Hello beautiful people!
Let’s clear some casting profile clutter!
First, let’s tackle IMDb. Did you know that you can edit your “known fors”? Check out this screengrab and then make a bit of today’s work you going into your IMDb profile and editing your known fors so that your highest-profile, most on-brand, best “this is where I’m headed” credits are front and center.
Extra-extra credit: While you’re still over at IMDb, update your bio. Revisit the work we did on Day 61 and if your bio still needs help, spend more time there first. And if your bio is, in fact, at “Launch at 85%” level and you’re really just nitpicking that last sentence at this point, then get it out there. You can always come back around and edit it again when you go back to update your known fors, right? Oh, and here’s a very next-tier reason you want that IMDb bio looking hot.
Of course, what I noticed is the “click for more” feature on every actor’s image in the sidebar of the shows we watched! There’s a “known for” overlay on each of the actors in that sidebar, plus bio, and even trivia and… well… guess what a casting director likes to do more than watch a show full-screen. Yup. You got it! She likes to watch a show partial-screen while reading up on the actors she’s learning about through this interactive viewing experience!
You probably aren’t even considering the myriad ways your online info is being used by buyers already. So let’s get really purposeful in the next-tier story we’re telling about ourselves every chance we get!
As for your online casting profiles (I keep a pretty decently-updated roundup of all the major submission sites over here — please do share in the comments over there if there’s a missing brand-new best, most professional, or most popular site in your market so I can add it immediately), as I said starting out in today’s course page, if you’re like most actors, you have too much stuff here. You really only need one really great theatrical shot, an awesome commercial/comedic look, and then one more shot IF you’ve got some specific next-tier castability that’s not covered by those main two shots.
Here’s how I know you probably have more shots than you need: I can always tell at which tier an actor thinks he or she is based on how much oversharing is going on in his or her online profile. The confidence of the upper-tier actor whose profile has selected credits, very few well-branded and slam-dunk hell-yes clips, and maybe two or three headshots is clear. And their booking ratio backs it up.
You may say, “Well, sure! If I’m booking all the time, I’m confident enough to strip away all sorts of clutter!”
Okay. Then I’ll challenge you on that little bit o’ goodness by asking: How many micro-tier-jumps have you made since you first got on these online casting sites and how many things have you ADDED over the years… while never taking the same number of things AWAY from your profile? If you’re like most actors, you’ve already proven that you don’t believe you are enough (*ahem* Day 3) to really strip down your profile to focus the buyers’ attention on where you’re headed rather than on where you’ve been, where you possibly might go someday, and where you “hope to sweet baby Jeebus that I will go so please please please let this be enough to convince you I really really want it!”
Yeah. It feels that way on our end for sure. Whenever I see an Actors Access profile with 10 photos, 5 Slate Shots, 40 minutes of clips and various re-editings of the same demo reel footage, and a looooong scrolling resume with 50 special skills, I see “trying too hard” and I almost always move on.
Wanna know for sure what some of the next-tier actors’ profiles look like? Okay, well on Actors Access, the naming protocol is pretty basic. The root is resumes DOT actorsaccess DOT com. Note I did not use WWW. That’s because the site doesn’t either! If you put in WWW, your attempt will fail. Since the vanity URL most actors choose is their first and last name, you *should* be able to land on your pace car, your nemesis, your next-tier lighthouse just by plopping their name after that root URL. Y’all know we love to show off Blair Hickey‘s profile for his masterful labeling of clips in his MEDIA section. Well, check out his URL when you click on that link.
Keith’s is at, you guessed it, https://resumes.actorsaccess.com/keithjohnson — and I’m willing to bet each of you is using similar naming protocol. So, pop your URL in the comments below, get to checking one another out, and get to snooping around other actors’ websites and clicking through from their links pages to their online profiles. When you can’t find their links easily, just try the naming protocol to see if you get lucky! Are those to whom you look for proof that the next tier CAN happen in your life cramming their profiles with way too much stuff? No? I didn’t think so. Then neither should you.
Get in there and perform some resume feng shui (revisit Day 7 for billing language if you’ve forgotten when to use what), and if you feel like circling back to IMDb, clean up your resume there (if you use their Resume Service) because you may have things showing up as duplicates (meaning they’re being posted by IMDb *and* also on your Resume Service version, which looks, again, like you’re trying too hard).
UNLESS you so regularly use the IMDb Resume Service to submit yourself to buyers through that submission portal, you need to cut out all duplicates for sure. Either way, really think about the role and tier of people visiting the IMDb-Pro side of your page (again, that’s directors, producers, non-casting directors… since we more often use Breakdown Services or whatever casting-specific site is our go-to for all our submissions, appointments, and communications since online submissions started up in the early 2000s) vs. the tier of buyers putting out breakdowns on IMDb so far.
Where are you headed? Where do you WANT to be headed? Serve the buyers there, babe. Don’t worry about what you used to think you needed to prove to the buyers at the tier you’re leaving behind.
Again, set an appointment with Future You on your calendar for checking in on this stuff in a few months. Depending on how quickly you’re amassing credits and getting closer to that next tier, you’re gonna want to keep this stuff clean ’til your fancy publicist does it all for you. #SoOnBrand
’til tomorrow… stay ninja!
