Tag Archives: Actor

Resume Samples: Beginner Actors

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The best actors were inexperienced at one time.

Remember every actor’s story is unique, and so every resumé is unique.

 

Quick Tips:

  • Make your resume one page only.
  • Your resume should be no larger than 8×10, the size of your headshot.
  • List professional credits first for easier reading.
  • Keep your resume clean and simple

 

 

Name, Stats, and Contact Info

Just like any other kind of resumé, your acting resume format should start with your name. Put it in big, bold letters at the top of the page.

Your name is followed by your height and weight. Some actors mention their hair and eye color too. But if your professional headshots are in color (and they should be), and they’re stapled to the back of your resumé (and they should be), it’s just a waste of valuable page real estate.

If you sing, put down your voice part. And if you belong to any of the unions, put down the acronym. (i.e: AEA, AFTRA, and/or SAG)

 

Finally, round it out with your contact info. Your cell phone number and email address specifically. If you have an agent/manager/feudal lord, list their contact info instead.

Theatre Credits

Here’s where we really get down to business. Most actors tend to list their theatre credits first. Why? Because casting directors know their theatre. Chances are, that’s where they got their start. However, if you’re agressive about film and TV, then list those credits first.

Don’t get carried away with this section. Your instinct will be to list every show you’ve ever done. Don’t. Instead, create a small list of roles you’ve played and could play again. Remember, tell them how to cast you.

Other Credits

Beneath your theatre cred, you can list other mediums where you have experience. Film, television, voiceover, commercial, etc. The same rules apply from above. Don’t get carried away.

Education and Training

If you have any arts-related education, it goes in the “Education and Training” section. I’m sure you must have a little training, right? (Hint: Your middle or high school drama club counts.)

 

Special Skills

Sometimes, casting directors are looking for someone who can juggle, or do a back handspring, or simply has a passport. All of these abilities go under “Special Skills” at the bottom of the page. The more skills you have, the more marketable you are.

Resume Sample by: www.ace-your-audition.com

 

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7 Acting Tips

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By Pluginin.org

Ready to Become an Actor or Become an Actress?

 

Here are some great tips to get you started. You know you need an agent to be a professional actor, but how do you go about getting one? Contacting an agent for representation is actually very simple, and should be you first step to being an actor. All you need are a few photographs, a resume, an envelope, some stamps, and a list of prospective agents.

Acting Tips:

Tip 1

The first thing you need to do is get a few good photographs of yourself. You do not necessarily need an expensive portfolio of photographs to send to your prospective agency. Send a good, clear, simple photograph that looks exactly like you. Keep the background, wardrobe, hairstyle, and make-up simple. Do not wear jewelry or hats in your photograph. Simple and plain is best. Make sure your personality shines through in the picture.

Tip 2

Once you have a good photograph, you need to prepare a resume. When drafting a resume to send to an agent, simple also works best. Do not send a page full of hard to read paragraphs of text. Your resume should include your contact information, personal statistics (height, weight, hair color, eye color, age range, clothing size, shoe size), special skills (singing, impressions, accents, etc.), and a bullet breakdown on past acting experience including production name, production company, and part played.

Tip 3

When you have your photographs and resume, it is time to look for an agency. No matter where you live, contact a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) franchised agent first. Go to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) website at http://www.sag.org. Under the “Agent Relations” page click on the “Find a SAG Franchised Agent” link. This will give you a list of the union franchised agents in your area.

Tip 4

The best way to contact a talent agent is via regular mail. Most agencies do not respond to e-mails for aspiring actors. Never send an agency an e-mail with attachments. Call your prospective talent agency. Tell the person who answers the phone you are seeking agent representation and would like to know to whose attention you should send your picture and resume. Typically, they will direct you to send your package to a specific person or just to the new talent/actor division.

Tip 5

Prepare a letter stating that you are and actor seeking agent representation and request an audition with the agency. Enclose your photographs, resume with contact information, and a self-addressed, stamped envelope with the letter. Mail the package, then sit and wait. You may hear something immediately. It may take two months to get a response if at all. Most agencies are good about getting back to people quickly, especially if a self-addressed, stamped envelope is enclosed.

 Tip 6

Do not call and pester an agency about your submission. They will never represent you if you become a regular caller. Just wait it out by working on your acting skills and preparing for an audition.

 Tip 7

If an agency is interested in representing you, they will call or send you a letter in the self-addressed, stamped envelope you provided asking you to come in for an audition. If an agency is not interested in representing you, do not give up. There are many reasons an agency may pass – they already have too many actors of your “type,” their client roster is full, they do not handle actors with your “look,” etc. Keep trying and continue to pursue acting work on your own. It may take a while or it may happen fast, either way, perseverance will eventually bring about success.

