22/05/08 14:39

Finished my castings today, only two. One was for a showroom, so rich people come in and want to see clothes on real people, so you get paid to try on clothes for other people.... yes very strange. I was one of 3 guys in this room of about 20 people. Each guy took maybe 10 seconds in the room with the designers, and each chick took about 5 min. When I eventually got in there were 2 male designers and one female, the men looked at my book and the woman shook her head. My guess is i didn't make it.

Second one was odd, it was an open casting for a magazine cover, when we got in there was no line up (strange) and then all I did was hand my book across the table to the woman (I guess editor?) who flicked through it, and said "ok, thanks, have a nice day". I'm not too fussed about this though because I wouldn't have gotten paid for it.



Ok. So eating. Models have a really bad rep for eating disorders. I just want to make one thing clear, there is NO time to eat. you get up in the morning in your residence and have to leave to do a casting, right away. The residence has nowhere to make food. In my room there is a stove, mini fridge, and sink. Heres the problem, I have no cutlery, plates, bowls, or pots and pans. Even if you have all of the above, the counter space is about the size of 3 loaves of bread. So breakfast is hard to make at home, and expensive to eat out. How hard can lunch be, right? Well you cant eat at the castings, and there is very little time to stop and buy it, because your castings tend to be very close to each other time wise, but really far distance wise. If you make your lunch then your set, but due to the problems with breakfast, lunch is less likely. Finally dinner, once you get home you are so tired making food is the last thing on your mind. On my way home I have just grabbed fruit and vegetables and eaten them while traveling. Eating out isn't too bad if you are feeling up to it, but finding a place near where you live, that is cheap is hard. In Toronto, I hate missing meals, hell if I go to lunch at 3pm I feel dead. While I have been here I have eaten dinner once, and eaten lunch twice, and no breakfast. Tonight I am going to make lunch and a snack for tomorrow, and I'm going to run across the street to get dinner (pizzeria). The only reason I'm going to make food tonight, is because my casting finished at 2pm so I have lots of time.
Then there is this weird fear of food. No one talks about it, no one mentions there hungry, and when you start eating a snack people look at you like you just punched a baby in the head (especially when your standing in a casting line up, inside a store, where the cheapest thing sells for a couple hundred euros).

The socializing is weird. The fact that very few people realize that if you get the job or not, it has nothing to do with you as a person, it has to do with what the designer is looking for. So getting the job is not like you know the material better then the person behind you, its more like the shape of your shoulders will fill out the shirt better then the guy behind you. This doesn't seem to be common knowledge though, so by people not getting this, and thinking everyone is there rival, socializing is really hard. It seems the best way to meet people is to; a) do it at the agency, or in your house, or b) Just be really open and talk to everyone around in the castings (doesn't work great because of the language barriers), c) once you have a job, apparently everyone warms up and then you make friends...





ps: converse shoes suck, I have blisters the size of small villages on both heels.