As model bookers, there are many hats we wear on an average day in the office. These tasks are vital to running our business successfully and making sure that not only we are happy, but that our clients and models are too.

First of all, our team arrive at their office (we have offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane) in the morning to a range of model applications that have come through over night from our website. The first call of action is to delegate each application to the appropriate talent manager for the state the model is in. Due to receiving hundreds of applications a week, we really do require all information to be filled out so we have easy access to all requirements and don’t have to do any chasing up. The process of how we decide who to sign up can primarily depend on the type of briefs we have in at the time or briefs that we get in regularly, and the talent their requiring. We are always looking at filling gaps in the current talent pool we have. We also always have our clients in the back of our minds when deciding on who we’d like to meet and sign up. We know the type of talent that our regular clients are on the lookout for for their next projects so it’s super important we sign the talent types their looking for.

We have seen a massive shift towards the demand for diveristy in the industry. Therefore, we are always looking for beautiful diverse faces that are a great representation of Australia as a multicultural society. We have also seen a big move towards clients wanting to fulfill briefs with authentic talent, who are relatable but also able to move behind a camera. We’ve had clients ask specifically for real mums for mum roles, real surfers for surfer roles and real chefs for chef photoshoots. It always helps us if an applicant includes their special skills and talents that we can use to our models (and our) advantage when putting them forward for work.

After we sift through all the model applications, we move onto answering enquires made by either our already exisiting clients, or new clients. This generally starts as a chat about the brief the client has to fill – this could be a promotional job, an acting role, a fashion shoot, a TV commercial, a print campaign and the list goes on. We then determine the rate for the particular job and if it is a still shot or moving image, we also determine usages, how long the images/video are going to be used and on what mediums. Once we have all of that locked down, we move onto suggesting the appropriate talent on our books that may fit the brief they are after.

We have all of our clients fill in our booking form which asks them to fill in all the details of the job, which arms us with all the details we need to build the job on our custom built talent and job management platform, WINK Central. Once we gather the availabilties of our models based on physical requirements, skill sets and any other defining factors the brief had, we then go back to our client with the comp cards of those people. This process is generally the case with briefs that are more straight forward.

Sometimes a client may supply us with quite a wide brief. For instance, a female between 18 – 30 years old. In these cases, our expertise as bookers comes in handy. After running through the job brief thoroughly, we are able to put forward the most fitting person for that particular job according to our experiences with those models.

After sending through the available talent, our client will then either cast from the photos alone, or ask a selected few in for a casting which usually goes for about 10-15 minutes. Castings are the perfect way for our clients to determine who is the best fit for their brief. After our client is happy in their selection, we lock in the talent!

Call sheets are a huge part of our day to day activity. It is extemely common for us to receive call sheets either the day before the shoot, or hours beforehand. This requires quite a lot of patience from us and our talent!

Lastly, to finish off the day we spend quite a bit of time reaching out to new and existing clients. At WINK, it is super important to us that we foster relationships with our clients and put a face to a name. We spend quite some time out of the office meeting with people, having coffee (and sometimes wine) to really hear the needs of our clients and help educate on what we offer and how we can help out in a variety of situations.

What some people may not realise is that, as bookers, we’re on call before hours, after hours and on weekends, pretty much 24/7 (we get some sleep in). We always have jobs happening outside of 9-5 so we have to make sure we are available if our clients or models need us during these times. In addition to this, we also LOVE hanging out with our models. We always hold digi days, personal training sessions, team dinners and model development days after hours and on weekends so we have more time to get to know our team on a personal level. They are also great ways to develop our talent’s skill sets, arming them with everything they need once on set.

It’s such a fun workplace (thanks Anthill for rating us in the top 100 workplaces, 3 years running) and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We always have the tunes pumping, endless cups of coffee and tea and the snack drawer is never empty.