Monthly Archives: September 2011
Acting, or Acting Out?
Some of you know that I often host tweet-up’s under #AGYST on Twitter. AGYST is an acronym for “Actors Get Your Shit Together.”
I had the opportunity to witness some very bad behavior on a recent project — classic AGYST. Anecdotes like these are why AGYST started. From these firsthand experiences, I devised this handy measurement of your on-set professionalism.
The Collectibles Launch
In the green room with Falcor, the best on-set dog ever!
Last month, I had the pleasure of shooting The Collectibles, a new webseries that’s Superfriends meets The Office. We shot for two days – the weekend before I flew out to Germany for work!
Letting Go
I started a detox this morning developed by my partner in fitness crime, Jenn at For the Glow. Of course in the back of my mind was the cranky thought “Well, if I’m giving up alcohol and caffeine for five days, I better damn well lose about 35 pounds!”
Jenn must have felt those vibes across the city, because she posted this incredible new perspective on her site:
10 Tips for Your Acting Career
In Part I, Required Reading, I listed a handful of articles on filmmaking that I urge Actors to apply to themselves. In this post, I take it a step further, breaking down Sheri Candler’s Top 10 Tips for a Successful Film Launch.
Consider this the translated into actor action lists and call it…
Top 10 Tips for your Acting Career.
Acting, The New Conversation: Directors as Audience
This post is a continuation of Part I, Required Reading, and Part II, Audience Building.
Part III: Directors as Audience. PMD for Actors?
Picking up where we left off …
Directors as Audience
Now this is an audience I want most of all. I actively follow the work of many film directors, and nothing would make me happier than if those directors were also aware of my work. This is still a frontier as far as social media contacts go, but the more I think about it, the more I’m determined to find a way to cater my online presence to directors and filmmakers.
Resources for connecting with your audience (directors in this case) are good works we should all be doing anyway. In this post, I want to throw you for a loop a bit. You’ve heard it said over and over “it’s who you know,” right? Well, maybe it’s not. I want to look at the game from another angle: “It’s who knows you.”
Think about it. You might follow your favorite director on Twitter and be aware of his wit and work, but does he know you? No. I want to fix that. Because who I know isn’t going to get me on his next project. I want him to know me.
Acting, The New Conversation: Audience Building
Note: This is Part II in a series that explores how Actors can think like a business owner and make greater strides in their career. Part I kicks off here with Required Reading.
Part II: Who’s Your Audience?
Success for indie filmmakers in great part lies in being able to connect with a loyal core audience rather than water down the message in order to appeal to the masses.
How does this work for actors? Who is our audience? This is a complicated question; we request audiences with casting directors, in order to be granted an audience with a producer or director, who will take our work to their audiences. Eventually, an actor also brings their own built-in audience to every screening. At this point you are or are becoming a name brand, one hallmark of a sustainable career.
Identifying your audience may indeed be the key to applying the new model to our acting careers. My suspicion, though, is that unlike Kevin Smith’s audience that continues to grow out of a loyal core, an actor’s audience evolves.
Acting, The New Conversation: Required Reading
As an entrepreneur-minded writer and producer, I’m keenly interested in the evolving DIY system of open information sharing, grassroots appeal, bootstrap’ing sweat equity, and Think Outside The Box Office-ing of independent cinema. These factors drive the indie scene much as the Hebrews circled Jericho, finding the right trumpet pitch to bring the studio walls a-tumblin’ down.
If you’re involved in this scene, you’ve debated in these conversations about self distribution, finding your audience, and whether Kevin Smith represents a replicable business model or if he’s just a stunt-pulling one-off in an XXXL bathrobe.
I want to bring these conversations to Acting:
