Sometimes, it’s the small things that matter. There are plenty of big things that you can and can’t take control of in your acting career. You can be prepared, you can arrive early, you can be in acting class regularly, and you can have all the right materials on your website.
Sometimes, students ask us for advice when seeking out photographers for a new headshot session. While we don’t endorse any one photographer, we do endorse preparation behind making the most of your headshot session.
Whether you get your sides at an audition, or just minutes before, these tips will make a cold read look like a prepared read. Grab your pencil and highlighter and jump in.
This seems to be a touchy and controversial subject. For some people in the industry, casting director workshops are seen as a “pay-to-play” experience that yields no results. For others, they are a legitimate way to get seen and score auditions.
We are big proponents of safety in class. Whether it means setting up guidelines for privacy in class, or how to treat the furniture, we believe in creating a safe place for actors. This especially means establishing an environment that is supportive and conducive to honesty and vulnerability.
The experience of being in the moment is real. Many times it’s what provides the true joy in acting. Every actor who has been in the moment while performing knows this, as only then does the work become effortless, spontaneous, and utterly creative. Unfortunately, this experience is mostly accidental. Once you’ve been told how important it is to be in the moment, it immediately becomes harder to achieve, because it cannot be achieved by trying. Welcome to the actor’s Catch-22.
In my first article Welcome to the Desert, I explored how living in the arid, isolated reality of Los Angeles can often immobilize an actor’s life. Too often that paralysis stifles the actor’s creative soul – both personally and professionally. Today I want to explore another common dilemma for the actor: the dual life actors must lead in order to succeed.
Whether you are a new arrival or have been here for a number of years, I want to welcome you to LA. As a director and teacher it has been my experience that many actors, whether seasoned veterans or enthusiastic newcomers, can make life in LA more difficult for themselves than it need be. Too often actors can get lost when approaching their work, and grow immobilized when striving to remain active and focused. In this first article, I want to offer a personal insight as to why LA makes it so easy to lose your way and become immobilized.
Remember when you were young and play included imaginary games of Cops and Robbers, Hospital, Spaceship or whatever? Whether with friends or by ourselves these games would seem more real than regular life. For many of us, our childhood was the peak of our imagination. We were able to slip from reality to fantasy, and then back again effortlessly with total commitment and enjoyment.
Unless you have a particularly famous parent in the business, the single most important thing for you to learn to do well is auditioning. While there is a great deal of overlap with performing, auditioning is very different and has its own set of skills to learn and pitfalls to avoid. This article will focus on prepared and cold readings, where you are asked to read from a script for an audition. The term ‘cold read’ refers to those instances where you are asked to read a scene with little or no time to read the whole play or get off-book.