Speaker 1: Welcome to your beginner's guide to commercial acting. Maybe you've never done one before, or maybe you have been doing them, but maybe not as successfully as you would like. This video is going to help. Stick around. Commercials make the world go round. They will also really help you with your overall acting career. If you want to keep your agent happy, I would be a commercial booker. How are you going to get the callbacks, and how are you going to land the job? Let's start with your beginner's guide to commercial acting. Almost all commercials start with a slate, and sometimes when you don't have an actual copy or script to go off of, they're going to have you do some personality thing or answer a question, and what is all of it for, and how do you make it stand out and be a commercial booker? First off, your slate. You should have a lot of personality in your slate. You should look very comfortable in your slate. You should be nice and clean and clear with your talking and your dialogue. They need to see that they've got somebody polished that they can work with, that's comfortable in front of the camera, that's cool and calm, they don't have darting eyes, they're not jumping up on their feet. You see a lot of actors, they have different tics, and if an actor is holding those tics in that audition process anywhere, that is not an actor that they're going to feel comfortable putting through the process and putting on the set. Let's start there. The tics that can come in. I think it's just energy and it's coming out in different forms. Sometimes actors hold it in their mouth and their lips can come in. Sometimes they have darting eyes and that energy wants to go around the room. Sometimes they hold it in their hands. This is why actors don't know what to do with these. Actors generally will try to hold them together in front of themselves, they'll put them behind, they'll try to put them in their pockets. A lot of actors hold that energy in their feet, they're either shifting side to side or they can even come up on their toes and kind of clap around there. So we want to make sure none of those are entering into your commercial auditions anywhere. Not in the slate, not in the actual commercial portion. For your slate, it might be your name, they might want your age if you're under the age of 18, they might want to know how tall you are, they might want to know your agent information, and oftentimes they're going to want your profiles in that commercial audition. Most of the time when you get that commercial notification, they're actually going to tell you exactly what they want in the slate. Just follow those directions exactly. Sometimes it can also include a full body shot, which if you're doing a self tape, you'll have to figure out at home how you're going to do that. Then they might just want you to answer a question. A lot of commercials don't actually have commercial copy, which means you're not actually going to say anything. They just want to see that character in an environment. So for example, maybe you're walking down the beach or you're playing fetch with your dog or you're hanging out with your friends and you don't actually say anything, but they want to see you acting. They want to see you in that environment. If you were supposed to be pretending to write an email or you're FaceTiming with somebody, then you can just make it up on the spot and go through that scenario and play it. Sometimes again, they want you to answer a random question. That question could be, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about a vacation that you recently went on. Tell us what you love to do on the weekends. It's not the answer that's going to get you the part, but why they ask you that is again to see if you're comfortable in this environment. Can you keep your mind? Can you keep your personality and have that come across and through the camera? And then they realize they have an actor that they can work with who seems seasoned, who seems comfortable in front of the camera, and somebody that's going to be easy to work with. So there's no right answer. There's just being comfortable and having personality when you do it. Smiling is so important in commercials. This is why your commercial headshot is smiling and with teeth. I want you guys to pay attention to the advertisements you watch. This could be a YouTube ad. This could be the commercials that pop up on television. This could be really any form of advertisement that you see. Every time you see an actor within those ads smiling with teeth, just note it. Just think about it. And you'll see that literally 90% of advertisements that are out there, the actors are going to be smiling at some point. That means that's important in that commercial audition process. So make sure you have a lightness to it. Make sure that it's likable, that it's genuine, and all of that should be coming through. If you do have copy that they give you ahead of time for that audition, have it well prepared. Have it memorized. You don't want to be juggling through it. And I think you can memorize a lot faster than you think that you can, but don't put it on tape until it's like top notch as far as being a strong audition. And I think part of that is having it completely memorized. You'll put those in order, your slate, what they ask for, maybe the question, and then the commercial portion of that if they give that to you as well. That's really commercials right there in a nutshell. Probably 90 plus percent of your auditions are going to fit within that little mold right there. So to recap, genuine in that slate. Make sure your smile is present throughout. How to get rid of all of that nonspecific movement or that energy that wants to come out somewhere. And if you do all of that, you're going to be a contender. We want to make sure that we're not getting eliminated right off the bat, making any of those mistakes along the way in the process. And if you do, you'll be getting callbacks and you'll be getting bookings. And you will also be keeping your agency very happy. Hopefully this has helped you guys wrap your head around commercials and what they are expecting from you as a talent. If you haven't yet watched our video on why you should want to do commercials as a professional actor, check out the video up here.