Actor Growth

I was watching the SAG awards today and the most interesting part for myself wasn’t the awards itself, but the part that I thought was interesting was the beginning. Basically, at the start they had a bunch of actors talk about their life before getting their big break and people talked about things such as their jobs at the time.

While the format of it did kind of make it look like one of the alcohol anonymous groups, what was good to take away from that was how essentially everyone’s journey up until they landed those roles has helped them a lot. For example, there was one story about a person working at an office environment for about 8 years and not getting anything acting wise. Then low and behold the role she lands actually dealt with an office environment theme.

In many ways acting is just re-enacting real life experience and so in that sense you should value the things you do each day as you are continually training yourself to better understand various personalities and situations. Everyone has a different path and will play different roles, so you shouldn’t get discouraged if it looks like one person is accelerating faster in terms of landing roles.

Watching this show made me realize one of my goals too as an actor. There was this montage that showed clips of older movies that kind of molded the path for other actors. For the Asians, it seemed like the two main movies that were shown was The Game of Death which Bruce Lee and I think it was either Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Hero with Jet Li. Either way, they were both martial art flicks.

I guess we have yet to see any North American Asian actors be taken seriously in roles that would be award worthy when it comes to acting other than typical ones like these. It’s a hard stereotype to break that’s for sure in order to expand your opportunities, but that’s what makes this journey fun too.

Recently I have noticed quite a few postings for public service announcement projects. Some specifically are looking for actors while others don’t mention it specifically. I was just thinking that I was interested in trying as a form of goodwill and at the same time for experience.

Believe it or not, they actually made us do these types of things in acting classes before. The whole point was to learn how to be natural on the camera. At the same time, I’m personally not a household name at this point in time and so it makes you wonder if what I have to say would be that effective to help the cause of the PSA.

I’ll probably request for more details about one of them and go from there.

One interesting I have always found with a lot of actors is that they don’t view their profession just like any other entrepreneur in a different industry. Instead, they treat it more like an employee mentality where they go to a job and get paid to do work.

However, like an entrepreneur you have to promote yourself and have business expenses to pay. With that comes benefits too such as write offs. For example, the headshots that you get can be a write off towards your income or even travel expenses such as a vehicle you use to get to point A to point B. Heck, some actors even “incorporate” themselves when they find that they start to earn too much money.

Of course you should read up on the tax laws in your area, but starting to treat your profession as if you were a business person can be beneficial both in trying to land roles as well as helping yourself out financially when it comes to working in this industry.

One topic that came up in the actors group yesterday is how one person in the group is well into the 60’s to 70’s age and how he mentioned hat there is extremely fewer roles for him compared to people like myself who are young in the group.

While I suppose that is true, there are just so many factors that come into play in regards to the amount of opportunities that one can get. For example, as a visible minority I could just as easily say there is less opportunity for myself. Interestingly enough, some people even say that I look too young and that there are more roles for people with an older look.

As you can see, it is mostly matter a perspective. Depending on where you go and who you talk to, there are usually plenty of opportunities all around you. Example, I may be a visible minority, but that means if I do better then odds are I will have a better chance in landing future roles that require say a Chinese person of my look range as people will remember me.

Same thing with the age look I’d say. If I listened to people before I would have probably missed out on a lot of the opportunities that I have had thus far. So in general, while I’d say that starting at a young age has its benefits, you can still make something out of it very well regardless of your age.

So myself and some other actors are seriously contemplating about creating some kind of simple web series that we would create mostly for fun with the hopes that we can make something great out of it. As mentioned, in the group it seems like there are three of us that are dead serious about making things happen.

This might be interesting too as I am personally very comfortable and knowledgeable about publishing on the Internet which will come in handy. At this point the main idea that was thrown around is similar to a past idea where since we are all actors we would film our journey’s on like a weekly basis and the public can follow us.

Other than that, we were thinking of a semi reality and scripted story of some sort which all revolved around something comedic. Needs more time in the think tank though as we want to do something that is within our capabilities from a production point of view too.

After meeting the other actors yesterday I was talking to one person where we were talking about how it might be a cool idea that we film our meetings as a documentary and publish it in places such as YouTube where people can follow our careers.

When we thought about it, so many people have been able to successfully create their own shows with a large following this way which has definitely helped their careers a lot.  The only thing that could be iffy we thought was that we don’t exactly have the best equipment to film people with.

The main thing that I did like about the whole idea is that we would be pro active in making things happen for ourselves as oppose to relying on other people’s productions to get the opportunity to do some acting work.  It’s just an idea for now, so we’ll see how it goes.