One of the best acting lessons
I had just signed up for new acting classes and acting workshops in the Hollywood and my biggest frustration while looking for script scenes was being able to find something that fit my look, unique personality, and class/workshop parameters. One day I spent 10 straight hours looking for a scene for myself and in the end after searching every website out there at the time and reading countless scripted scene pages I realized I was going at this all wrong. I was fishing with a net hoping to find the perfect catch instead of making the perfect bait, fishing with a pole, and letting the right fish come to me.
Act. Change things up.
Instead of reading handfuls of scripts and plays to find the right acting scenes. I started with me, with my type. (If you haven’t read the article “How do I find my type?” stop here, go read that article really quick and then come back and continue.)
I took my top 3 likely occupations (military, entry-level professional, grad student) and chose 5 shows that are on the air right now that highlight these fields. From there I went onto IMDbPro (if you don’t have an account, get one. SAG has a discount code – just google to find it), took my age, my physique, and my demeanor and began search the tv show cast list for characters that looked like me and had ‘jobs’ in one of my top occupations.
Here’s a short video (not created by us) to show how one navigates through IMDbPro for a specific show.
A cool way of expediting my search I began looking for ‘Lt’, ‘Private’, ‘Dr.’ in the character name as well. When I found a character that had similar features to me and had an comparable occupation looked up the episode(s) the character was on and watched them to see if there were any good scenes.
Go a step further
I clicked to see the actor’s profile and looked for other roles that actor may have done that would align with my type (almost 100% of the time I find multiple more roles to look up and watch). Through that research I found amazing scenes for acting and to this day learning this has been one of the best acting lessons I could have asked for as a professional actor in training.
Author: Christian Telesmar is a professional actor living in Los Angeles, CA. He received his Bachelors (BA) from the University of Washington as well as his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Washington School of Drama’s Professional Acting Training Program (PATP). He also holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Kaplan University School of Business. He is known for his work in Stomp the Yard 2 (2010), Sense and Sensibility (2014), and BONES on FOX (2015). He is also a freelance Creative Director and Writer, having won awards for his promotional work with Microsoft Windows 7, Wal Mart, and Pepsi Co. He enjoys hiking and is an avid Seahawks fan.