Actor Growth

Alright, it looks like I finally decided on who to go with to get the supplemental acting headshots from. I currently have it scheduled for next week so this gives me plenty of time to prepare. It’s going to be funny for me this time around as before I had nothing really to compare to.

Since these are supplemental ones I am probably going to constantly compare the quality of it to my current ones. The first time around when I got my headshots too I had no agent feedback as I was still looking. So that will be another new thing as this time I will be showing the proofs with my agent and from there we can decide which one works best.

Now I am thinking that I may have to go shopping for some different clothes and accessories. I prefer shopping for things like electronics………

I was talking to some people the other day who always wanted to try acting but were simply too scared with the notion that they can’t stand the thought of not knowing when their next job will be. At the same time, I guess everyone has heard the starving artist stories where the majority of performers make less than a minimum wage job for the whole year.

While I don’t have enough examples of diverse acting role payments, today I got a phonecall from my BG agent as I apparently had a ton of cheques from past work that I have yet to pick up. While looking at them today I thought this just reminded me on what you have to prepare for when you are trying to pursue acting as a career. I just scanned these three cheques to demonstrate my example:

Imagine everyday you have no idea what your next gig may be. At the same time, you can’t necessarily predict how much you will earn in a month. Just take a look at those examples and how different the pay was for each production.

In my opinion, the smart way to do this is to have something you can rely on that is flexible. I’m actually surprised at how many real estate agents try to pursue acting for example as you would think every performer would be working at say a restaurant as a server.

But hey, enjoy what you do as always. If you are going to be in a self employed type of environment then you have to enjoy it I’d say. Unpredictable income just comes with the territory regardless of what field you are in until you are semi established.

Some may say that you have to starve yourself on purpose so that it pushes you to reach your goals faster. But, that’s the great thing about situations like this as there are just so many ways to do it that you need to find what way works for you the best.

So recently I had to memorize a whole load of dialogue for a scene and for the most part it seemed okay. This then reminded me of all the times where when I couldn’t memorize my lines very well it seemed to be attributed to things like my meals.

Yeah, I guess it sounds a little weird when you say it. For example, people always say that things like fish are brain food. I definitely do notice the difference in how much faster I can memorize lines when I have meals like those for example.

Although, there are some people that can memorize like one whole page worth of monologues in one cold read. I definitely don’t know what they are doing to train their brain and memory to work that well.

Over the past week I have noticed that there have been a flood of advertisements for people who were trying to create teams for various film festivals and competitions. These consist of ones where you have to make a film within 24 hours or say competitions that try to replicate a real scenario where you have to pitch the films to producers of sort.

I guess for the actors like myself this is usually a good time to network with a lot of people while being able to expand your portfolio. The trickiest thing is trying to find the professional people to work with as many times a lot of these teams can end up just quitting mid production for whatever reason.

I haven’t participated one in awhile come to think of it as when it came to short films it has been mostly with people that I have worked with before.

Okay, I must be over-complicating this or something as the first time I chose a photographer I simply went with the one that the people in the acting community kept saying was a good one. It was very expensive but it turned out great.

Since these are supplemental looks that I would be going for having to look through every photographers portfolio seems to be a little cumbersome. One way that has semi helped the process is by simply going to a photo reproduction site where it seems like all of the photographers have their work on it. So you can scan through every image to see which style clicks for you as oppose to visiting each person’s site individually. Search continues.

Happy Canada day all. Today I made a big change and have officially switched to a new agent to handle my principle representation. This took awhile and I thought a lot about it. I felt that this was a better choice for myself in order to progress better in the acting field.

People usually say that getting an agent is one of the hardest things to do as an actor. Just from this journey thus far I would say the main issue is finding one that you will click with. The funny thing is that I may have to redo my portfolio a bit such as getting some additional headshots as we both agreed that I needed one more type of look.

I was thinking of just going back to the same photographer that did mines originally as the quality was really good. However, I thought that changing it up a bit could be a good decision as every photographer has a different style. Time to research about that I guess.

All in all, this agent appears to have the same level of enthusiasm as I do to work together and so hopefully that will equal to a great future. Never a dull moment as everything changes so fast in this business.