Actor Growth

You may remember a few weeks back I went for an audition that I thought went very well. Today, I got an e-mail from the producer asking me to phone him back. I assumed that was good news as in most cases people wouldn’t bother to contact you if they weren’t interested in any way.

While talking to him on the phone, he told me that they auditioned a lot of people and they decided that I could pull off a different character quite nicely other than the one I read for. Therefore, either way I got a role in this independent feature film.

I’m actually excited about this as resource and commitment wise these guys seem like they are dead serious in creating a film that has a high production value quality. At the same time, it is so true in this scenario where doing great and trying to stand out individually can result in the production saying something along the lines of “Okay, we like this guy…….what can we put him in” even though you may not be the ideal person for the particular role you read for.

So I was talking with my agent recently about my growth and direction thus far as I was curious if he had any input when it comes to myself in comparison to other local Vancouver actors who get seen by casting directors. Essentially, I was trying to find out what other people’s competitive edges were where they would be called for something over myself or vice versa.

He began by mentioning how it would make his job so much easier if he knew exactly what a casting director wanted. However, most of the time they just ask for very generic descriptions for a person such as the age and sex of the actor.

Out of that conversation too he addressed that a casting director usually calls 15 actors to audition per character. As well, he estimated that there were approximately 60,000 male actors here in the BC area. Putting that number into perspective should really make you think how competitive this field is.

He even mentioned that even though I’m ethnic, which puts me in a smaller demographic, there is no way to figure out what characteristics a casting director is looking for unless they mark Asian males only in their casting information.

You know, casting directors always say that if you even make it to the audition room you should be super happy. Many times I don’t really think too much of it, but thinking about those numbers sure puts everything in a different perspective. If here in BC we have 60,000 male actors, does that mean LA has like 500,000?

Now I know what my old acting classmate meant when he said he went to New York and couldn’t even get seen.

I was talking to a person recently who mentioned that he would be interested in seeing me publish simple videos of times when I am on set in a simple Q&A type of setup for the visitors. While many people post video clips of their days on set and such, I guess there isn’t too many performers that take requests from readers.

My first thought was that a big reason I suppose people don’t do this is that film sets can be super sensitive about what people publish and most people want inside story scoop information which we can’t do. Usually though we are free to say generic stuff such as talking about what we ate or who we met/worked with. That’s not that exciting is it? Lol. Going to an audition itself is kind of an open book though usually.

Maybe I’ll put together some little videos I took of just me hanging around with other performers on certain sets or the places I have had to travel to. But, feel free to ask if anyone has a particular request as maybe what’s considered routine for me might be super exciting for others.

I might consider making a no budget online reality show out of it if it turns out to be something fun.

Since I only have two sessions left with the current place I am taking acting workshops from I am already in the hunt for a different one. I actually see one that looks pretty good and have already sent an inquiry about it.

It is located in the Vancouver area too which seems great. One of my criteria this time around was to find a coach that also focuses in trying to help their students actually get auditions such as advice on networking, how to market themselves, types of places to find auditions, etc.

I personally have found this lacking thus far with the current place I attend.

I was reading this interesting article at the Showfax site by a casting director named Bonnie Gillespie at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/index.html which had a lot of important notes about knowing your character type I thought.

There was a lot of insightful points such as if an actor submits themselves for virtually every role it can come across as desperate or that they don’t know their own look range. Another interesting note was the one I read about meeting casting directors.

Basically, she talks about how there are so many casting directors out there where it is better to just research the one’s that usually cast for projects that you would have a good chance of getting as oppose to just trying to meet everyone. Usually people tell you to always take every casting director workshop for example. I guess this puts it in perspective in terms of narrowing down your focus. You can probably end up saving a lot of money too.

It was a good read and I would recommend everyone take a peak at it if you are an actor as well.

I recently inquired about audition for a short film and just today I received the scripts for it. Yes, that is with a plural. As it appears, the organization is filming for a bunch of independent films and they simply sent me about four of them to go over and prepare one of them to be read on camera.

This is actually the first time I have been thrown multiple scripts at once and then having to decide which one to do. Lucky too as at first I thought they wanted me to go prepared with all four scenes. Wouldn’t that have been something?