The ActorCast Blog

What should I wear to an audition? Answer: Whatever You Want.

In 90% of cases, this is absolutely true. What do you feel confident in? What do you feel comfortable in? Wear it. Go on with your day.

However, there are always exceptions to every rule.

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ActorCast is now also hosting an open call for two roles in the upcoming Twilight Sage: Eclipse movie. The casting office is looking for actors to play Seth and Leah Clearwater. For more information, or to submit your audition, please visit: www.eclipseopencasting.com.

Universal’s upcoming film, The Death and the Life of Charlie St. Cloud, is looking to cast the role of Sam, a 12 or 13 year old boy. If you are interested in auditioning, go to http://www.iamsamstcloud.com.

The question I am most often asked by actors is “How can I be as cool as you?” and I don’t have an answer. But the SECOND most asked question is “Do you like to get postcards?” and I DO have an answer to that: No.

The time you spend finding casting directors contact information, having post cards and general submissions printed and finding addresses would be much better spent finding open auditions and roles and submitting for them. Focus your energy on opportunities when casting directors are asking for your information instead of seeking out theirs.

I’m not saying that it’s completely useless to contact casting directors blindly. There are always going to be stories about blind submissions that got the part, but those are the exception and not the rule. There are a lot of websites and services that ask you to pay for casting directors addresses and phone numbers. Pursuing those people is a dead end. If they were open to general submissions, they wouldn’t hide their address. Your face is too cute to end up in a trash can.

The agency submission schematic is in place because it works. As annoying as it may be for everyone involved, it streamlines the process. Circumventing that process by submitting directly is rarely fruitful. What is fruitful is submitting for a particular role. Which brings me back to why postcards don’t help as much as open auditions.

Agents and managers give a casting director an immediate context of who you are. Without context, you are a stranger to the CD. If you don’t have an agent, focus your energy on submitting yourself when you have the opportunity of context or can create it–and stop paying services that say you don’t need it. You do. That’s part of why Actorcast is as helpful as it is. There’s immediate context.

Open auditions, or even just submitting yourself for a particular role are things you can do to go around the agency-submission process while still maintaining a sense of purpose when you make contact. Casting Associate Tamara Hunter, (currently working on Iron Man 2) says “It always benefits the actor to do some research and find out what projects we are working on and submit appropriately.”

That being said, open auditions and specific role information aren’t always going to be available to you and sometimes you just want to do something to get the ball rolling. In that case, audition for off-broadway plays. If you get in, you can invite the casting director you fancy to come see it with industry comps— and THAT is a postcard that does work.

Taping yourself (or your child) at home is becoming exponentially easier. Nonetheless, there is still some effort necessary in order to make your tape as well-produced as possible.

The most important thing you can do to ensure your tape is taken seriously is make sure the audio and video are clear. Check both of them, on the camer and on the computer. If you have doubts, do it again, just make sure any reasonable adult could easily view it.

If the audio seems cracked, fuzzy, blown out or otherwise painful to one’s hears, check all your connections and do it again. Test everything before you tape anything. You don’t want to have a brilliant acting moment lost because the mic wasn’t plugged in. If the audio is barely audible, that isn’t a problem that will resolve itself. That is a problem that will make the casting director turn it off and go to the next person. You have to either edit the audio using iMovie  or Windows Movie Maker or you have to do it over.

The lighting is best when you tape yourself in a brightly lit room in the middle of the day. If you can’t do that and you have to do it at night, make sure your your face is clear and easily distinguishable on camera. Casting directors know you don’t have a perfect lighting set up in your house, but sending in a video that is dark or grey doesn’t draw attention to your acting. It draws attention to how drab the whole shot looks. It’s also not a good idea to have one brilliantly lit lamp in the corner of your shot. If we see your face and what looks like a halo up to the left, it’s distracting.

I know I’m giving a lot of somewhat vague parameters and that’s because every audio and video check is going to be different for everyone in every space. The best guide is whether or not you’d be interested listening to and watching a stranger with the clarity levels you’re sending in.

It’s better to put in the extra hour getting everything perfect than sending it out sub-par. That voice in the back of your head that says “Oh, just send it already!” is not helping you. Ignore it. Consider it a favor to your brilliant soul-shocking talent.