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Film Acting vs. Theater Acting

Posted on by • Posted in Actors (PA), Performance Art, Pluginin to Support, Theatre (PA) • Tagged , , , • Leave a comment

By Pluginin and Infoplease

With the advent of film in the early twentieth century, and in particular with the introduction of sound in the late ’20s, there was a need for a new kind of acting style from that which had dominated the stage and the theater for centuries. Thus was born the art of film acting, a demanding and innovative discipline that has now been around for almost a century.

Here are four of the main differences between stage and film acting:

 

  • Unlike the theater actor, who gets to develop a character during the course of a two- or three-hour performance, the film actor lacks continuity, forcing him or her to come to all the scenes (often shot in reverse order in which they’ll ultimately appear) with a character already fully developed.
  • Since film captures even the smallest gesture and magnifies it 20 or 30 times, cinema demands a less flamboyant and stylized bodily performance from the actor than does the theater.
  • The stage is more friendly to the unattractive, the overweight, and the flawed, while film—despite the advantages of makeup, lighting, soft focus, etc.—is relentlessly cruel to any sign of imperfection in the actor or actress.
  • The performance of emotion is the most difficult aspect of film acting to master: While the theater actor can use exaggerated gestures and exclamations to express emotion, the film actor must rely on subtle facial ticks, quivers, and tiny lifts of the eyebrow to create a believable character.

In short, film demands a fundamentally different kind of performance work from its actors than does the stage; as D. W. Griffith himself put it, the stage actor projects an emotion or a character to an audience, whereas a film actor must in some way embody and perform these emotions in as true and believable a way as possible. Though some have made the theater-to-cinema transition quite successfully (Olivier, Glenn Close, and Julie Andrews, for instance), others have not, and there are many examples of silent stars who fell off the movie planet after sound was introduced. They just weren’t able to compete with the bell-voiced theater actors who instantly flooded the studios.

 

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How To Rehearse With Your Actors – Pluginin Film Expert Magda Olchawska

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Filmmaking Expert Magda Olchawska

 

Rehearsal is an important and integral part of any film production. I, personally, like to give myself as much time to work with the actors as possible so once in a production I can concentrate on shooting the film. 

Below is the list of rehearsal techniques you may find useful.

  1. Stay loose.
  2. This is the time to have ideas and try them out. Even if you don’t try them all, just keep working on the ideas.
  3. What the character wants for the whole movie.
  4. When you are looking/analyzing the character, pay special attention to what seems to be the most important that has happened to him/her.
  5. Concentrate on the relationship between the characters, not the stage direction.
  6. Replace adjectives with action verbs, images, facts, events and physical life.
  7. Know what the movie is about.
  8. Know who the characters are and try to back up your ideas with evidence.
  9. Have alternatives in case your favourite ideas don’t work.
  10. Keep re-reading and re-thinking the script, and deepen your ideas.
  11. The directions that I think most actors respond to best are the ones that show insight.
  12. The proper purpose of rehearsal is to stimulate the actor’s emotions and imaginative side so on the set the actors can work well.
  13. It doesn’t matter whether you have half an hour to rehearse, set a schedule for it and plan tasks.
  14. Decide which scenes you are going to rehearse. Locate scenes that are continuous and can rely on one another.

PLAN FOR THE REHEARSAL

  1. Introduce people.
  2. Tell actors how you work.
  3. Make sure actors listen to one another and work honestly.
  4. Introduce the group of actors to work together.
  5. Let everyone talk about each other’s character.
  6. As a director ask questions while the actors are talking.
  7. Analyze the scenes with the actors.

THE GOALS OF REHEARSAL

  • Make sure the actors are listening and work honestly, use themselves and find some authentic connection to the material.
  • Investigate the text: explore questions, problems and possible meanings of individual lines and solve the structure of the scene.
  • Block the scene and find the physical life.
  • Establish the actor – director relationship, set up your system of communication, hear and try the actors’ ideas and smoke out their resistances.
  • Before each scene take 5 minutes to talk about the scene and ask the actors if they have any questions or ideas. Take their concerns into considerations. Most of the time these are ideas to explore in rehearsal.
  • Always set up the framework and goal of the rehearsal (This is to connect with the characters and relationships or to get at what is unspoken in the scene or it’s to work out physical activities).
  • Discuss with the actors your policy regarding the stage direction.
  • If you only have few minutes to rehearse, make sure the actors are listening to each other. This includes eye contact unless there is a reason not to and add some simple physical life.
  • Ask as many questions as you can, this is one of the best directing techniques.
  • We want the actors to feel they are making the direction because the director doesn’t know if the idea is working or not until the actor tries it out.
  • Never tell the actors how and what to feel. Use facts and images, events, verbs and physical action to communicate with the actors.
  • Decide what the character wants and stick to it, don’t change it.
  • Don’t expect the actors to use their full emotional investment in rehearsal. In rehearsal we are looking for a choice that brings to life the scene’s structure and engages the actor’s interest. We aren’t looking for performance but the road that takes the actors to create the performance on the actual shooting day.
  • At the rehearsal the actor should experiment with different ways of getting to what they will need on the set.
  • Try as much as you want at the rehearsal and the most important thing is to establish the relationship between the actors.

