Actor Growth

I was talking to another actor recently who apparently traveled to New York before to learn about acting.  When it came to getting training, he mentioned how there were so many different types of quality workshops you could take for as little as $17 for a 5 hour session with recognized coaches.  It was a group session of course.  When you compare it to the average price tag of say $250 here, he just felt that it was a scam.

While I personally never been elsewhere for acting training other than Vancouver, in many ways I do agree that the prices seem pretty high here.  Although, for myself a lot of my training came from public schools and so price wise I think it was pretty reasonable as it was inline with anything else you would want to study in.

Honestly though, I think like most things the best type of training is practical experience.  Even for myself I can say most of my real growth in terms of becoming a better actor came from high school as the instructor kept pushing me and gave me so many opportunities to be involved in plays.

As I grew up and went to a different school as well as learning from some working professionals, I felt that you were learning more about theory and technical applications.  I didn’t exactly get as much opportunity to get practical experiences in those situations and not surprisingly I don’t think the training had that big of an impact in me growing as a professional actor from a performance point of view.  It definitely helped me from the business aspect though.

I personally feel that actors overall are the worst when it comes to being very susceptible to every offer that they see which they think will be the answer to catapult their career.  Like anything else, you should really sit down and compare the value to what you are paying for.  Otherwise it is no real different than people who go to every get rich quick seminar and purchase every material that guarantees success.

I recently saw an ad from a person who was interested in setting up an acting group where people can teach each other techniques while supporting each other during their acting career.  I thought it was a great idea as with anything in life you usually need to surround yourself with like minded people in order to achieve what it is that you want.

I met with them today and in total there were about 8 people.  It was great to learn about all the different background and experiences that had thus far.  While today was just a meet and greet, next we are hoping to do some monologues or even filming.  An idea flew around too to try and find people who were interested in say script writing or camera work where we can all create our own films to get exposure and experience.

As a teenager I always thought I would go into something tech oriented and I was a fairly quiet person. During high school though, for one reason or another the school’s theatre program instructor really pushed me to take the theatre acting program. I personally thought he was crazy too considering I always got nervous whenever trying to speak to a large group of people.

I then learned later on that a big reason for wanting me to go into the program was that the instructor wanted to break a stereotype that Asians were too quiet and could not succeed in the program. As a point of note the school, Templeton Secondary, had one of the best theatre programs in all of BC with an ample amount of awards and recognition to back it up.

Long story short, I eventually did decide to dedicate myself to the program throughout my high school life and accomplished a lot including winning recognitions in provincial competitions. It really did change me a lot as well for the better such as giving me the confidence to do public speaking with ease.

After graduation though, the tech side in me still wanted to explore other things such as the growth of the Internet and that led me into a direction away from acting. A few years later, I seemed to have done what I wanted to do to satisfy the tech side in me and I started to wonder where if I pursued acting immediately instead how would it have turned out? At the same time, I really enjoyed film as it is one of those things where you create once and it can stay alive for ages.

As a result, I decided I wanted to get back into acting. At first I took an intensive acting workshop from Studio 58 since my training has primarily been in theatre. Eventually, I decided that I needed to learn about film acting specifically and so I enrolled into a full time film acting program at Capilano college. After completing the program, I was ready to start my journey in trying to make a career as an actor. However, something came up shortly after, which I can probably write a script for one day, as it involves a lot of things that halted my ambition.

Despite these setbacks, just a few months ago I decided to go ahead anyways with my ambition as the longer I wait the more time I am wasting I’d say. As of now, I am doing gigs on short independent films as well as extra work for various productions.

I am still young with a youthful look, so let’s see where this journey takes me. Fortunately with my tech background, running this blog is easy for me and maybe I’ll get to meet some great people along the way.