My Inbox is Exploding! | How to Handle All Those Auditions
Jun 12, 2020 20:34:13 GMT -8
Lady Stardust ★ and Kevin Liberty like this
Post by Brittany Ann Phillips on Jun 12, 2020 20:34:13 GMT -8
So you’ve opened up your casting call recently and so far so good. You’ve got a great concept, a well-formatted casting call, and people are retweeting the heck out of it. Deadline’s in a couple weeks and you’re even offering some payment. All in all, good for you!
And sure enough one by one, they start coming in. One audition after another. And another. And another. And wow it’s only been one day and already that’s a lot. And wow they just keep coming. And geez someone with like 10k followers just retweeted it and now they’re coming even faster. And holy cow you had no idea there were this many voice actors in the world and, remind me, how many more days are left til the deadline???
On the one hand, wow your project is getting so much attention! Must feel great that so many people are interested and want to be a part of it. On the other hand, hoo boy, you’ve got to get this flood of auditions under control before they come pouring out of your screen.
You can do it, though! And here’s some tips to stay on top of the heap, instead of the other way around.
1. Make a separate email just for this project
Of course this is before you release your casting call, but if there’s one thing you don’t want it’s a bajillion emails clogging up your usual place of business. Email accounts are free and unlimited, so no reason not to set up a projectname@gmail.com and tell everyone to send their auditions there instead so you’ve got it all in one out-of-the-way location.
Remember to check your spam folder too! Sometimes perfectly innocuous auditions get caught there.
This email can also be where you handle the actual production of your project as well. And if you want to stay in touch with your chosen actors when it’s over, you can always give them your usual email address when the project is released.
If you don’t feel like making and maintaining a whole extra email, another option is to use Dropbox. You can set it up so people can upload files to you and you can view them that way. Just make sure you get their contact info as well, maybe via an accompanying text file, or you won’t be able to get back in touch!
Sidenote: If for whatever reason you’re only asking for demo reels instead of recorded auditions, you’ll save yourself a ton of time by specifying what voice types specifically you’re looking for. That way if, say, you need to fill an adult British female role you don’t get bombarded and have to sift through a whole bunch of young American male reels (They might be perfectly good, but not what you need right now).
2. If your email has tabs, use them
In addition to the Primary Inbox, gmail has Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums tabs. The names themselves are meaningless, but right off the bat you can start organizing auditions as they come in. Especially if you get a ton of auditions, this will be invaluable to going through them efficiently.
Unfortunately you can’t rename tabs, at least not in gmail, but what I’ve done in the past was decide: “Ok, auditions for female characters that sounded promising will go in Social, ones that didn’t in Promotions. Auditions for male characters that sounded promising go in Updates, ones that didn’t in Forums.” Ones you haven’t listened to yet can stay in Primary Inbox until you’ve sorted them out. And if you develop any favorites you can Star them so they show up there too. And if your email service does have tabs you can rename, even better.
Gmail also has labels. This is useful for tagging audition emails with certain character names, but is also useful if you cast multiple projects via tagging those emails also with project names. By searching for those labels within gmail you can pull up all of any category you want to browse through. Another extremely useful tool for organization.
3. The Listening Process
No matter how many auditions you get, you can still only offer one person the part. So there’s lots of sifting to do to find the one, and the more efficiently you can make it for yourself the better. Oftentimes the reality of casting online is a good deal of auditions that get sent your way will be more or less immediately recognizable as unusable. Whether due to poor audio quality, wrong voice type, or a performance that wouldn’t mesh well with the rest of the cast, sometimes you listen to an audition and know after a few seconds it’s not the one. If you’ve got lots to get through, you’re under no obligation to hold yourself up by listening through to the end.
If you’ve got the files on your computer (see below), it can be helpful to sort the files alphabetically to go down the list. A lot easier to remember where you left off that way if you’re going through it a bit at a time.
4. Keep it off your hard drive til you’re ready to start selecting
There’s no need to burden your hard drive downloading every single audition you get when you can easily listen to them in-browser. But eventually the submission deadline will have come and you’ll have picked out various favorite auditions among the characters and it gets tedious going back and forth in your email trying to compare them.
