Actor Growth

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.

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.

I guess like any other job, when you are the new guy in the scene you usually want to make the best impression that you can and not wanting to make a big deal about things. Just the other day I was talking to a person who felt that many times there were productions that didn’t credit him appropriately as they simply don’t want to pay the rates of having to upgrade a person to a certain category.

The tricky thing he mentioned was that he is not exactly a big name or anything and so for the most part he just sucks it up as he doesn’t want to be excluded from future projects simply because of the notion that he say asked for an upgrade one time. In contrast to any other job it would be like people hired and paid to be say a cashier yet for some reason they then find themselves having to do merchandising, accounting work, scheduling, etc.

I suppose for myself it is fortunate that I enjoy most aspect of the film industry. So just having the opportunity to be a part of various productions is usually a good reward in itself. Have there been times where I felt that I was taken advantage of like with the example above? Absolutely.

But my hope has always been that I will just continue to do the opportunities that are presented to me to help myself grow as eventually I will either meet the right people or land the right opportunities to enable me to take the steps to move forward. I don’t see too much point in spending so much time and energy trying to get say a production to upgrade you from a small principal actor to a supporting actor if they are reluctant.

Like in that case, if you are still kind of fresh I would think just the fact that you were in the production will give you a lot of new tools and experience to do even greater things.

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.