Our divisions
Our categories
Our books are organised the way the whole profession organises its own. Here is what that vocabulary means, so that you do not have to guess.
The vocabulary of the trade
Four words come up in every casting conversation. None of them is obvious if you have never booked a model before.
- A division
- The top-level split of an agency's books: women, men, seniors. A person belongs to one division at a time, and may move between them as the years pass. It is not a judgement on a profile, it is a way into the catalogue: it saves you scrolling through six hundred profiles when about thirty are relevant.
- A discipline
- What the person actually does: modelling, acting, voice-over, background work, content creation. Unlike divisions, disciplines stack, and on the advertising side that is the norm rather than the exception: an actress is almost always a model too.
- A polaroid, or « pola »
- A raw photograph: neutral background, plain light, no make-up, no retouching, front and profile. It is not a failed picture, quite the opposite: it shows the person as they will walk onto your set. A casting director always looks at the polas before the portfolio, because a portfolio tells you what a photographer managed to do, and a pola tells you what you will be working with.
- A portfolio, or « book »
- A model's or an actor's selected work: published campaigns, editorial series, studio tests. It shows the range of a profile, the registers they have already been directed in, and how they carry themselves in front of a lens. It is read after the polas, never instead of them.
Our categories
Each category opens the filtered catalogue. Height, body type and location filters come on top of that.
Our disciplines
They stack: one profile may be sought for several of them at once.
- Model
- Photography, runway, showroom, catalogue.
- Actor
- Commercials, fiction, corporate films.
- Voice-over
- Studio recording, dubbing, brand voice.
- Background
- Background and silhouette work on set.
- Content creation
- Social content for a brand.
Not sure where to start?
Describe the project to us - the medium, the dates, the number of profiles - and we will put a shortlist together for you.