Hope you like folders because you’ll want to make an “Auditions” one on your desktop and then, inside, one for every character in your project. Into those projects you can download and drop all the auditions you’ve got that are in the running for the part (whether it’s just your favorites or all of the ones that made it to one of the email tabs you kept the promising ones). As long as everyone’s submitting their audition file with their names and the characters’ names in them and you’ve been sorting them as they come in, should be easy to move them all. And now you can listen to all the auditions for one character one after another.
To be even more organized, you can make a folder in each character’s folder called “No.” A little blunt, but no one needs to know and you can drag in auditions that you’re not considering any more. This can be preferable to deleting them in case you change your mind and want to bring them back into the running. Alternatively, you can just mark the files you want to come back to with a special character of some kind so they’re easy to search for later.
Finally, you can make a Final Choices folder, where you drag all the auditions from the actors you want to offer their respective roles, and so you have a folder with the full prospective cast in one place.
5. Closing your project early
You’ve followed all this advice but there’s still too many! Maybe you’ve only got one role to cast and within the first day you’ve got like twenty perfect applicants. Maybe you realize you made the deadline too far away and you don’t want to get stressed out. Either way you feel like the guy on the Doom box art and you want to either make the deadline shorter or close up shop altogether. Fair enough. Your project, after all.
All that we here at VAC ask is you at least give everyone one last heads-up, 24 hours at least, to get theirs in to keep it fair for the people who were planning on submitting but haven’t been able to yet. An update post in the forums or on the Discord, as well as any social media you’ve used to promote the auditions, will do fine.
6. Hire a Casting Director
Casting can be lots of fun, but it’s undeniably lots of work. Maybe you’d rather bring someone else onto the team and let them deal with all the details. A Casting Director can help by creating and promoting your casting call, sometimes even to their own private pool of vetted talent, and managing the income of auditions for you. Depending on how hands-on or hands-off you, the creator, want to be, they can even narrow down what they think are the best options and present them to you for your final selection and approval. Since a Casting Director’s role in your project begins before auditions properly start, you’ll want to get in contact early so you can talk about what your project is and what you’re looking for.
Written by Michael Malconian, with suggestions from Amanda Hufford, Kira Buckland, and Brittany Ann Phillips
And sure enough one by one, they start coming in. One audition after another. And another. And another. And wow it’s only been one day and already that’s a lot. And wow they just keep coming. And geez someone with like 10k followers just retweeted it and now they’re coming even faster. And holy cow you had no idea there were this many voice actors in the world and, remind me, how many more days are left til the deadline???
On the one hand, wow your project is getting so much attention! Must feel great that so many people are interested and want to be a part of it. On the other hand, hoo boy, you’ve got to get this flood of auditions under control before they come pouring out of your screen.
You can do it, though! And here’s some tips to stay on top of the heap, instead of the other way around.
1. Make a separate email just for this project
Of course this is before you release your casting call, but if there’s one thing you don’t want it’s a bajillion emails clogging up your usual place of business. Email accounts are free and unlimited, so no reason not to set up a projectname@gmail.com and tell everyone to send their auditions there instead so you’ve got it all in one out-of-the-way location.
Remember to check your spam folder too! Sometimes perfectly innocuous auditions get caught there.
This email can also be where you handle the actual production of your project as well. And if you want to stay in touch with your chosen actors when it’s over, you can always give them your usual email address when the project is released.
If you don’t feel like making and maintaining a whole extra email, another option is to use Dropbox. You can set it up so people can upload files to you and you can view them that way. Just make sure you get their contact info as well, maybe via an accompanying text file, or you won’t be able to get back in touch!
Sidenote: If for whatever reason you’re only asking for demo reels instead of recorded auditions, you’ll save yourself a ton of time by specifying what voice types specifically you’re looking for. That way if, say, you need to fill an adult British female role you don’t get bombarded and have to sift through a whole bunch of young American male reels (They might be perfectly good, but not what you need right now).
