ACRM for Actors

Every actor already has a contact system. It is usually spread across a phone, an inbox, a notebook, the back of a headshot and memory. It works right up until the moment it matters: a casting director you met eighteen months ago is casting something you would be right for, and you cannot remember her name, only that she liked your Chekhov and had an office near the theatre.

The ACRM exists for that moment. This page is not a manual, the ACRM guide covers the buttons. It is about what actually to put in it, and what you get back.

Start with the room you were just in #

The habit worth building is small: after every casting, workshop, shoot or festival, spend two minutes adding the people who were in the room. A name alone is enough to start. Add the job they did, where it was, and anything you would want to know if their name came up again in two years.

Do it while you still remember. The value of a contact record is decided in the ten minutes after you meet someone, because that is the only time you know the small things: that she asked whether you ride, that the reader was also the writer, that they were casting three more episodes in the autumn.

Notes are the part that pays you back #

Names and numbers you can get anywhere. What no directory holds is your own account of the meeting: what they were looking for, what you played, what they responded to, what they said about future work, whether the audition was a good experience.

Those notes are encrypted on your device before they are stored, so nobody else can read them, ourselves included. That is deliberate. Notes are only honest if they are genuinely private, and honest notes are the ones worth keeping. Encrypted notes are a Pro feature.

Tags in your own words #

Tags are yours to invent, and the useful ones are the ones a casting breakdown would never think to ask: speaks Greek, works with newcomers, Berlin, met at Drama School, owes me a coffee. Tag people the way you actually think about them, and the search will find them the way you actually remember them.

Projects hold the story together #

People make more sense attached to the work. Link a contact to a project with the job they did there, and the same person can be an actor on one and a director on another. Each project keeps a small diary: a date, which can be as vague as a month or a year, a line of what happened, and who was there. "March 2025, callback in Athens, with Maria" is a complete entry, and it will still make sense to you in 2030.

Your own credits from the enCAST film database arrive as projects on their own and stay up to date, and contacts of yours who are credited on the same production get linked for you.

Search is where it all comes back #

One box searches everything unencrypted: names, jobs including the ones you typed yourself, tags, locations, nationalities, phone numbers, email addresses, project titles, roles and events. Words narrow each other, so "female athens 35" does what it looks like.

This is the part that repays the two minutes after each casting. "Who was that casting director in Thessaloniki who does commercials?" is a question your memory answers badly and a search answers in seconds.

Keeping in touch without pretending to be organised #

Star the people who matter and they lead your front page. Record birthdays, even partial ones, and each morning you get one email listing whose birthday it is, each name linking straight to their page. A message on the right day is a small thing that keeps a professional relationship alive between jobs, and it takes thirty seconds.

Relationships record how your contacts connect: agent and actor, married to, worked with. Knowing that the director you are meeting is represented by an agent you already know is the kind of thing that changes how a conversation goes.

Bring in what you already have #

You do not have to start from nothing. Import your existing contacts from your phone, Google, Apple, Outlook or anywhere that exports a vCard file, then run Duplicates to tidy the doubles. Import brings in names, numbers, addresses and photos, and you can prune afterwards.

Exporting works the same way in reverse, at any time, including everything you have added. Your address book stays yours, and you are never locked in.

It works where you work #

Casting corridors, rehearsal rooms, sets and festivals are not places with reliable signal. Install the ACRM on your phone and it opens instantly and keeps working offline: search finds your contacts, with their phone numbers and email addresses ready to tap, whether or not you have a connection. Your encrypted notes stay online only, by design.

If you do nothing else #

• Import your existing contacts once, and clean up the duplicates.
• After each casting or shoot, add the people who were in the room, that day.
• Write one honest line about what happened while you still remember it.
• Tag people in your own words, not in industry categories.
• Star the twenty people who matter most to your career.

Do that for a year and you will have something no agent, no casting platform and no phone can give you: a record of your own professional life, in your own words, that answers questions when you need them answered.

Open your ACRM or go back to the ACRM guide.