The Branding Badge (part 2)

Apologies for the long delay between Part 1 and Part 2! But, this is a long process as I am figuring out how to professionally market myself for the ever-closing-growing “real world”.  My senior class has been talking a lot about how our post-graduate, real world resume should look and what other tools we will need to apply for work (FYI: google voice phone is genius. If you don’t want to put your real number out there where anyone can see it, use a google voice number. Also, put your resume in PDF format).

It seems pretty basic that everyone should have a resume, headshot…maybe a website. That’s where I use my brand to make my resume go from ‘basic’ to “Hi, I’m the College Theatre Dork and you are going to hire me!”

1. Resume: On the advice of my professor, I took my resume and turned it into 4 resumes – performance, combat-related performance, house/stage manager and publicity and the civilian non-theatre resume. I also realized just how much I’ve done when I could pick and choose what credits I wanted to include. Your resume isn’t a biography of what you have done; I’m showing you what I want to do. When I hand you my pretty resume with these text-heavy shows I’ve done and all the combat training I have listed, you are going to remember me the next time you are doing a monologue-laden, sword-fighting show. 
2. Special Skills: Jumping off that point, special skills are my favorite thing ever. Muggle Quidditch is going to stay on my list of special skills until I am eighty years old and in a wheelchair because it’s so-on brand for me — I love playing contact sports with broomsticks and who doesn’t love to know more about that?
3. Headshot: This is something that I really need to work on (and find the money) for myself. If your resume sounds like the best possible version of you, then the headshot should look like that too. If you play a lot of villains, you wouldn’t want to be handing out pictures of you smiling, right? I’m figuring out what my own headshots should look like for myself and right now, they don’t look like my actual headshot – it’s something I need to fix.
4. Website/Business Card: Well, we haven’t covered these topics in class yet but they are great tools for expressing your brand with. You can get really creative with colors and fonts that can visually sum you up; share your latest reel and give a real sense of what you are like and what you like.
5. Title: I didn’t think this was something I really needed until it was brought up in class. What am I? I can describe myself: geeky, vulnerable, sweet, determined, fascinated by the more esoteric topics – but what do I call myself? I’m an Actor-Combatant (to be)/ Asst. House + Stage Manager/Blogger-Poet/Tarot Reader. Even when I break it up into my four separate resumes, it’s still a long title. I need a better logline than that to brand myself with.

And this is how branding will help me pay back my student loans. I am really starting to get my act together and earn this branding badge but I’ve got more work to do!