Actor Growth

This might have been a very crucial day in my acting career thus far. During the workshop we did some cold reads which was kind of interesting. At first we were partnered up in pairs being one guy and one girl. With this, we all received the same 5 page script that we practiced together and would then audition for it.

The catch? During the actual audition time we were not allowed to use the partner we have been practicing with. Therefore, all of the scene blocking or interpretation of the scene that we did may be thrown out the window as the person reading for us would be completely different. The pint that this showed is that for an audition you can practice all you want with your friends and all. However, in the actual room you don’ know if the reader is say going to be good or bad to prevent you from doing it the way you intended. Therefore, you have to learn to adapt to it. Overall it went okay.

That wasn’t the main highlight of the day though. Beforehand, I asked the acting coach if he had time to discuss about my career goals and questions after class and indeed he said that was not a problem. Basically what happened was that I discussed about my current growth in the industry and wanting to learn what he felt I could do to improve my mark and presence.

Cause as you all know, when I attended that casting director workshop I received some very good praises and as well I have that feature film to act in soon. However, even with this I still feel something is holding me back as I have no problems auditioning and landing roles for independents. Getting seen for the bigger work is an extreme challenge though. We went through a lot of details such as reviewing my resume, discussing about my agent representation and so fourth.

While I will need to address a lot of things, here is the super interesting part. The coach with much excitement said he knows exactly what I need to do that will make a huge difference. He says that I need to be more LA like. Persona wise I guess you can say he wants me to look “cooler” and “tougher”. He expressed how obviously in real life I am more conservative and I can be that way still personally. But since this industry is based so much on image and first impressions he feels this will help to raise more awareness. Therefore, he started to phone a friend of his who is a stylist saying how he wanted her to hook up with me to give me a makeover and all.

Even when I showed my headshot, I have one that is like a super smiley shot and another that is more cool looking I guess you can say. Basically, he wants me to be more like that cool guy in terms of look where when I walk into a room that is the perception that people are going to have of me.

He then asked me a question on why I studied martial arts initially. I mentioned how because I have always been a smaller person people always picked on me. So, I decided to learn it to prevent that. Funny enough, I never even told these “bullies” that I began studying martial arts yet everyone suddenly stopped trying to pick a fight with me. The coach then says this is exactly what the makeover is going to do as you don’t even need to do anything afterwards as it will project a completely different attitude and confidence with people.

Even I said this was a little scary. But we’ll see how it goes. And hey, I guess it will be an entertaining read for all of you to see if this has a profound impact or not. There was also some other stuff that he suggested I do which will be interesting too.

This must be a new thing with student and independent films. As you know, many times as growing actors we volunteer our time to act in films for free to gain experience, contacts and some possible footage to use on our reels. However, you don’t really want to work on productions that seem very unprofessional as the result could be that the footage is completely unusable.

Recently, a lot of casting call notices I have seen have written how any actor that participates in their film would get “great experience and an IMDB credit”. These are mostly from students too. While there is nothing wrong with that, it just seems like so many people are now using that as a sort of bribery as if an IMDB credit is going to put you in a different league where you will become famous.

When I first started out I thought IMDB was like an industry operated site where big production companies would list the cast and crew. Hence, it should give you a lot of credibility. However, as I got deeper into my acting journey I realized that anyone can update and add credits for almost anything. This includes student films too.

Therefore, in terms of credibility it is more about being listed with a well known production with a good role to really give you that boost in confidence. For myself, that is why I never personally bothered too much with IMDB credits as I haven’t done anything out of the extraordinary yet where I feel it would give me a huge boost in my career. Unless you are really that famous that is when everyone is going to want to try and update your profile with everything that you have been on.

I might just add a credit just to show how simple it really is. I was also told too that even if you have a ton of credits listed on IMDB, if they were all for projects like those student film examples it can end up making you look unprofessional. Think of it like a traditional job resume too. While you may have worked for so many companies, listing just ones that you feel give you the most credibility and relevance to your professional goal is a better way to go I’d say.

While it is definitely great to work on independent films, don’t let the IMDB credit pitch be the primary factor to decide if you should do it or not as oppose to evaluating the professionalism of the team and quality of the script I’d say.

Yesterday I was doing some simple background work for a TV show and I noticed something interesting. Now this isn’t exactly an acting gig, but in this line of work many times the production people would just choose people on the spot to perform certain actions on the scene. When I was there, it looked like I was the only young Asian guy on set.

That made me stood out it seems as every time they tried to make some kind of group such as a family, friends, colleagues and so fourth I was constantly chosen either because I was young or Asian. Eventually, you had the production people specifically trying to find me too it seemed. I am just reminded how people say it is so hard to break into the industry as an Asian performer yet times like these it’s almost like it’s to your advantage since there are more odds that there will be less people of your look type and category.

It also made me think about the youth aspect in general. There were these two scenes that required some running and the majority of us were carrying luggage. I guess a big factor was my youth as they figured odds are I was still physically able to run while holding large items.

As a side note, this turned out to be hilarious as the guy told me to run and sure enough I did. I guess they under estimated how fast I could run and as a result in the background you would see me as this guy sprinting with this luggage when the focus should have been on the main actors. It was like some guy that was missing his flight or something and was determined to make it. Everybody cracked up at that and if being a young minority didn’t help me to stand out I guess this sure did as so many crew members kept approaching me about it afterwards. lol.

This scenario isn’t too far fetched when it comes to say trying to get an audition for a role. It could be that they are looking for young people and in an effort to get a diverse group of people in the room you can easily stand out since there are generally less ethnic people available. Afterwards, if you do a really great audition, regardless if you get the role you will stick in the back of their heads as someone to call when they need a person of your type.

So today I got the full script for the feature film that will be shooting soon. It looks like the bulk of my work and lines comes near the end of the film. After reading everything this is indeed an ambitious project with a lot of CG effects.

I guess my acting coach was right about this one in terms of the type of roles that I can play. I mentioned before that these are the types of roles I don’t think I would ever get cast for since usually movies are very specific in terms of the type of physique they are looking for in a stereotypical way and this is definitely not what I would consider a type cast for me. And sure enough, I will be playing one in this movie.

That made me think too if getting cast for this role had to do largely because the production people were impressed with my audition and therefore it’s one of those “We should put the guy in something” type of scenario. Good either way I suppose.

Looking at the schedule, I still have a good 3 weeks or so until the shoot. So, lots of time to study everything.

So technically after today the next class would be my seventh making this the longest workshop program I have taken so far apart from the full time film acting program I took in the past. I guess that is a good sign thus far if I am continuing to stay this long.

Today I did a scene from the movie “He’s Just Not That Into You”. I never seen it myself, so in that sense it was good as I was able to try and interpret everything on my own first without bias. For those who have seen the movie, it was a bar scene between a character named Alex and Gigi where Alex was talking about how men don’t call women back.

My initial interpretation was that these two only knew each other from the bar where Alex works and Gigi was like a customer. My decision was to play the character as a blunt tough love type of approach where everything was extremely directly when he was giving out his secrets about men in general as if he was talking to a friend.

As I anticipated, this got a lot of laughs since it was so blunt and direct as it is something that you wouldn’t really expect. The coach then wanted me to go in a different direction where instead the Alex character actually liked the character in a potential relationship way which in hence would turn the whole thing to be more sympathetic.

Now what caught my attention was that he mentioned the first way that I chose to go with doesn’t make the audience fall in love with me whereas that would. That was kind of interesting in the sense that in film in general it’s always about connecting with the audience where they care about the character to want to listen to what they have to say or to be rooting for them.

I guess the conflicting thing in my mind was that this was an audition style and so it should have been more about doing it with my interpretation to stand out. However, I took the direction and did it the way the coach suggested. At the end he seemed very happy about it and started to say how that is indeed the type of character people would fall for.

He then made a comment too that anyone could do the scene the way I did it in the first take, but this second approach isn’t the same story and it would definitely stand out. It was all interesting to think about. The funny thing for me I thought afterwards was that serious and dramatic style roles are a lot easier for me than comedy I think.

As well, I guess the new thing that comes to my head is once again that balance. Example, when to use a comedic approach and when to use a serious approach in terms of increasing your chances for success at an audition? Like in this example, I could easily see two different directors having two completely different perspectives/opinions.

While working on set yesterday I was talking to a person that was telling me about his life as a stuntman. I always heard that this was a very difficult field to get into not so much about the type of work that you do, but rather the politics involved in getting those opportunities.

Essentially, what I learned was that to get stunt roles here it doesn’t involve having an agent where say they submit you and the casting director chooses who they want. Instead, the way it works is that the productions hires a person called a “stunt coordinator”. This person then brings people in to do the work.

This is where it got interesting. He was telling me that when it comes to stunts there is usually a lot of money involved as you may imagine and as a result the stunt coordinators can become very territorial to each other in a dog eat dog world type of scenario when one person gets hired by the production over the other. I was just joking at first on how it was like a gang mentality in some ways.

To further paint that vision of how things work, he was saying that when the stunt coordinators give out work a lot has to do with distributing it as see fit based a lot on making sure his/her favorite people are “fed”. With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why this field is so hard to get into from a political standpoint.

You know, before this my perception on how stunts worked if you wanted to get into that field was that you would work very hard in doing simple set work like say background work and then as you become known in the industry as a very reliable person a casting director would be inclined to call you and ask if you would like to do that kind of work.

I remember my last agent told me for example that when you become known as the reliable person, in many cases you have to join the Union to start getting the higher gigs and so if casting directors know that you are the hard working and reliable one they will go out of there way to try and get you gigs such as stunts so that you can get your credits to join the Union.

While both cases are probably true, the story this guy told seems to make sense in a more everyday scenario.