 I'm ready to talk about what I learned during my 31 days of self-tapes in July. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I did self-tapes every single day in July of 2021 and I themed each week differently. The first week was audition questions, so you know like when they ask you tell us something about yourself or what's something interesting or what's your favorite food and why. So I did that the first week and then the second week I did auditions where it's usually for commercial auditions and they just ask you to do an action and you might have a couple of lines but usually they just ask you to do an action and that was pretty boring honestly but it was fun to just explore with all of the settings and then the third week I did my special skills so like skateboarding. Are you okay? Yes! No, it's close. Skating, sewing, speaking Spanish. Y la bebida que me encanta tomar diario cuando soy en México es de juino. Special skills the whole week. I divided it into five weeks in July because technically there was five weeks in July and then the fourth week that's when it started to get really hard. I did monologues every day and then the final week I did scenes every single day because I had to film so many different videos and I also had other things going on in my life of course and self-tape auditions at my age and send and just so much. I was doing research for the monologues and research for the scenes and things like that. I didn't really have time to take my time during each video so I was a lot more loose on camera and even one of my subscribers commented this that I was able to just be myself more and like show my personality more on camera which is pretty funny because I try to do that always but you know there's different there's just different use or you know you act differently around different people and you're in different moods around different people or in different times and during these videos during the intros and the outros I was busy and also wanting to like finish this up so I could post it that day. I didn't really have time to sit down and like think about it or sit down and really plan exactly what I wanted to say whatever I was just able to be more loose and because I had to memorize so many monologues and so many scenes during the last couple of weeks so the fourth week it was all monologues and then the fifth week was all scenes I noticed that my cap got longer as far as like okay I can sit down and memorize something for 15 minutes well now I can sit down and memorize something for 30 minutes and things just click and stay in there a little bit faster. The third thing I learned from doing self tapes every single day for 31 days is that I have no excuse to ever say no to a self tape of course unless I'm like at the hospital or no wi-fi or whatever but in these last 31 days I actually filmed 30 I think it was 37 or 38 I have to look at my spreadsheet but I filmed this many self tapes this month because towards the end I was self submitting a lot more and I was getting also self tapes requests from my agency that really shows me that I can make time for it and of course the more you practice anything the better and the faster you're going to get at it. I want to play with the script more because I was in such a hurry I know that a lot of the auditions I just I did it and I was like I need to shoot it and edit it and put it up there so that's something that I know I want to work on is just taking my time more for every single audition that I have really be in the moment really you know play that person I'm supposed to be playing so just spending more time and experimenting with it a lot more timing it so that I know how much time I need to allocate for each audition. Get fast and memorizing that's good but really working on the text and knowing how much time I need in order to be able to like happily submitted because the monologue that I did for um I think it was day two of the monologue week it was a handmaid's tail and it was a dramatic monologue and it just wasn't clicking it wasn't clicking and I was like I was gonna actually do it Monday and then I ended up doing it or Sunday and then I ended up doing it Monday because it just wasn't clicking like sometimes for me I re-descript a hundred times or I say it a hundred times and then it isn't until it I think about it a different way where it really clicks where that character like I'm actually able to portray that character so I need to time how much I need for each one and also I know that it's going to be different for comedic or it's going to be different for dramatic so that's something that I'm going to work on in the beginning of the week of monologues I was like oh let me just show everybody my my takes all of my takes and that monologue was like a 35 second monologue and I did something like 26 takes and that video ended up being 19 minutes during that video like even while filming it I was like wow I am so self-conscious because I know you're gonna be watching all of this I am so in my head about it when I could have just played around with it played a different ways and not cared about like oh I'm gonna look weird or they're gonna think I'm grumpy or they're gonna think I'm whatever you know like I realized that just the mindset of of thinking that you guys would be watching made me do that many takes and then if you fast forward to the last week I did like two or three takes of each of the scenes and I performed it okay you know again back to the other one where I need to take more time with it but in general just knowing that people were watching I just need to chill out and not care which I thought I didn't care but clearly during that video I realized that I did but then after that I did show you guys um at least one or two more times I showed you guys every single one of my takes my slates I have to say my slates got so much better throughout this process because I had to slate so much at the beginning or even in the past I was gonna say at the beginning of the of the month or even in the past um I would do my slate a lot of times and now two or three times and I have my slate I can immediately go to say my slate and not be like hi oh that was too high hi okay that was not really hi my name is belki carol like oh I did I said that too fast now it is easier to do a slate because slates already are pretty they seem pretty simple right but you want to make sure that you are pronouncing everything right that you're putting a pause after your name but not too long not too short um and there's a lot of different ways you can do your slate but now I am at least comfortable delivering my slate quickly versus having to do it at least 10 times because I did so many scenes and monologues in the last couple of weeks I did so much research that's a really important part that not a lot of people talk about in acting is that you should be doing a lot of research and you should be learning about people in the industry so you don't only need to know how to act you also need to know people's names what they've done their style what they're looking for so in this research I paid particular attention to who was casting the show I didn't pay attention to all of the filmmakers like everybody that it takes to create these tv shows or films but I definitely paid attention to the actors who are the actors represented by is there an agency that a lot of the actors are represented by or were represented when they first started who was the casting director does the casting director have relationship with any of these agencies or actors um who wrote it so you know a few of the filmmakers I paid attention to and I was seeing a repetition of like oh this casting director actually has done a lot of the things that I really enjoy and just learning about them so that if I'm a ever able to be in a room with them I can speak with them and know you know what I'm talking about like how embarrassing and what it be if I met with Alice and Jones and I didn't know who she was like that would be pretty embarrassing not to say that I know a bunch about casting directors but I'm learning more and more about casting directors and people in the industry in general and talent agents in LA so I am trying to learn of course there's a bunch of people so I am at least making the effort to learn about some and I am continuing to learn more doing this challenge on my own definitely made me realize that I want more in person coaching because when you're doing something alone and even if you're learning you could be learning so much more if you had professional feedback um I mean I do tend to I do try to take acting classes or coaching or workshops as much as I can but they can be expensive and it's already expensive being an actor so I try to spread it out you know in different times but this really made me miss having a coach and because my boyfriend was a reader for all of these auditions well all of the ones that I needed a reader for um I just he's really sweet and he always helps me and I would say that he's just really sweet he's this very very supportive partner but I don't want to inconvenience him you know this isn't his career like I feel like I would be pretty annoyed if every day he would come home and be like hey can you help me really quick you know it'll only take like 15 minutes or whatever hopefully I can get like an in-person reader that's not my boyfriend soon because that's an actor specifically and then more coaching in audition in an audition setting um and more coaching in general lastly the fact that I was able to complete this challenge showed me how disciplined I am um I've always been like this even since I was a kid like when I wanted something I would work towards it and even if I never accomplished that goal like I'm just a really hard worker in general so sometimes I surprised myself like when I film 32 videos in one month plus you know other self-tapes anyways so yeah I learned a lot I would recommend this to you if you just want to learn more about your abilities and experiment and especially if you want to improve your memorization skills memorizing a lot like just anything you know anything that you repeat and have an open mind to learning like it's gonna help you improve so maybe in the future we can do this together like 31 days of self-tape I don't know oh I don't know it was a lot of work you know maybe in the future we can do something like this yeah it was it was a lot um thank you so much for watching let me know if you watched any some all one of the self-tapes I did in July and uh yeah I'm gonna go thank you so much for watching at the end of every video 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