Commercial Model Career Information

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Amy Erinberger. I'm with Option Model Management in Portland, Oregon. I've been a commercial model for almost twenty years and I'm going to tell you a little bit about how to get started. You want to find a reputable agency in a market near you. If you live in a large city, that shouldn't be hard. If you're in a small town, you're going to need to go to a bigger area to find these agencies. And they should be pretty easy to identify in the phone book or the internet. And you want to set up a visit with them, as many as you find attractive to you, and go to what are their open calls. And they'll usually have a day of the week set aside and a few hours in that day to see new people. If the agency finds that you have what they think it takes to be a model, then they will let you know and they will generally give you contact information for photographers in the area so that you can shoot pictures and start creating a portfolio. This is a book with photographs of your head, your full body, and several other different looks just to give a variety to show clients what you're capable of doing in front of the camera. Once you have these photographs, the best of those will be chosen and then your agency will put together a composition card. This is like a business card and it has information about you, your measurements, which you should know, your bust, waist, hips, shoes, clothing size, etc. and contact information for your agency. So this is the key, keys to getting you in contact with clients. They'll see your card on the wall of the agency when they come to visit and say, "who's that. I want to book them." Or your agent will hand them a card and say, "this person is doing great in runway or they're a really good catalog model. I think you should take a look at them." And they'll help you get these jobs that you're looking for. A very common scam I would call it in the modeling world are these agencies that also act as modeling schools. And when a new model visits these places with every good intention, the agent sees an opportunity to make money. These bogus agencies do. And basically any legitimate agency out there will not ask you to pay them for anything that they're not performing as a service directly to you. Whether it's putting you on their website or creating comp cards or doing some kind of actual service. If they start asking for you to attend their classes and pay them exorbitant amounts of money, I've heard of three thousand dollars to attend modeling classes. And it just sends shivers down my spine to think of spending that kind of money on things that are pretty, relatively easy to pick up if you have a natural ability to model and if you can even fit into the modeling world. There are some requirements as a model. And you've probably heard of some of these before. There's a certain height requirement. I'm not going to give you an example because sometimes that is modified for certain models that just have a great look and can really, really know how to use their body and their face well. But your agency may tell you you're too short or you're too tall or this kind of thing. Also, you need to be in relatively good shape unless you're a doing a different kind of modeling, a plus size modeling. So these are some basic requirements of modeling."