Actor Growth

I went to the audition today and my first reaction was how I was wondering if I was even in the right room. Reason for this was because the room was full of Caucasian people who were in their 40’s and usually when I am called it is usually with a room full of Asians or people within my age range.

The scary thing was as you know I never got the sides for this. Even at the audition there was none available. Fortunately as time went on I did see another Asian pop in. It was cool as I actually met this person once while auditing an actors workshop and so we recognized each other. Sure enough, he was reading for the same role.

I immediately asked him if he received sides for this as I never got one. He mentioned he did and immediately gave me the sides that he wrote on paper to review. He then talked with me a bit about the scene so that I would hopefully have a grasp as to what was going on. That was so awesome I thought to see an actor willing to help another in this kind of situation as stereotypically you would think everyone would want to sabotage you for their own gain.

Thanks to his help I went in the audition room and everything was pretty straight forward. I was surprised at how little people they brought in for this particular character as it looked like there were only three of us. As usual, there is nothing you can do now so you just have to wait for the next audition and such as you let the production decide on who they want to go with.

I got an extremely unexpected message today while on set as I got a call from my principal agent saying that I had an audition request. While that is great, there are absolutely no sides or information available about it other than the title and character it is for. Even the agent was telling me that he was trying to get a hold of the casting director for more details with no luck. To make matters worse, the audition is tomorrow!

I never experienced this situation before. What to do? My first reaction was to text message my favorite acting coach to see if he had any idea what this project was about so that I can at least b semi prepared. It would be horrible to present on the spot something say very dramatic when it is supposed to be a comedy for example. So far no luck. So I guess I am on my own.

Hope this turns out okay. I am almost thinking of going to the audition room extremely in hopes to actually get to see the sides to better prepare myself.

So today I attended the paid audition. It was kind of odd as the building looked fairly empty from the outside and inside you entered. Interestingly enough, apparently one of the art schools here use this building as a facility of some sort.

I was greeted by a lady and before she brought me up she handed me a disclosure form to sign. This form was obviously just created by some regular people it seemed and was kind of awkward. Essentially, it wanted you to sign that since we are being recorded any of the sound and footage may be used for documentary purposes and that we waive any rights to damages that may occur as a result of these footages.

I guess an example would be if you did something super embarrassing and they say YouTube it you can’t then go after them for damages if it affects your career. As well, they would pay the actors $100 do all this. I must say, I was a little iffy about it. But, I decided to try it anyways.

Why? Because from my understanding of things like the law if they say try to purposely use this footage in an intentionally manipulative way to make people look like fools then I still have my rights to stop them. Basically, I guess you can say it is misleading. It’s different if it’s say someone went to an audition taping and accidentally slipped on the floor.

When I went up it was a huge room that was mostly empty like an unfinished constructed building. There were four people in total. One person doing the casting, one reader and two camera people. All in all there was only two takes and it lasted about 3 minutes. They asked if I did things like martial arts and I said yes.

The person asked me to show some moves and I only did conservative stuff. The reader actually did a martial art form that I practiced as well and we did some light “sticky hands”. My assumption is that the reader was actually playing a part in this short film.

It went okay in the end. Very awkward experience though.

Okay, this was very strange I thought. I got an audition request recently and the interesting thing was that in the note they were specifically going to pay the talent money to audition for them. Very unusual in deed.

What’s the catch? The only thing I could see is that they are apparently interested in using the audition tapings as part of their documentary in making the film. So maybe the money would be a way for people to agree to do this should they decide to use your audition footage.

The first thing I thought of was how this must be one expensive audition process for the producers. Secondly it made me wonder if this was a serious production or if they are trying to do like a blooper or documentary of sort. Guess I’ll have to wait and see as this would be a first.

The audition the other day went okay and it was kind of interesting. It was for a commercial and people in a group of three were brought in. This audition felt like it was 100% based on look. Essentially, when we were brought in we were asked to just improvise that we were like college students who were talking about school life as they taped it.

Then, the camera person just slowly zoomed into each of us as we did this improvisation. So I think that is a sign that the intent for this is to just show the client on the type of looks they have and from there they can choose which groups of people they like best.

Well this was an unexpected surprised. I got a call from the agent today that a casting director requested to see me for some kind of commercial shoot. The cool thing too is that the audition takes place tomorrow right in the studio where I took the audition workshops. So, hopefully that gives me an advantage.

This was technically the first day that I asked my coach for any possible pointers even though I am not active in the workshop at this point. Result? No response from the message I sent. Then again, as you all know the other coach that said he wanted to speak to me didn’t get back to me either. So, maybe this truly is one of those it is all about the money scenario.

Either way, hopefully this audition will go okay. Guess I am on my own.