We’ve received hundreds of submissions. Thanks to everyone who uploaded their audition. The role has not been cast as of yet, so if you’re thinking about auditioning, please upload your video as soon as you can.

Here’s a few updates from the open call:

-  Keep in mind, not all of the auditions are being displayed on the I Am the Wimpy Kid web site, so if you don’t see your video there, be patient. We can’t promise it will go up, as we now have hundreds of videos to sort through.
-  We do not know when the casting director or the producers will choose an actor. Once they have made their selection, we will post an update to this blog.

If you have questions about your submission, do not contact the casting office. Please email support@actorcast.com if you have any questions. We will reply to your email as soon as we can.

- The ActorCast Team

If you are looking to submit yourself for the role of Gregg Heffley, you’ve come to the right place. If you are not already a member of ActorCast, click here to go to the web site where you can start the registration process. Everything you need to film and upload your audition is on this site.
If you already have a membership on ActorCast, log in to your account and go to the Roles page. Break a leg!

The audition, and what happens after, can be nerve wracking (although maybe not as nerve wracking after you’ve read Part 1? Maybe?) But let’s back up a minute to something that can be ever MORE nerve wracking and that’s: How to get auditions in the first place.

If life were fair, every single person in the world would get as many auditions as they wanted. And I would be married to Ryan Gosling and have a disease where you lose weight by eating cheeseburgers. Seeing as how Ryan Gosling remains unmarried and I have to limit my cheeseburger intake, you probably have not gotten every single audition you’ve ever wanted.

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As an actor, there are some things you can control like which headshot you send out, what training you have behind you, and whether you ate a tuna fish sandwich before going in. Maybe that’s why the things you cannot control, like what happens after your audition, are the most maddening. As such, let me lay a little knowledge on you so maybe you can rest easier knowing the likely scenarios following your audition.

The first thing that happens is that you go into your audition and you rock it. [If you didn’t rock it and/or typically don’t rock it, skip ahead to the “I Don’t Think I Rocked It” section.]

I Rocked It

Contingent upon you rocking it, the casting director highlights your name, makes a few notes about how fly you are and gives your tape to his/her overworked assistant. That tape gets uploaded to Cast It where the director sees it. If the director likes it, he’ll either have you come back for a director’s session or he’ll have the producers see it. Lately, with so many features being filmed on location, directors will cast an entire movie off Cast It, or as we call it ‘Tape’. So once the producers see it and approve you, it will go to the studio casting department to approve if that step is necessary. On some projects, all you need is the director. On others, you need approval from absolutely everyone in Los Angeles. (Prop 109: To cast Andy Bauch as “Frightened Inmate #2″ ).

It is different for every production because the heirarchy is different but here are the general things that you need to know about the process:

1.) It is possible to be cast off of your first, and thus only, audition. As such, you should treat every audition as a director’s session because the director may very well see it.

2.) By the same token, if you were expecting to get called in for the director and you get called in for the casting director, you should absolutely still take the appointment. Not only because it is respectful to the casting director, but because the director might not be seeing anyone in person.

3.) There could be a lot of lag time between when you go in and when you hear anything. You can’t use the “call back” as a barometer anymore because that part may be cast off tape, eliminating the need for “call backs” all together. I once offered a woman a role 3 months after her audition. Unless your agent hears from the casting office that you aren’t in the running, don’t count yourself out.

Take from this the following: Do your best from the outset; realize the director is now much more accessible to you even if you can’t see them; don’t freak out if you don’t hear anything.

I Don’t Think I Rocked It

This is okay, provided you’re a good actor. Since the casting director has you on Cast It and tape, they may use that audition to get you a different role in the film or a role in a different film all together. There is always value in a casting director having tape of you. This is especially true with a website like Cast It where everyone’s auditions are easily accessible and able to be pulled up at any moment. If you come in and do a great job on a project, but you aren’t right for the role or you get beat out by someone else, that casting director might think of you randomly in a meeting with another director months later and they have your audition right there to show– you never know when the right part will come along.

But whether you rocked it or you stunk up the room, you can’t control what happens after you leave. So when you walk out of the room, relax your shoulders and go get a milkshake (for me).