Aaron Marcus shares four practical tips for actors auditioning for training films: respond to casting calls quickly, send your resume and headshot as PDF or Word files instead of JPEGs or links, include clear contact info and specific training details on your resume, and label your headshots with your name and phone number or agent info.
Hey, I'm Aaron Marcus, and if you are watching this on my Acting and Modeling Quick Tips YouTube channel, uh, welcome. And if not, you should check it out. It's a really, really helpful place to go to find tons of great acting and modeling information. So I had the great fortune of being asked by a company to help them find some actors For a training film. And it was great for a couple of reasons. One is I got an opportunity to help fellow actors book a job, which is pretty incredible. The other thing was I learned a tremendous amount by essentially being a casting director, kind of slash agent. I was kind of doing both things because I was reaching out to talent directly. And there are 4 things I want to share with you That I think will really help your chances of booking the job. So number one, when you get an email about an audition, work on it as soon as you can. I can tell you there were a number of people who sent in auditions after it had already been cast. They had days to get it back to me. I did mention send it back to me as soon as possible. And by the time they sent it back, the client had already chosen someone. So number one, get it back as soon as you can. Number 2, if they are asking for a headshot and resume, which most of the time they will, here's a couple of suggestions. Number one, don't send your resume as a JPEG. There were some people who did that. It's hard to read and Basically, I mean, I have nothing to do with decision-making. All I'm doing is gathering the information, sending it over to the client. And so I would send attachments of headshots and resumes. When it's a JPEG, it just doesn't look very good. It's hard to read. Sometimes you have to try to enlarge it. People don't want to spend time doing it. They want it to be a very easy process. Some people sent links to their resume. Once again, if they're looking at a lot of actors, they're not going to spend the time doing that. So send it either as a PDF file or in Word and send it as an attachment. Here's something else that really surprised me. There were— I wouldn't say a lot, but there were a number of resumes that did not have Contact information. You've got to at least have an email address because if they like your resume, they're going to want to be able to get in touch with you. If they see your headshot and they see your resume and they go, hey, I like the look of this person, they seem right, I like their experiences, and then there's no contact information, it makes it really bad and hurts your chances of getting booked. One other little thing. And I could spend a whole video just talking about resumes. I have done videos on those. But for your education, here's something that I also noticed some people would do. They would make their classes way too generic. You know, they would say Acting 101, Acting Class. Well, You know, for somebody who might be looking at your resume, and let's say you don't have that much experience, then they're going to want to look and see, okay, well, where have you studied? What kinds of classes have you taken? Who have you studied with? Because that can make the difference between someone being offered the opportunity to audition for a project, even with little to maybe no experience. But if they see, okay, this person studied with some good people, they've taken some good classes, they took Acting for the camera. They took improvisation. They took script analysis. Well, that's telling them, okay, let's give this person a shot even though they've had little experience. But if you just make it really generic, it's not telling them anything. So definitely add in more specific information about your training. The very last thing I wanted to mention in this video is with your headshot, make sure you label it properly. There were some headshots that came into me that just had a string of letters or numbers. And once again, they want to see who you are. So what you want to do is have your name. And personally, I would suggest having your phone number. Now, if you're represented by an agent, you can have your agent's information, but you definitely want your name attached to the headshot when you are labeling it and sending it in, because not everybody has— number one, not everybody has their name on their headshot. But even if you do, when they are going through tons of photos, maybe they have to go back and, and find your headshot because they're interested in offering you the opportunity to actually audition. Well, if they see your name describing the headshot, then that way they can easily find you without having to open it up and try to recognize you and then finding it on your headshot. So anyhow, those are some of the things you want to do. But just in general, make life easy for the casting director. The easier it is for them, the more— the greater the chances are that they're going to want to ask you back and have you audition again. And I can tell you, there were some people they made things so difficult for me. They seemed very unprofessional. I knew, and I made some notes, I probably wouldn't ask them to audition again just because it doesn't make me look good sending people who weren't acting professionally when submitting their materials to me. So those are some of the things that you can do to really increase your chances You know, booking the job, but probably even more importantly, of leaving a great experience with the casting director, which will in turn have them want to have you audition more for other projects. Anyhow, I hope you found this helpful. If you have not subscribed to my YouTube channel yet, make sure you click the subscription button as well as the little bell, which is the notification button that will automatically let you know every time I upload And the other thing too is, if you can do this, I'd greatly appreciate it, just to leave a donation. There is a donation link. It goes straight to PayPal. And as you can imagine, these things take a lot of time and effort and expense to keep up and having to hire people to help me with these things. So whatever you're comfortable with, whatever fits your budget, I would greatly appreciate a donation. Just use the PayPal link. I'm Aaron Marcus. I love sharing this information with you. If there are any topics you want me to share with you, shoot me an email and let me know. You can reach me at aaron@howtoactandmodel.com. See ya. See ya.
