Actor Growth

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.

Happy Remembrance Day everyone. Over the past few days I was thinking how one thing that I need to do is to re-evaluate people’s first impression of me for casting purposes. Essentially, as an actor you are heavily pre-judged by what your headshot looks like as well as your appearance when you walk into the audition room.

I have heard that what some actors do is go up to complete strangers and simply ask them questions such as what kind of profession they are in. For example, some people might label one guy as a lawyer because of the suit they are wearing and another person might be stereotyped as a basketball player because they are so tall.

This is kind of hard to do with your friends and family since they know you quite well and therefore will already have a reservation about what to label you as considering they know your personality. I was thinking, maybe a funny way to do this is to go to like a speed dating event which would get rid of the awkwardness of just asking a complete stranger off the street.

Okay, this is interesting. I got the sides for tomorrow’s audition class. The side looks like it is going to be heavily dependent on the actor being able to pull off reactions as well as establishing the surrounding. The tricky thing is that in this scene a large part of it is like when you hear what the characters are thinking in their head.

Hence, it can be like a guy and a girl on a date and while watching the show you hear their thoughts on how they feel so nervous. Now in this case the sides explicitly say that the actor should read the voice overs as well and there is a lot of action in it.

I’m just thinking, how the heck do you pull this off? Like in the dating scene scenario, wouldn’t that look kind of silly in context of what is going on? One thing is for sure, I am glad I am doing this in the audition class as I have never seen a request like this and it is better to make the mistakes in class.