Actor Growth

I must say, this is feeling really weird. After having to sign the acting contract myself, recently my agent contacted on whether or not I was available to do some background work on a show. This was, it was a text message. Okay, maybe I am just assuming too much, but I can’t help to think this was to semi avoid speaking to me on the phone as I never got a response before when it came to something serious about an acting gig.

I was also reading a message on a site today too that was kind of interesting as one person was complaining their agent was ignoring him/her whenever he/she requested to have a sit down to talk about career direction. Was kind of interesting as one guy’s advice was to pretty much just dump the agent that quick and find a new one.

So yeah, that incident didn’t exactly give me a boost of confidence or anything. Oh well, enough ranting about that though. Time to do something about it.

Today in the audition workshop it was more or less similar to last week except this week there were a total of three males including myself. The regular acting coach was still on set filming that new movie “The Stranger” that has the former wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin in it. Must be fun I thought. Similar with last week we got the same acting coach though and it is nice to get feedbacks and directions from different people as it is a great way to learn.

One really interesting technique about the whole audition process that I learned today was that you should map out your plan as to how you are going to physically position yourself and the room for the audition. Many times we are so focused in trying to understand the script and our lines where we completely forget about planning the logistics on how to best present it.

The thing is, an audition is not like a movie where all of the camera angles or say set decorations are done for you. For the most part, it is you in this blue room with a chair, a reader, the casting director and a cameraman. So with that you should plan ahead of time on where you are going to sit/stand, the direction you will be facing, how to best use the room as an eye line, etc. This will help to prevent any surprises where you have to completely improvise everything on the spot.

The coach made a comment in the end how I seem to have this really good energy about me and that I will probably land a lot of roles. The first thing that this made me think of was I think for the most part I’m not exactly getting in front of casting directors enough to get my name/face out there effectively as I seem to be doing it all by myself. So maybe when the original coach comes back I can have that sit down with him to receive some business tips about the industry as similar to what I said in my other posts I am seriously contemplating about my representation.

So today I am going to bunker down and sign this deferral contract. It sounds pretty straight forward. The main weird thing is that this is a Canadian shoot with what looks to be a primarily a Canadian cast yet in some points there is a statement written that disputes will be handled through the “American Arbitration Association”.

I’m just thinking, how does that work exactly? As mentioned before, I had no help from the agent and so hopefully everything will work out. I did look at the cast sheet as well and there sure were a lot of familiar local names. These aren’t exactly people that the general public would recognize, but rather there are a lot of up and comers such as myself.

So today I was working on set and at the same time was hoping to hear back from my agent about the contract that I received yesterday. As it turns out, my agent never contacted me back again. Therefore, it looks like the course of action now is that I am going to make the decision solely on my own and unfortunately this incident is making me think of my current relationship with the agency.

I think I can say without a doubt that one of the most difficult tasks thus far in my acting journey is finding the right agent that is always responsive and motivated to answer questions with he/she being just as excited about me moving my career forward. So why is it that this seems so difficult to accomplish?

So my action plan now is that I am going to decide in signing on the contract alone and over the next week or so I will re-assess my representation situation.

Looks like the shoot date of that feature film is coming closer and closer. Today I was a bit surprised as the producer sent me a deferral contract outlining the pay structure for the film. Originally I thought we were doing this as a pilot/test to see if they can attract more investors first. I guess they are super confident or something and want to protect the rights of the performers and the production.

I was wondering what a deferral contract was and by the sounds of it the general gist of it is once the production starts to make some kind of revenue then the actors will be paid accordingly. I was reading some examples online and a scenario I read was this is just incase the film turns out to be say a Blair Witch project type of success. You can imagine all of the anarchy about pay and rights that will occur as a result.

I did read it over myself and everything seems pretty straight forward. However, to be on the safe side I contacted my agent to hopefully have his input on it as well. Honestly, I don’t even care too much about the pay as it sounds like this will be a great experience for me. One uneasy bit about this is that as of writing this my agent hasn’t got back to me yet. So ironically, this contract scenario is making me more worried about my representation rather than the role itself. lol.

Worried in a sense where I landed this role by myself and I kind of need a prompt response for this from my agent for some reassurance and it’s not there. Crazy how things work sometimes. I’ll post an update tomorrow on what happened.

Last week there was no class as the coach was unavailable. This week he was working on a film set and so one of the other coaches came in to teach the session. This was a new month too and everyone in there was different aside from myself today. Some of them came from the other workshop classes.

Today was the first day where everyone literally did the same scene as we auditioned it with our own interpretation and style. Like an audition, we were sent out of the room and were called in one by one. It was a really interesting experience for me as although the coach mentioned that I made very strong choices, in the end we all as a class really tried to dissect the audition side even further to see if the choices we made were the best for this scene.

It was amazing on how much information about the story you can get from every little word of the script. While I originally interpreted it with a more serious tone, there were so many elements of the character that you are speaking to which was revealed by reading the sides more thoroughly.

Many times when you get a side the production crosses out dialogue from a script that doesn’t relate to you specifically. Example, imagine on the page there is a fight scene and your character is talking to another character. However, just before that the scene is crossed off as they want to see how you handle this scene specifically.

Now what most people would do is just read the checked off portion of the script and work on that for the audition. So your mindset in reading the dialogue would be something like “Okay, these two want to tear each other apart as they are like mortal enemies”. However, reading the crossed off sections before can give you so much hint about the back story.

Example, it could be that the scene that was crossed out was a daydream sequence where these two characters were kids and were like best friends. Reading that and knowing that fact can have such a profound difference on how you present the scene. So before when you read a line that said something like “I’m here to fight you” you might think that is in a violent way. However, knowing that back story could make you play it in a resentful way instead. That is a big difference.

Interesting session this was.