Monday, January 14, 2008

A modeling agency is a company that represent fashion models, to work for the fashion industry. These agencies earn their income via commission, usually from the deal they made with the model. Modeling agencies will require new faces on a regular basis. The number of models in an agency depends on the demand brought in by its agents and changes throughout the year. To this end, modeling agencies advertise in local phone directories in order to remain visible. Modeling agencies will require new faces on a regular basis. The number of models in an agency depends on the demand brought in by its agents and changes throughout the year. To this end, modeling agencies advertise in local phone directories in order to remain visible. A dry call is where models mail unsolicited comp cards to an agency. While this may work with smaller agencies, larger agencies are constantly being inundated with these cards and frequently discard unsolicited comp cards. Another option is the walk-in, where a model calls for an appointment at an agency and receives and interview on that particular date and time. The model then has an opportunity to quickly review with the agent past experience and show his or her portfolio. The most popular process is the open call, where an agency will advertise that on a certain day, they will allow anyone to show up for an interview. Depending on the popularity of the agency within the industry and the advertising done by its agents, anywhere from several dozen to hundreds of candidates could attend an open call. It is not uncommon to have a line extending for several city blocks.

Personal Requirements

  • enjoy artistic and creative activities
  • dedication and patience
  • tall (not so important for TV, commercial and photographic work) with a well-balanced figure
  • well-proportioned facial features and clear skin
  • a well-groomed appearance
  • able to project a confident image and outgoing personality
  • good communication skills are essential in promotional work.

For many actors, inspiration is something that happens at random. Some nights they go on stage and everything flows extremely well and everything they do has meaning. Other nights, nothing feels right and they stumble through to the best of their ability, uninspired.

The first man to address this issue was Konstantin Stanislavski. He was an Actor, Director and Producer during the late 1800's-early 1900's, and he formulated the first concise process for actor training, which he called ‘The System'. This later became the premise for ‘the Method', developed by Lee Strasberg. Within Stanislavski's investigation as to how the actor could inspire himself, he categorised actors into three types; creative, imitative and stage hacks.

Creative actors are able to stimulate their body to come alive on stage, using real experiences. They actually generate real experiences within their performances, which brings them to life.

Imitative actors are not able to have real experiences on stage, but imitate what the character is experiencing. For example, in a scene where the character has an explosion of anger, an imitative actor would not actually experience any anger, but would rather imitate what anger looked like. Imitative acting is very common to this day and can be seen in many soaps, where imitation is the standard.