In all honesty, Stand-In Central is a bizarre website. It is a website dedicated to perhaps one of the strangest jobs out there — the job of essentially standing in place on a TV or film set so a crew can set up a shot for an actor. Stand-ins are often forgotten about in credits, in invitations to wrap parties, in crew gifts. Their work is assumed to be simple, easy, requiring no skill or talent. They might even be mistreated as if they were props. Why would someone ever create a website about stand-ins, ya know?

Stand-In Central never took that negative perspective about stand-ins.  From the start, Stand-In Central has respected that standing in on a TV or film set can be a hard job at times, requiring knowledge, skill, and talent, and that standing in certainly is deserving of credit and inclusion at least compared to other workers who dedicate less time to a production than they do.

Stand-In Central was founded in 2010 after an insult. On the Editor’s first major stand-in job, an assistant director slapped down a piece of paper defining the term “stand-in” and the job responsibilities. Although the gesture seemed offensive, it was also a relief: The Editor knew exactly what the production expected of him. And the Editor knew if other stand-ins who cared about the work and were new to it had that kind of explicit information about the job of the stand-in (delivered less offensively), their minds wouldn’t be consumed with fear of being fired for not understanding stand-in work, and instead would be consumed with understanding what was expected and doing just that to their best of their professional abilities.

Stand-In Central cares deeply about stand-ins. They are like a ragtag extended family. They are subjects sometimes of poor working conditions, outdated compensation arrangements negotiated by their union, recipients of fewer visits by union field representatives. They are sometimes funny in that they resemble a movie star, a TV actor — or don’t at all. Some are actors themselves, some are definitely not. Some have amazing experiences on set, some have traumatic ones. So many have great stories and wild experiences. And they all have the odd perspective of what it’s like to stand on a mark on set as a path toward making a decent living, earning health insurance, qualifying for a pension, and maybe even growing their acting careers.

For the Editor, Stand-In Central is a labor of love. Each week, the Editor strives to have a post come out on Wednesdays at 10pm Eastern Time. For a long while, a frustrating pattern has taken shape: The Editor will have drafted a blog post to come out on Wednesday evening, only to find out the next day or so that the website didn’t publish it. It was hard to understand why, but the Editor usually was able to publish it upon seeing the issue.

But, over time, more and more website issues have come up for this modest informational website, and they have been hard to address, largely because tech support chats aren’t easy to do on set when you’re standing on a mark, or trying to watch the monitors, or just being on the ready at a moment’s notice to stand in. And outside of standing in, the Editor has been fortunate to have other consuming work, but unfortunately not to have adequate time to address Stand-In Central website slowdowns, server crashes, etc.

This is a happy message, not a sad one. The Editor has been able to spend the last month here and there addressing server issues that are technically beyond his ken. Slowly but surely, though, those issues seemed to have resolved in fits and starts. As of the date of writing this post, it seems as if things have resolved a bit with Stand-In Central’s issues of slower-than-desired load times, server outages, and maybe missed publication times. Time will tell if those fixes hold. If you visit the site and it doesn’t load or is slow, just bear with the site and the Editor: We are doing the best we can.

But all in all, here, the Editor of Stand-In Central wants to say, “Thank You!”  Thank you for sticking by Stand-In Central, using it to fill your head with tips, tricks, and knowledge about stand-in work. The search results for the website show that people use it. The purchases of The Stand-In Handbook and The Callsheet Cheatsheet show that there are people who care lots about working as a stand-in and being a professional in doing it. As far as the Editor is concerned, Stand-In Central has become a success. If you’ve noticed issues around the site and bore with them, the Editor is most appreciative of your patience.

And when the Editor learns on set you visited the Stand-In Central, follow the site, shared the site with others or recommended its handbook, those things validate the labor of love that is Stand-In Central.

So, thank you for following Stand-In Central and continuing to follow it. Stand-In Central has truly become the industry resource it was aimed to be.  The Editor hopes it will continue to serve you and other stand-ins, present and future.

Sincerely,
— The Editor

Do you have any feedback on Stand-In Central or your use of it? Please share your thoughts in the comments box below!