Cloud Portfolio

So you're an actor, and like the vast majority of the members of your trade, you are out of work (excluding your day job, of course). What's the best strategy for getting your foot in the door?

In the past auditioning was about all you could do, along with networking. Of course the internet has supercharged both of these activities; finding auditions is now extremely easy and as for networking--do I even need to elaborate? Competition does tend to drive out the additional benefits that any one actor can enjoy, however--the cost of finding auditions has dropped for everyone, meaning the audition you know about is undoubtedly known about by many others who intend to show up and compete with you for the available parts.

In between auditions I think anyone who has any ambition of making it in acting needs to be doing everything in their power to get themselves in front of a camera and do something that shows off their talent. They should then take the video and put it online.

Actors already have to do a lot of work for zero pay. Moving up to paying jobs means starting out by building your portfolio with a lot of unpaying ones. So why not take some initiative and put out free content on the web?

Take Amy Walker for example, star of the video embedded above. She made a video of herself just speaking in 21 different accents one after another. This isn't even a skit, this is just Amy Walker, saying mostly the same thing 21 times in different accents. Pretty much a pure show-off of skill when it comes right down to it. But a great thing to show anyone potentially interested in casting her. And by the way, it's been viewed over two million times.

Live performances and auditions do not scale. Digital content scales--which is to say, it costs about as much to provide it to one person as it does to provide it to a million people. This is especially true when you put it on the internet.

That doesn't mean that you're going to get two million views just because you showed up online, even if you're talented and you put out quality stuff. To begin with, the same principle of competition mentioned above in the audition example applies: you can put your stuff out there, but so can everyone else. In this case, not only will you be competing with other people seeking to make a career in acting, but also with a lot of amateurs who simply enjoy making videos.

Beyond that, mediums that scale will inherently conform to a power law--a tiny minority will account for a gigantic majority of the attention.

Nevertheless, I think that building up a digital portfolio is going to become a necessity for any aspiring actor. It gives you something to show even if you haven't been in many professional productions yet, and who knows--you might end up getting lucky and having something that goes viral. After all, the more you put out there, the greater your odds that at least one thing will get fifteen minutes of fame, or even better.