Acting Seminars for Kids

Video Transcript

"SCOTT DUPONT: Welcome back, Scott DuPont here on behalf of Expert Village. In this segment, we're going to talk about acting seminars in addition or as a substitute to acting classes. Now, seminars, usually are one day or an all weekend seminar, so to speak, event--learning opportunity. Usually hosted by a casting director or a producer/director, someone else in the business that can share a lot of knowledge with you, your kid and the parents together basically, in a short period of time. So you don't have to go through twelve weeks of acting classes. Now, what I would suggest is that this is the -- a big rule of thumb for me - is try to go to a seminar if you're going to do one of these where the person giving a seminar is local. If you hear one of these big acting seminars in the radio or they're hyping it up and they're bringing in this really famous LA casting director and you live in Hartford, Connecticut let's say, that's not really a good thing because even though you might learn some great information, at the end of the day, when that LA cast director flies back to LA, they're going to go out of the way, not to hire anybody form Hartford, Connecticut or anywhere in the East Coast because they have 300,000 actors in the LA county, 50,000 of which are already Screen Actors' Guild, many of those are kids and there's serious penalties involved for bringing in an out-of-town kid to work on a movie or TV show. There's first class air fare. There's all kinds of per diem penalties. So here's what I would do, I would see if there's any local seminars in your area that are hosted by a local casting director that maybe does commercials in your area. If you're from Charlotte, North Carolina, from time to time, there might be a local casting director that not only where you get great information by attending that seminar, at the end of the day, that casting director also has the potential to cast your kid in a commercial or independent film. So, that's kind of my take on that. On behalf of Expert Village, stay tuned, we'll be right back."