Acting clips are often essential when you or your agent or manager are submitting to a role and it’s important to consider the types of clips you’re submitting as part of your reel when you do. As a talent manager, I can tell you that the more specific message these can send to casting, the more auditions it will get you.
You should make sure you have clips for all the types of roles you’re the best fit for and most likely to be cast in. For example, if one of those roles is a cop and you’re up for that part, you should have a clip available showing you as a cop. If you’re likely to be cast as a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, or a social worker, you need clips showing you in those roles too.
Casting is moving so quickly now with thousands of digital submissions for every role that if they’re casting a teacher, they’re not going to sit through a reel watching scenes of you as a garbageman, a priest, or a racecar driver. They want to see you as a teacher.
READ: How to Create Your Demo Reel
Over time as casting gets to know you through the auditioning process, it’s not about the reel or the clips anymore because they know your work. That casting office is seeing you in so many different roles that they truly understand your capabilities and professionalism. So when casting wants to see you, they just request you directly.
But first, to get you to the stage where casting will call you into a room from a submission, we need to use clips that deliver a strong and specific message. Once we get you in the door with these it’s all about the audition, but until then you need the clips. So if we pick up the phone to call casting and say this actor plays a hell of a teacher, you really need to see him, he’s perfect for this role, and casting says OK send us a tape—it should be of you as a teacher. We don’t want casting to imagine you playing a teacher. We want to show them you as a teacher.
By following this method, we can get you 10 times the auditions. Check your clips and make sure you have what you need so you’re ready when that part you’re perfect for arrives.
Clips ready? Then apply to casting calls on Backstage!
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and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Backstage or its staff.
