Actor Growth

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.