State Of The Acting & Modeling Industry 2013 (With Aaron Marcus)

Hi. My name is Aaron Marcus, America’s premier acting and commercial modeling career coach
and the author of, “How to Become a Successful Commercial Model” now in its fifth edition.
The founder of, Howtomodel.com and I’ve been making my living as an actor and a commercial
model for over 26 years. This is a very special time of year and I
wanted to really encapsulate the year a little bit, talk a little bit about what took place
in 2012 and some ideals for you for 2013. I guess I’d like to start with the biggest
story of 2012 and that is the merger of two major unions; SAG, the Screen Actors Guild
and AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Actually in January, we're
going to be doing a workshop, an online workshop dealing specifically with the unions. This
is a major change and all of a sudden now actors have united more and we’ve become
a much more powerful union because we are a one union company now.
The other thing that I wanted to share with you and this is more of a general comment
about 2012 and also just how things are moving in the future. We're becoming a very electronically
geared community and that also holds true for acting and modeling work world and that’s
why it is so important for you to get this information, so that basically you can really
keep up and do things and get as much work as you possibly can. On a little bit of a
side note, one of the things that I do fine states, when agents are submitting people
electronically, when actors and models are submitting themselves electronically and everybody
is up on websites; one of the benefits is that you can do things immediately and you
don't have to put things in the mail and you can save a lot of money that way.
On the flip side, one of the downfalls that I see with it is the lack of personal connection.
You don't get the phone calls that you used to get. You don't necessarily have the same
kind of relationships with your representatives that you used to in the past. I guess because
of that, one of the things that everybody just absolutely needs to do is, learn more
about the industry. You need to learn how to put together a great headshot, so that
it can be customized well for a website and sometimes that can look a little bit different
than when you're just creating a hardcopy. Actually, we even did a workshop about headshots
just teaching people how to do that. The other thing that also is really important
is, learning how to market yourself well and with today's technology it makes it so much
easier to find resources and do a lot of this work on your own. For 2013 I’m going to
make sure that I continue to create these monthly online workshops to really help people
move along, to help people market themselves, to help people find agents and to learn more
about the industries. The other thing to is, I think it's really important to diversify
and look into many different aspects of the industry, whether it's TV commercials, industrial
films, voice work or whether you're interested in doing stand in work, whether it's promotional
work that’s something that you want to be doing or whether it's working on a cruise
line. There are so many different areas of the industry that you can do things in and
once again, with Howtomodel.com, we're setting up all these online workshops just to help
you along. Just to finalize things in this little video,
I just want to say that look, this can be a very competitive business for people, it
can be cutthroat, but the important thing to remember is that, you don't have to do
it that way. You can help other people. You can live your life and run your business in
a very friendly and compassionate way and for me, that’s how I like to do it. For
instance, on Howtomodel.com, if I hear about an audition or a job or a go seek, I will
post it in the forum section, so please check it out you might find something in your area
that would be good for you. I’m not really concerned … not really, I'm not concerned
about competing with anybody else; because I truly believe that none of us competes with
anybody. We all have something very unique and very special to offer and so the important
thing is to learn, what are your strengths. Once you figure that out something you want
to start using that strength. The other thing to is, when I was just talking
about helping each other out, that is the main reason why I created the Facebook.com/howtomodel
page. I'm building a community with the Facebook page as well as with How to Model, a community
of actors, models, industry professionals throughout the world, people helping each
other. I can tell you I've been very fortunate in this industry. There were some people who
were incredibly helpful and took some time to explain things to me, showed me things
not to do, ways to run my business in ways that allowed me to book … I'm getting close
to 1200 jobs right now and without help from other people there’s no way I could've done
that. That is why I like building this community of having many, many different industry people
help each other. To me it just seems like a really nice way to run your business and
I think you can also have tremendous success doing it that way as well.
You'll notice on the bottom of this page I have a survey that I'm asking you to participate
in and it's because I'm creating The Summit. The Summit is going to be an annual event
and I had one last year and it was incredibly successful. This is free. There is absolutely
no cost. This is my way of giving back to the community, the acting and modeling world.
I will have people from literally around the world attending the summit. I will have over
a dozen industry guest speakers who I will be interviewing and this will allow you to
learn so much from so many people, people you just wouldn’t have access to and certainly
not be able to spend 20, 30 minutes with. Please fill out the survey, because instead
of me trying to figure out what you want to learn, I want you to tell me and so that way
once I get the survey back I can start figuring out what topics are most important to everybody
and then finding really, really great industry professionals to interview for the summit.
Please I want you to be a major part of the summit, of this special day and you'll read
all about it at the bottom of this video. Please fill it out as soon as you can, sign
up for it and I can't wait to talk with you soon. I want to wish you all a great New Year's
and I hope it is just a wonderful year for you all and as always, if you have any questions
at all, always feel free to email me. It’s aaron@howtodmodel.com. H-O-W-T-O-M-O-D-E-L.com.
You can also reach me through Howtomodel.com or at my Facebook page. Facebook.com/howtomodel.
Looking forward to talking with you soon. I’m Aaron Marcus.