenses to pay. With that comes benefits too such as write offs. For example, the headshots that you get can be a write off towards your income or even travel expenses such as a vehicle you use to get to point A to point B. Heck, some actors even “incorporate” themselves when they find that they start to earn too much money.

Of course you should read up on the tax laws in your area, but starting to treat your profession as if you were a business person can be beneficial both in trying to land roles as well as helping yourself out financially when it comes to working in this industry.

So yesterday I attended the reunion event and one person that was there happened to be my old drama instructor who is apparently back in the film industry more. After catching up, he asked me about agency representation and immediately offered to send my package to two agencies in particular as he knew those agents personally. His reasoning too is that he felt I should be with a bigger agency.

They are fairly established agencies too and the interesting thing is I submitted my package to one of them way back and got no response. The other one I actually did get a response and the agent mentioned that he wanted to set up an interview with me. However, he never got around to doing it nor had he responded to my inquiries in trying to find out what was going on afterwards

This made me wonder if it would be kind of strange if I was submitted again to the same two agencies and whether or not that could be a positive or negative. For example, it could be like a job resume where you would say “Oh, that guy again” or maybe on the flip side it could be now that I have a strong referral it could be a “Hmm, let’s take a more serious second look”.

He told me to phone him back in a week or so to catch up some more, so well see where it goes from there.

One topic that came up in the actors group yesterday is how one person in the group is well into the 60’s to 70’s age and how he mentioned hat there is extremely fewer roles for him compared to people like myself who are young in the group.

While I suppose that is true, there are just so many factors that come into play in regards to the amount of opportunities that one can get. For example, as a visible minority I could just as easily say there is less opportunity for myself. Interestingly enough, some people even say that I look too young and that there are more roles for people with an older look.

As you can see, it is mostly matter a perspective. Depending on where you go and who you talk to, there are usually plenty of opportunities all around you. Example, I may be a visible minority, but that means if I do better then odds are I will have a better chance in landing future roles that require say a Chinese person of my look range as people will remember me.

Same thing with the age look I’d say. If I listened to people before I would have probably missed out on a lot of the opportunities that I have had thus far. So in general, while I’d say that starting at a young age has its benefits, you can still make something out of it very well regardless of your age.

So I really needed some advice in choosing the best scenes for my demo reel and so today I got together with the other actors and we watched through two specific short films to try and choose out the best scenes possible.

One topic that came up was the production quality as for one of the films it wasn’t exactly the best production wise, but the acting seemed to be a good contrasting scene. One person mentioned that he had to make a choice before too in a similar fashion where the sound quality wasn’t very good, but still it was a good demonstration of his skills and so he used it.

The verdict was that we would replace one scene that we originally chose for a new one. This is interesting too as it cuts the reel time by about 40 seconds which leaves me more flexibility to use something else as well. Tomorrow I am going to meet some old friends for a reunion of sort and so maybe I can get some feedback and maybe some contacts as well in general.

I was thinking about this the other day on whether or not getting a business card is useful as an actor. People use it all the time in business as networking is usually the key to landing business. In many ways when I think about it, acting is no different.

Kind of feels weird too for some strange reason. Something about whipping out a business card and saying “I’m an actor” seems a bit unusual as you usually associate business cards with a more corporate environment. The other thing I was thinking of too was just a generic business card with mainly a contact information as you can essentially use that in any situation.

Maybe I’ll just design one to see how I feel about it first and if the price is right to print them then it may be a wise decision.

So one thing that I am currently debating about is creating a new demo reel. The question that is boggling my mind is what clips to use and how long it should be. Some of the general points I was taught before was that demo reels should be between 2 to 3 minutes long as more than likely the person won’t actually watch through the whole thing. 5 minutes was supposed to be the absolute max.

Another tip was that your demo reel isn’t suppose to be like a music video and so you shouldn’t focus in just showing snazzy shots as oppose to clips that show your acting range. That’s kind of the most confusing part in a demo reel I’d say. The reason is that I would think one of your goal is to capture the person’s attention enough to watch through the whole reel. In that sense, you have to treat it as if you are making a movie in some way I’d say as you are trying to market yourself.

A great comparison example before in terms of choosing the right clips is that I initially used clips from my film acting school work. In general, they weren’t exactly the best looking quality wise but when it came to acting I felt that it showed my range and it stood out as the parts weren’t stereotypical. Example, I have a monologue where I cry, some very over the top comedy and as a result I got responses from agencies.

Later down the road, I decided to get advice from an acting coach and she gave me various monologues/scenes to do which she filmed and I tried those for my reel. Interestingly enough, although the picture quality was better it seemed like no one was interested in me afterwards. I felt that the biggest reason for it was because of the type of roles she had me read for. Example, one of them was a computer geek and the other one was like some Asian low life. Hence, there are a dime a dozen Asian actors that are stereotyped in this way and so I simply didn’t stand out.

So now that I have more roles under belt, I am going to again try to choose the best clips that show my acting range. At the same time, I am going to try and use some clips solely to establish how I look playing various roles such as a serious stern character or a goofball. Mainly a matter of trying to squeeze this in 3 minutes or so.