debor009

Our local actors group had an online discussion recently of ways to gather your clips together for your demo reel, a topic I’ve touched on before and worth repeating as young filmmakers especially frequently seem to have something “better to do” than get clips out to their cast. If the film or TV project you appeared in is somewhere online, there are online services that can get the clip for you. Actors have used ripit.me or clipgrab.org, which has a program for both Mac and Windows. Expect to pay a small fee however. If the project is posted to YouTube, you can easily download the whole thing to your desktop by simply replacing the “www.” in the url with “ss” (without the dot). This will redirect you to Savefrom.net, where you can click on "download video in browser" (look on the lower right third of the screen) and select the video quality you prefer. Done in less than a minute and free. If the film/TV project itself isn’t posted to YouTube, see if you can at least find the...

All actors, at one time or other in their careers, experience the frustration of finding themselves relegated to one or two types of roles, with no opportunities to show their skills playing anything else. An actress friend, for example, said she felt she could play a lawyer, but she’s always being cast as blue collar, "lady plumber" types. When that happens, we’re frequently told to produce our own films, which means writing a script, assembling a cast and crew, finding locations, setting up a schedule, feeding everyone, and – even on a micro budget – coming up with many thousands of dollars to pay for it all.  Then the months of waiting for editing, promotions, and the cost of submitting to festivals. A few weeks ago, I got the idea that since an actor only needs 30 seconds of footage to show what they can do, it might be possible for two actors to shoot and edit a small scene themselves, with minimal set up, and then mine it for clips. Having some experience in directing a...