PRODUCER'S NOTEBOOK

Auditions - During and After

Audition day arrives. Your lobby becomes a beehive of activity. Actors buzz around, studying their sides, and socializing. The place can get loud and chaotic. But inside your studio, it is a completely different atmosphere. Auditions are all business.

For the actors, auditions are job interviews. Think of your casting director as the human resource department and your client as the top executive at the company.  Sometimes your client is the producer. Sometimes your client is a network. Sometimes you have representatives from both companies in the booth.

The control room can get crowded and multinational. Not all clients speak English and it can be challenging to work through an interpreter. A good casting director could probably moonlight for the United Nations. There’s a lot of diplomacy involved when you’re talking to a different person every fifteen minutes.

Keep in mind that the point of recorded auditions is to produce a digital recording for the client/network. This is the case even when the client is present at every second of every single audition. Your engineer is in charge of not just recording each audition but also of keeping track of which takes wind up on the final tape.

This is what happens inside the studio during a typical audition:

1. Introductions

One actor at a time will be led into the recording booth. The director, the clients and the engineer will be seated on the other side of a glass wall in the control room. Each actor will come in and introduce him/herself, then light banter with the casting director will generally ensue. Often, they will already know each other and introductions will be for the benefit of the client and other executives. The entertainment business is filled with chatty people with high social skills who know the value of networking.

2. Preparing for the recording

The engineer will adjust the microphone to the height of the actor in the booth. Then he will return to the control room and set the levels on the recording equipment. Each audition has to be recorded at the same audio level so that all the takes on the final tape play back at the same volume. You don’t want the client having to turn the volume up and down for every actor.

3. The audition

Through the magic of the talk-back mike located on the console in the control room, the director will talk to the actor in the booth. The actor will read from the sides. Between takes, the director will turn off the talk-back mike so the actor can’t hear what’s going on in the control room and ask the client for his thoughts on the read. The director will take those comments and give the actor suggestions on how to tweak his performance. The director is the only person who should speak to the actors, no matter how many clients are in the room. The actor will read again – sometimes a few more times. Smiles and thanks all around will follow and the actor will see his way out.

The director – or the client - will immediately decide which takes will make it to the tape. Time constraints usually dictate that the engineer edit together the selected takes right then and there. (This is not a job for a rookie engineer!)

Often, these takes are a combination of different reads. For example, the first two sentences of take three can be followed by the last sentence of take two. No one cares how you arrive at the end result as long as it sounds good.

Repeat steps #1, #2, and #3, over and over again, until auditions are complete.

4. Remote auditions

Sometimes an actor isn’t available to come to an audition. He or she may ask to record the auditions at home and email them in. A lot of actors have some recording equipment at home.  The quality of the recording won’t be as good as a professional studio but it will probably be okay for audition purposes. If you have a client who wants to sit in the studio during the auditions and give direction, this may not work. But otherwise, you can send the actor the sides and let them do their thing at home.

5. The audition tape

Audition tapes are created so the client can take this back to his office. Usually a bunch of audition tapes are dubbed off so everyone who has any possible involvement with the project can listen to the tapes. As I mentioned in “Creating Your Audition List”, casting choices aren’t always made based on talent.  Sometimes you will wind up giving the client’s family and friends a lot of roles. Learn to live with it because nepotism is not going away.

6. The results

Hopefully, the client will be happy enough with the selected takes that he or she can cast the series from it or, at least, ask for “call backs” with the same actors. Call backs are just that: you call back the actor for a second audition, usually with a little different direction in mind.

The worse case scenario is that the client decides none of the actors hit the mark and you have to do another round of auditions for every character. Have I ever experienced that kind of complete failure? Absolutely not.

Most audition results are mixed. You get the majority of the characters cast, have to do some call backs, and perhaps bring in a new set of actors for the trickier roles. You may not agree with the client’s choices, but the person signing the checks always gets the final decision.

One last word of caution. Don’t get too attached to the cast until after you have mixed the first episode and the client approves it. One of the worst things a producer has to do is fire an actor who thinks he or she just landed a 52-episode series. Try to remember that the cast only finalized when the client thinks so.

Good luck!