2. If your email has tabs, use them
In addition to the Primary Inbox, gmail has Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums tabs. The names themselves are meaningless, but right off the bat you can start organizing auditions as they come in. Especially if you get a ton of auditions, this will be invaluable to going through them efficiently.
Unfortunately you can’t rename tabs, at least not in gmail, but what I’ve done in the past was decide: “Ok, auditions for female characters that sounded promising will go in Social, ones that didn’t in Promotions. Auditions for male characters that sounded promising go in Updates, ones that didn’t in Forums.” Ones you haven’t listened to yet can stay in Primary Inbox until you’ve sorted them out. And if you develop any favorites you can Star them so they show up there too. And if your email service does have tabs you can rename, even better.
Gmail also has labels. This is useful for tagging audition emails with certain character names, but is also useful if you cast multiple projects via tagging those emails also with project names. By searching for those labels within gmail you can pull up all of any category you want to browse through. Another extremely useful tool for organization.
3. The Listening Process
No matter how many auditions you get, you can still only offer one person the part. So there’s lots of sifting to do to find the one, and the more efficiently you can make it for yourself the better. Oftentimes the reality of casting online is a good deal of auditions that get sent your way will be more or less immediately recognizable as unusable. Whether due to poor audio quality, wrong voice type, or a performance that wouldn’t mesh well with the rest of the cast, sometimes you listen to an audition and know after a few seconds it’s not the one. If you’ve got lots to get through, you’re under no obligation to hold yourself up by listening through to the end.
If you’ve got the files on your computer (see below), it can be helpful to sort the files alphabetically to go down the list. A lot easier to remember where you left off that way if you’re going through it a bit at a time.
4. Keep it off your hard drive til you’re ready to start selecting
There’s no need to burden your hard drive downloading every single audition you get when you can easily listen to them in-browser. But eventually the submission deadline will have come and you’ll have picked out various favorite auditions among the characters and it gets tedious going back and forth in your email trying to compare them.
Hope you like folders because you’ll want to make an “Auditions” one on your desktop and then, inside, one for every character in your project. Into those projects you can download and drop all the auditions you’ve got that are in the running for the part (whether it’s just your favorites or all of the ones that made it to one of the email tabs you kept the promising ones). As long as everyone’s submitting their audition file with their names and the characters’ names in them and you’ve been sorting them as they come in, should be easy to move them all. And now you can listen to all the auditions for one character one after another.
To be even more organized, you can make a folder in each character’s folder called “No.” A little blunt, but no one needs to know and you can drag in auditions that you’re not considering any more. This can be preferable to deleting them in case you change your mind and want to bring them back into the running. Alternatively, you can just mark the files you want to come back to with a special character of some kind so they’re easy to search for later.
Finally, you can make a Final Choices folder, where you drag all the auditions from the actors you want to offer their respective roles, and so you have a folder with the full prospective cast in one place.
5. Closing your project early
You’ve followed all this advice but there’s still too many! Maybe you’ve only got one role to cast and within the first day you’ve got like twenty perfect applicants. Maybe you realize you made the deadline too far away and you don’t want to get stressed out. Either way you feel like the guy on the Doom box art and you want to either make the deadline shorter or close up shop altogether. Fair enough. Your project, after all.
All that we here at VAC ask is you at least give everyone one last heads-up, 24 hours at least, to get theirs in to keep it fair for the people who were planning on submitting but haven’t been able to yet. An update post in the forums or on the Discord, as well as any social media you’ve used to promote the auditions, will do fine.
6. Hire a Casting Director
Casting can be lots of fun, but it’s undeniably lots of work. Maybe you’d rather bring someone else onto the team and let them deal with all the details. A Casting Director can help by creating and promoting your casting call, sometimes even to their own private pool of vetted talent, and managing the income of auditions for you. Depending on how hands-on or hands-off you, the creator, want to be, they can even narrow down what they think are the best options and present them to you for your final selection and approval. Since a Casting Director’s role in your project begins before auditions properly start, you’ll want to get in contact early so you can talk about what your project is and what you’re looking for.
Written by Michael Malconian, with suggestions from Amanda Hufford, Kira Buckland, and Brittany Ann Phillips