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Actors Resume Career: Actors Resume & Career Advice

Actors Resume & Career Advice

For: Artists

In the old days of the internet when having a web page of your own was still kind of a big deal, Starving Arts offered online acting resumes, modeling resumes, and art portfolios for a small yearly fee. These days, you can set up quick and professional resumes for actors and other artists for free [...]


 
 
 


 

In the old days of the internet when having a web page of your own was still kind of a big deal, Starving Arts offered online acting resumes, modeling resumes, and art portfolios for a small yearly fee. These days, you can set up quick and professional resumes for actors and other artists for free or very affordably through a number of professional organizations or commercial services.

Careers In Acting Are Tricky

It’s still great to have an online actor’s resume for your headshots, an online modeling resume with your comp card, or an online art portfolio, as it can help you to make your information available when and where it is needed most, and even to increase your exposure as an artist to some extent. Actors and actresses will still need agents and will even still need printed copies of their acting resumes and acting headshots to take to their auditions, and you can view sample resumes for headshots elsewhere on this site.

Acting Head Shots And Acting Resumes

As you are probably aware, head shots are crazy expensive, and make it hugely expensive to mail out updated resumes to all of your contacts every time you land a great new role or modelling job. This is one of the areas where an online acting resume or modelling resume can really shine, especially as the industry develops and it becomes more ordinary to just view everyone’s information online. At present, you mostly have to deal with paper, which means you still have to pay the exhorbitant rates for prints of quality professional headshots and bodyshots. However, I am predicting good things for working artists in the future; I think the internet will become the standard way of making your materials available soon. Of course, you will probably always have to bring a physical copy of your resume and your headshot with you to an audition.

Start An Acting Career Off Right With A Great Actors Resume

You can get an online acting resume or an online art portfolio for super cheap these days, often even completely free, and so it’s just silly not to set one up. The time investment is minimal and it can definitely increase your exposure. Don’t think that you’re going to put yourself out there on the web and suddenly have millions of casting directors or galleries knocking down your door, as that is probably just not going to happen. However, any extra exposure an artist can get is a good thing. You’re in an image industry, so no publicity is bad publicity. There is always a chance that someone important will be searching or even just randomly searching, and come across your stuff on the internet and fall in love with you and your work.

Realistic Actors Resume And Head Shot Scenario

More likely is that you’ll meet someone in person who tells you they like your work, and you’ll tell them your web address. If all goes well, they will go home or go back to their offoce and type in your web address and have instant access to your best professional representations of yourself and your artistic work right there. An up-to-date resume, beautiful head and body shots, a clean view of your art portfolio, whatever you have to offer there it is. Beats the shit out of having to carry all of your materials around with you everywhere, am I right?

Acting Careers Are Like Life

As far as I’m concerned, everything I’m saying here applies to every type of creative professional out there, from the model to the actor to the architect. There is no reason for anyone involved in a creative field who is trying to market themselves—not working steadily for a single organization and happy doing that forever—to not immediately set up a web presence. You don’t have to make it elaborate or flashy at all, you don’t have to do any work to promote it on the web itself, you just have to have it so you can personally send people there. Here’s a list of some of the types of professionals that I think can benefit from having something like this:

How To Start An Acting Career On The Cheap

As I said, back in the day Starving Arts would sell you one of these for a cheap yealy fee. These days we don’t even offer such a thing; there’s no reason to! You can get one for free in most cases. If you can’t get one for free, you can get one for the cost of cheap web hosting or even free web hosting. You can make yourself a simple web page in Microsoft Word for crying out loud! And just upload it to your hosting account and bam you’re done. Just to get your materials out there so you have them to point at.

Think Online Acting Resumes

The resume pages we used to offer can still offer you a really good example of what you want to do here: you want an online resume that is clean, very highly readable, and simple to understand. Even if you know how or know someone who knows how, do not clutter up your page with a bunch of flashy crap. Just don’t do it, it can only hurt you. For an idea of what a nice sample online actor resume with head shots looks like, check out our example acting resume with headshots for Big Talented Bob, our official example actor. It will give you a good sample acting resume to look at and even use as an acting resume template. If you want to steal the HTML for that page to use as your template, you can just choose “View Source” in your browser and copy and paste the whole damn thing into your own page. You can use it for free, I don’t have any problem with that at all. In fact, sometime in the near future I think I’m going to start offering some free HTML templates for acting resumes, so you might want to bookmark this page if that is something you’ll be interested in.

Acting Resumes Are Not All

For full online art portfolios, you’re looking at a little extra complication but it’s still pretty simple and you can probably get one for free. You could even set up a Wordpress photoblog with any of the excellent free wordpress photoblog templates out there, and set yourself up a running art blog that serves as your online artist portfolio. There you go, done and done. These things take only a little bit of time, cost nothing or next to nothing, and then you have something to send somebody to when you need.

Acting Career Information Is Yours For The Taking

That’s the pitch, folks. Set up your own online acting resume or online modeling resume or art portfolio right now, because otherwise in the future you’ll want to send somebody to it and instead of saying, “Hey, my portfolio is at mywebsite.com,” you’ll say something like “Oh I’ve totally been meaning to put my resume and headshots up on the internet but I haven’t had time.” Like I said, you can easily find resources online to set up your resume or portfolio on the web for free or for very cheap.

Park yourself in front of your computer for a little while and get to reading these here articles I’ve got set up for you. I’ve got no dog in the acting race so I’ve got no reason to do anything but help you succeed. If you read through these articles carefully and put your mind to work on the problem, and above all persevere, you’ll do well for yourself in good time. Here’s wishing you all beautiful acting resumes and luscious acting careers.


 
 
 


 

1 Comment »

  1. Thanks a lot for this info, I’m a young actress putting together my resume for the first time and I have no formal training but have done some community theatre so this was very helpful for me. Thanks!

    Comment by Felicia — June 12, 2008 @ 2:08 pm

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