Actor Growth

I still remember paying for a membership for this site and I realized that I haven’t really been using it that much. I was just trying it today and it seems like a very chaotic message board that they have on that site. There is basically a couple of places where people are supposed to be able to find agents for representation or possible auditions to go to.

The thing is the forum seems so stone aged technology wise that the messages get cluttered up easily. As well, it seems very difficult to flesh out legitimate postings such as whether or not the agents who are advertising there are reputable or not. Basically, there just seems to be so many people trying to desperately break into the industry where one simple post can easily get dozens of replies.

I am going to try and dive into this a bit more and see what more I can get out of this service as like many times it’s what you do with it that counts.

I saw this audition posting today and thought “What?” Essentially, it was advertising for a Chinese character that is about 8 years old. Judging by the name “Joey” I guess it is safe to assume that it is a male role. However, as you can see right next to the posting they placed in brackets “Male or Female”

Now that is just plain confusing. Upon further review, this actually appears to be the exact same film that I auditioned for yesterday too. So it would appear that they are still scrambling to find a lot of people. Either this was a really rushed casting process or there just seems to be an extraordinary amount of disorganization.

For myself I would tend to not respond to these types of ads usually though as I can’t help to think that the project isn’t taken too serious to have details like these turn out this way. Something new everyday……

Recently I was sent an e-mail from a student in the Vancouver Film School in regards to possibly auditioning for one of their projects. Upon reading it, it seemed like the age look that they were looking for was way out of my range such as a 40 year old look. On top of that, the sides that were given to me beforehand was for like 40 year olds and an 8 year old it seemed.

So just to be sure, I gave the person my online demo reel as I didn’t think I had the right look for any of the roles. Upon looking at it he still thought I may be suitable for one of the roles. Therefore, I agreed to pop by for a read as I figured why not. When I arrived today the person who e-mailed me recognized me.

It started getting a little odd from there as he asked me which parts I wanted to read for. Considering to my knowledge that every character but one is either 40+ or under 10 it seemed like an odd question. I was then given the side too and It was completely different than what was given to me beforehand. I wasn’t really given time to really sink it in either and was brought to the room.

It was extremely awkward as I didn’t really have a good grasp on the background story as well the side for the character only had one line with the rest being reaction shots. You can imagine how that makes the situation worst as if you don’t truly understand the scene itself it is almost hopeless in terms of giving the right reactions. Overall, I wasn’t really comfortable and don’t think it went too well.

It always made me wonder though when it comes to this school and whether or not they are just required to audition an X amount of people to get a certain grade. Or at worst, just calling in actors as guinea pigs to give themselves experience in casting people. I say this too because I had a friend that was requested to audition once where the role required the person to speak Japanese which he had no knowledge of. Yet, they still called him and he read the Japanese parts in English. Of course, he didn’t get the part.

Interesting audition day though I must say.

So I sent off a message to all of the agencies that I am potentially interested in and believe that will be it for my inquiries for me to decide who to go with. Essentially, I got four responses out of five and the responses have been interesting so far.

One agency is ready to take me on and is just letting me decide and another mentioned that I would be too much of a conflict with their existing roster and to try again in 6 months. Another replied to me, was the agent herself, and asked me what my age was and I haven’t heard anything back since. The last one responded to me with a particular agent from the agency saying while she isn’t looking for anyone at the time, she will pass my information around as a different agent who works there may be interested in me.

In general, I only got to actually meet and speak with one out of the five agencies in-person so far. So now the question is, how long do I wait before I say “These guys are off my list” and to finally make a decision to go with someone? Most people say you should wait two to four weeks to get a response as it could be that they haven’t had time to see your package yet. However, in my case thanks to the Internet I know that everyone saw my package and add that to the fact that someone acknowledge that they are evaluating.

I think I will give it two to three weeks still though unless something crazy comes up where I absolutely need new representation now in which case I will sign with the one that offered representation. Of course, the option is there for me to just keep things the way they are but that would be kind of silly as I wouldn’t be looking for a change if it was working out.

I’ll definitely try to keep myself busy too with things like independent films.

I was watching American Idol today and there was this one particular part of the show that just seemed so wrong to me. What happened was that at the very last audition they showed this girl who also brought in her friend to the audition as apparently she loved one of the judges a lot. After a lot of goofing around, the girl began to sing.

Unfortunately her singing was really bad and the judges tried not to laugh. To make it worst, her friend that she brought in with her was trying not to laugh at her performance too it seemed. Once the judges gave their opinions to her, she started to cry and say how all her friends and such say how she had a great voice and all.

I was just looking at that and was thinking “Are they really friends?” It’s one thing to not want to hurt other’s feelings, but it just seemed so dubious that the person’s friend was laughing at her in the background which implied to me that she fully knew that her singing wasn’t very good. When you think about it, isn’t better to tell the person the truth?

That’s a really difficult thing with acting and film in general too. Whenever you show people your work you want honest feedback as it is the only way you know whether or not what you are doing is believable/convincing to others as well. It doesn’t help much when people tell you that it looked great just because they are afraid that it will hurt your feelings.

Of course there is such a thing as subjective opinions, but for situations like this if you truly believe it wasn’t good then you are helping the person more by giving them an honest feedback. With that in mind too, if you are looking for a training buddy to brush up on your skills it could be a good idea to find another professional who doesn’t know you too well to increase your chances of getting honest feedback.

This was a first for me today. I submitted my information to some principal agencies and one in particular responded fairly quickly. The interesting was, they asked me what my age was. This is interesting because usually it doesn’t really matter as it all depends on your “look”.

But when I was thinking about it, this has happened to me once before during an audition and one time while on set I think I discovered why people ask that sometimes. In general I have a pretty young look. One day I was working on set with a person who casted me in one of his films and he made a comment how before he met me he was looking at my resume and thinking “Did this guy read what age the character is?”.

Afterwards though, he looked at my headshot and realized that I was a fit look wise. Turns out, the reason why he thought I was say a very old person initially was because I have a lot of film experience on my resume and hence the assumption is that you are this very old person. Like with this agent, I bet that was the same case where I listed so much stuff that they were confused on what my age was.

That’s something to think about too when it comes to your resume. Many times when you list a lot of stuff people will automatically assume you are an older fellah. So strategically it can be a good idea to only list specific credit if you are young and starting out too as that way you won’t be pre-judged as much and at the same time you can still show that you have experience under your belt. Unless you have established yourself already then the more the merrier I’d say.