Life Between Auditions and Shoots

The Instagram version of a working model’s life is a slideshow — wrap shots, behind-the-scenes Reels, glamorous travel posts, the occasional brand event. The actual version of life between auditions and shoots in India is something else entirely. It is quieter, slower, often uncertain, and weirdly more important than the shoot days themselves. The career is built in these in-between weeks. Almost nobody talks about them. Let me try.

The Monday after a wrap

You’d think it is celebration. It is mostly recovery. The shoot leaves the body sore, the face slightly broken out from heavy makeup, the brain a little hollow. I take that Monday completely off — a long sleep, a long bath, no phone before noon. The work starts again on Tuesday.

Audition season — the unseen full-time job

For every shoot day on my calendar, there are at least eight audition days. Self-tapes, in-person calls, callbacks, fittings, look tests, screen tests. None of them pay. Most of them lead to nothing. A handful, eventually, become work.

A normal audition day for me looks like this:

• Morning: read three briefs, plan the day’s self-tapes.
• Afternoon: set up the home studio — tripod, ring light, neutral wall, reader on speaker phone.
• Three hours: shoot, review, re-shoot, edit, upload. The cleanest take wins. Fashion tape and a deep breath in between.
• Evening: follow up on last week’s auditions, politely. Most casting directors appreciate a single nudge after seven business days.

Treating auditions like a job — not a mood — is the difference between models who keep getting work and models who burn out at year three.

The skill maintenance week

Between projects, I deliberately schedule what I call a “skill week.” It looks like this:

Mornings

Pilates and a long walk. Body before brain.

Afternoons

One craft session — accent practice with a Punjabi-Hindi-English coach, scene reading with a writer friend, or an extended posture session in front of a mirror. I am a working female model in Chandigarh, but I am also chasing acting work, and the two crafts feed each other.

Evenings

Reading. A book and a cup of chai. I am suspicious of any artist who only consumes scripts. The world inside scripts is too small.

The emotional weather of the in-between

I will not pretend the quiet weeks are easy. They are not. The phone goes silent. The Instagram doom-scroll begins. You watch a fellow model post a campaign you also auditioned for and didn’t get, and the brain does its thing — the comparison, the doubt, the small, mean voice that says maybe you’ve peaked.

Three things help me ride those days:

• Movement. A long walk shifts brain chemistry in twenty minutes. No therapy app does it faster.
• People who don’t work in the industry. My mother, my college friend who is a doctor in Mohali, an old roommate in Bangalore. They love me whether or not I get cast.
• Calendar discipline. I block training hours and treat them as appointments, even when nobody is paying me to be at those appointments.

Money management in the in-between

Modelling income is lumpy. You will have a ₹3 lakh month followed by a ₹0 month. The in-between weeks are when financial discipline is built — not on shoot days. My personal rules:

• One emergency fund of six months’ expenses, untouched.
• One “smoothing” account — every month I top up a small amount; in lean months I draw from it.
• One “investment” account — index funds and a small SIP, set up the day after every big payment lands.

This is not glamorous advice. It is the only advice that lets me say no to a project I shouldn’t take.

Brand work, the new in-between income

Every working model now has a parallel revenue stream — branded content. The trick is to be selective. I have built three personal rules:

• I only post about products I actually use.
• I do not promise outcomes I cannot guarantee (skin care being the main culprit).
• I keep collaborations to roughly four a month, no more. Anything more than that and the feed stops feeling like mine.

This earns less than maximising volume would. It earns trust, which compounds over years.

The friendships you build in the gaps

Some of my closest friends in this industry are people I met during the long stretches with no shoots — at workshops, at coffee meet-ups in Bandra and Saket, at the gym in Sector 8 in Chandigarh. We share rate cards. We share warnings about which brand pays late. We share photographers we trust. The career is not built only on talent. It is built on the network you grow in the in-between.

Why I’m grateful for the slow weeks now

For the first two years I hated them. I would refresh my email at 11pm hoping for an audition request. Now I almost protect them. The slow weeks are when I read, train, sleep properly, see family in Chandigarh, and remember who I am when no camera is pointed at me. The shoot weeks are when I work. The in-between weeks are when I become a better version of the person who shows up to work.

Both, it turns out, are the job.