Madga Olchawska’s Final Thought

Before you begin to improvise, you have to decide what the scene is about. You can still change your choice before the shooting of your scene. When you find the right choice, it will create the right behaviour and physical action of the character.

Ask QUESTIONS about the script and the character. It is also very important to know what the actor is thinking about the script. If he/she doesn’t like it, there is no point working with them.

If you get the feeling that the scene is not really working, choose the OPPOSITE/S to what the scene is about.

The character always NEEDS something from the other character or NEEDS to accomplish something within the scene or the whole film. Find what your character NEEDS and stick to it throughout the whole film.

SPINE is who a character is. Look for the real meaning of the character/person.

Usually each scene has a particular OBJECTIVE, which should be very simple and specific. Find playable objectives that will have both physical and emotional element.

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Want To Be A Theatre Director?

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Re-blog of an article by John Caird for The Guardian UK.

Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia

John Caird is a theatre, musical and opera director and writer. He has had a distinguished career working at the Royal Shakespeare and National Theatre companies and received a Tony award, an Olivier and an Evening Standard award for his direction of Nicholas Nickleby.

The world is full of aspiring theatre directors. Some of them are young, some not so young. Some are already working in the theatre, others have yet to break into it. They all know, or think they know, that they want to try their hands at directing. Directors, they believe, have control and vision and authority. They choose the plays, the actors and the designers. They are central to the creative process of the theatre but never have to write a play, act a part or sweep a stage; they have the perfect job. Well, maybe they have.

Here Are 9 Survival Tips

1. Read. However literate you think you are, keep reading. Read plays and novels and adaptations and screenplays. Read social histories and biographies and diaries. Read all around the plays that most interest you. Prepare yourself as best you can for the searching questions your actors will fire at you on the rehearsal floor.

2. Go to the theatre. All sorts of theatre. Whatever you can afford. And don’t be too discriminating. See everything – the National, the RSC, the Royal Court, your local rep, the school play. The latest blockbuster musical may be beyond your purse, but if you can blag a ticket, go and see what the fuss is about. And don’t ignore the fringe. You might learn more by watching a rough theatre production in the upper room of a pub than anywhere else.

3. Travel. The world is your oyster – and there is theatre all over the world. Broaden your view about what constitutes good theatre by seeing it in its myriad traditions and cultures. If you speak another language, don’t let it slide. Practise it, study its theatre literature, translate from it. Make it a special corner of your expertise.

4. Meet playwrights. Directors don’t have anything like the authority you might imagine. Playwrights are the primary creative force in theatre. Get to know them. Read their plays. Help them develop their work. Set up readings with actors. The more playwrights you know and who trust you, the more likely it is you will be asked to direct one of their plays.

5. Meet actors. Directors should love actors. If they don’t look forward to the time they spend with their actors and genuinely appreciate the actor’s process, they will never be good directors. Actors are remarkable creatures: what they do, night by night, performance by performance, is extraordinary. Get close to it. Strive to understand the creative chemistry of the actor becoming the character. It’s at the very heart of the business.

6. Form a company. However small, however poor. The idea of a company is at the heart of all theatre practice; little groups of like-minded artists ganging together to create plays. Raise some cash and put the plays on. Learn from your successes or failures and move on to the next project.

7. Work as an assistant. Write to all the directors you know or whose work you admire. Explain why you think the two of you would be a good match. Have something to show on your CV to prove your point. If you get taken on, be attentive and loyal and company-minded. Learn everything you can about your principle’s method but don’t get addicted to assisting. There’s a limit to the usefulness of watching from the sidelines.

8. Work in the theatre. Any job will do. Directors should understand how every other department in the theatre works. Get a job in the wardrobe department or with the stage crew, or in the lighting or sound departments; or as a dramaturg, a box-office clerk, usher or dresser. The more you know, the better you will be at the directing game.

9. Observe the world. Whether you work inside the theatre or out, don’t get trapped by its artifice. Wherever you live, wherever you work, you will meet the original versions of the characters you see in plays. Learn to observe people closely and analyse them accurately – their psychologies, predicaments and family lives; their fears, failings and aspirations. If you want your productions to be true reflections of real life, you must know your subject matter in the greatest possible detail.

What do you think about John Caird’s tips? Are there any suggestions Mr. Caird left off the list?

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