How to Hold a Casting Call

Casting calls are an important part of the entertainment and fashion industries. Whenever someone is shooting a music video, television show, film or hosting a fashion show, casting calls are a great way to get the participants to make the project happen. Casting calls can be held either online or in person. The best way to truly see the type of person you are going to be using is to hold a casting call in person.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Find a venue. Before you begin promoting your casting call, you should secure a venue for a particular date. Give yourself enough time to properly promote the casting, but you need to be able to give people a date, a time frame and a location.

2. Determine exactly what type of person you are seeking. When you send out a casting call notice, you should truly specify the type of person or people you want to come to the casting. There will be some people come who don’t fit the characteristics, however this is a helpful guide when it comes to screening potential cast members.

3. Begin promoting the casting call. Send out the casting call information on websites like Craigslist and Model Mayhem. This should be done initially a month before the casting call and continued once a week up until a week before the event.

4. Create an organized screening process for the casting call. Before the day of the event, you should sit down and figure out the best way to screen everyone that will attend the casting. Depending on the number of people that attend the call, you may want to have two screening points. The first screening point will be to trim the fat and cut out those people who are very unqualified and aren’t what you are looking for. The second screening point will be to audition those people that fit the basic qualifications but you still need to see more from them. These people should be required to walk if you’re casting for a fashion show or read a scene or be interviewed if you’re casting for a film/TV show.

5. Create an audition sheet. Give the reviewers specific areas to focus on and a specific way to rate the people auditioning. This will be helpful when going back over certain people later.

6. Acquire a Polaroid camera and film to take pictures of everyone. You want a Polaroid rather than a regular camera because you need to be able to take the pictures and clip them to people’s paperwork. If you can’t find a Polaroid camera, get a digital camera and make sure you upload each picture right after you take it. Then you can put a description under the picture to match it to the paperwork. A digital camera may work fine but a Polaroid is ideal.

7. Gather up some assistants. You will need help facilitating and organizing the casting call. Assign everyone a task. Do this prior to the casting call and make sure you go over the different tasks with each person. Make sure everyone understands their tasks and the role each task plays in the casting call.

8. Relax. You’ve prepared everything you could. Just be ready to handle everything that happens.

[godfather25]

on 9/2/2009 Nice article on holding a casting call.