Casting directors work in the world of unknowns. A casting director will be given a screenplay full of imagined characters and armed with this document they must set out to find the real world equivalent of each imagined character within the screenplays pages.

The decisions the casting director makes during this stage will have huge impacts through each stage of the project’s production process. The decision will impact the performances on screen, the audience’s connection with the character, the film’s financial success and it will also impact day to day working conditions on set.

Casting properly is one of the single biggest pain points on most film and video productions. One wrong move here can bring an entire production down.

Production Casting Dilemma

Because of this, many production companies tend to want to cast a wide net to ensure they have a sufficient number of high quality candidates to sort through before making their final decision. Using Stencil’s audition software, you can create casting notices, embed them on your production studio’s website and then share the link to your studio’s casting page within acting communities and acting job boards.

When you take this approach, you’ll likely get a lot of new traffic to your website and you’ll get many actor applications. However, casting a wide net and trying to get as many applications as possible also has its downsides as it can be logistically difficult to manage a larger number of candidates. Here in Stencil, you can see that as actor submissions come in, you’ll need to sort them, add notes, rate candidates, shortlist candidates and so on.

Logistically speaking, just looking through and sorting these applications is a lot of work.

After looking through all of the applications, you’ll then need to schedule each actor’s audition time, rent a location to hold the auditions, bring the actors in, audition them, record everyone’s audition, take notes on each performance and so on.

The more actors you bring in, the more days you’ll need to spend auditioning them. From a casting directors standpoint, this can also be exhausting and performances can start to blend into each other.

This is especially true at the end of an 8 hour day when you’ve seen and heard the same lines read fifty times that day. Things can start to become a blur.

To make matters worse, there are often times when an actor applies for a role and you like what you see on paper. However, when you bring the actor in you can tell right away that they are not a good fit for your production.

Casting directors need ways to make the entire process of casting more efficient so that they can spend more time looking at the highest quality candidates by filtering out lower quality candidates early on.

One way to do this is through online self-taping software.

Online Self-Taping Software

Online self taping software allows you to set up a first audition where the actor will self-tape their audition. Essentially, the actor can login to your self-taping platform, read a self-taping script you’ve determined is suitable for an online environment, record their audition and then submit their performance for your immediate review. Below you’ll see a screenshot of Stencil’s self-taping software.

Keep in mind that you can set up casting calls to either use our self-taping tool, or not use the tool. Not all of your casting calls need to use self-taping technology. You can simply deactivate it for the casting calls where you don’t want to use it. However, it’s available to you if you want to use it. You can sign up for a free trial of our self-taping software here.

While self-taped performances don’t always give actors optimal conditions to perform under, the conditions are not that much more artificial than an initial in-person audition. During these first rounds of auditions casting directors are mostly concerned with weeding out the actors who are not good fits, and identifying creative and performance possibilities in the group of actors who potentially could be good fits for your production.

So even if your best quality self-taped auditions are coming in at a rating of 7/10, that’s good enough to know that you have something to work with there. From this point, you can call your highest performing actors in for in-person auditions to see which of the 7/10 performances you can scale up to 10/10 performances.

And the good news is that by taking this approach, you’re not wasting your valuable in-person audition days accidentally bringing in actors who are 3/10 on the performance scale. So while self-taping, won’t give you a perfect view of an actor’s capabilities, it will give you a sufficient enough understanding of their abilities if it’s worth your time to call them into an in-person interview.

Self Tape Software: Your First Line of Defense

Self taping software acts as your first line of defense against lackluster performances. Self taping software also ensures that you maximize your casting efficiency on in-person audition days. It can be incredibly inspiring as a casting director to have to deal with back to back strong performances from actors. This can energize your audition days and it ensures you give the actors you brought in your highest levels of attention, which can in-turn fuel better audition performances.

Self-Taping Conclusion

So that’s Stencil’s self taping software tool in a nutshell. Again, if you’d like to take our self taping software for a run you can simply sign up for a free trial.

And again, you can whitelabel all of Stencil’s built in film production management tools. You can brand our software to look like your own and manage your entire production team and portfolio of productions directly from your own website.

For example, when it comes to the self-taping software, you can simply navigate to your casting page and then embed all of your casting notices directly over on your own website.

In order to match your casting notices’ look and feel to your brand’s look and feel, you can simply click on your user avatar in the upper right corner, click on the styling tab, and then change your theme’s primary and secondary colors.

Now all of your casting calls will have your brand’s color palette associated with them.

So that’s all I have for you today.

Thanks for taking the time to drop by our filmmaking blog.