Commercial Acting: 3 Tips

Acting for Commercials is different than acting in plays or musicals. In regular acting your job is to be truthful to the given circumstances, in commercial acting still have to do that, but you also have to sell a product! This blog post is 3 basic tips to help in commercial audition.

1. Substitution

Okay, so you got an audition for a Chocolate Ice Cream commercial, great! Only problem is, you HATE chocolate ice cream... Now what? How can you possibly be believably excited for something you detest, or even have no opinion on one way or another? You use a trick called Substitution: instead of thinking about chocolate ice cream while doing the commercial, instead think about your favorite kind of ice cream and sell THAT. If you love vanilla ice cream think about that while doing the commercial, just remember to keep saying chocolate :-)

2. Color Words

Color Words are words that are inherently act-able. Words like: Hot, Cold, Fast, Slow, Exciting, Fun, Magic, etc... These are usually adjectives or adverbs that the actor can say in a way that invokes their meaning and commercial actors should bite into them. Commercial scripts are not exactly known for being Oscar material and Color Words give the actor something to latch onto and act while giving the customer the info they need to know to make their purchase.

3. Be Truthful 

Now if you look back to the first paragraph you see that I said it's your job to not only sell the product, but to be truthful. Why? Well if you come across as fake, how likely do you think someone is to buy what you are selling? That is why you either have to truly believe in your project or be good at Substitution because the excitement that you show has to feel real to transfer to the buyer.

Okay, so those are just some quick tips, for a more in depth look at Commercial Acting, check out our Commercial Acting Technique class coming in November!

Also Please Comment Here, or on the Facebook post, and let me know what kinds of topics you are interested in having me cover next week!!!

Thanks!