HOW TO IDENTIFY YOUR OWN PANTONE COLOR

A child sees colors in their most primitive variations and paints with those primary colors of red, blue, green and yellow.  A master painter does not see "red", they see shades of red with many, many subtle variations.  To a casting director, you (the talent) are analogous to a colour in their palette: the casting director sees talent like a master painter sees colours: a spectrum of hues with subtle variations.  If you want to be noticed and exploited (in the positive sense of the term), know your personal colour and sharpen your pencil crayon so that the casting director is more likely to reach for you when they need someone with your characteristics.

I am not a visual artist but I have a lot of experience designing software tools for artists and videographers.  

Pantone colors are reference color swatches used by graphic designers to ensure that the exact red that they see on the screen and are intending to use in their design is what comes back from the printer.  You might see red, but a professional graphic designer isn't interested in red, they are interested in PANTONE 1645PC.  Do you understand?  It's not about being "red", it's about being PANTONE 1645PC.  Only an amateur is going to use an inexact colour.  The professional will always be more precise, more discerning and more judicious.  Your goal is to be appealing to the most judicious purveyors of talent: which means becoming an exact shade that casting directors will need.  And then making sure that the casting director can find you when they need you.

IDENTIFYING YOUR "PANTONE COLOR"

After considering the things that only you know about yourself and by listening to objective feedback from your agents and managers, you will arrive at a central type or archetype which emphasizes your unique traits and specificity. By analogy we will call this your Pantone color.

If you are having trouble determining your exact Pantone color you should start with what I call a career prototype, which should be an actor at least 20 years older than you are who, when they were your age had the same credits, background, training and genetic traits that you do.   NOT A FORMER CHILD TV OR MOVIESTAR. NOT A CHILD EMMY OR TONY WINNER. The point is that Emma Watson is not a useful career prototype because she was an international movie star before puberty.  You can't travel backwards in time, so choose a career prototype that started in the business approximately the same time/way that you did.  CHOOSE SOMEONE WHO SUCCEEDED BECAUSE THEY HAD A LOOK.

You can start by using Google image search to pull up 1990s images of actors and actresses that are now in their late 40s, 50s, 60s or 70s.

Once you have a career prototype(s), you can use that as a "jumping off point" to start intentionally designing an aesthetic for yourself which will be both useful and appealing to casting directors.  What you looked like in high school, or in college, or what you need to look like for your survival job has absolutely no relevance to the needs of a casting director.  You should prioritize accordingly.

SHARPENING THE PENCIL CRAYON

Once you have identified your Pantone color your next steps are as follows:

1) Ensure that your headshots / acting clips are the best possible representation of your Pantone color.

2) Ensure that you have headshot looks for the different contexts that you may be cast in.  For example, 1920s Flappers Look, 1850s Western Look, 1960s/1970s looks and high/low status contemporary looks (i.e. 2000s).  I'm not talking about "character shots" in police uniforms or scrubs, I'm talking about production design: hair/makeup and wardrobe.

3) Ensure that your materials are of the utmost professional quality.  This means choosing the appropriate photographer for your Pantone color and reproducing and uploading the best possible photos using the best possible darkroom (aka color correcting / retouching) process.  Nothing screams "amateur actor" like an out of focus headshot taken by your best friend on their iPhone in an alley behind the 7-11 (True story: while enroute to class at The Groundlings one time I bumped into an improv friend shooting an amateur headshot session for another actor in an alley off Melrose Ave.)

This process is sometimes called polishing or colloquially, "buffing it to a high gloss".  But we're really only interested in refinement that yields improved results in your career momentum.

Because I am a maniac and obsessed with numerical patterns, naturally, I am drawing here primarily from principles that I was first exposed to while pursuing undergraduate studies in mathematics (Successive Approximation) and then later in computer science/engineering (Stepwise refinement).  In the real world, W. Edward Demings created a discipline for continuous improvement that has been used at many places (like Apple Computer).  Demings’ work has been used to improve the quality of products in many areas and, if you can translate his language into an everyday understanding, you will see that his continuous improvement principles absolutely apply to the marketing of an actor.

The basic idea is as follows:  start with your best efforts using all the available information that you have at your disposal.  Take the product of your best efforts and start working with them.  Study the results from your current process and look for areas to improve it.

For most of you who have been with me for some time, the most obvious place to work with these principles is in headshot photographs.  Most actors come to me with one or two photograph sessions "already in the can".  So I immediately start by reviewing all 500 or 1000 photos from the recent shoots looking for the best images that may have been overlooked.  I upload these selections into the breakdowns using my highest standards of handling actor photos.  Then I start using them for submissions and postcards.  At the next available opportunity, I send the actor to the most appropriate photographer after planning a new photography session for sometimes as long as 2-6 weeks.  Typically, the results from the new photographer are significantly better than the original photos.  Now, with these new photos, I again upload the best possible images from the shoot and then start utilizing them on submissions.  This example is a refinement in two steps, however, any number of iterations (cycles) of refinement are possible.  What W. Edwards Deming is saying is that it is always possible to achieve further refinements.  However, usually such refinements are subject to the law of diminishing returns, which means there is a point at which an actors headshots are so much better than their peers that it is not necessary to improve them further.  And, further refinements may not yield any benefit to the actor.

This is sharpening the pencil crayon.

However, before you sharpen the crayon, you first need to know YOUR EXACT PANTONE SHADE. AND YOUR PANTONE SHADE IS DESCRIBED BY YOUR LOOK. Otherwise all of the subsequent activities will be misdirected towards an inappropriate result.