It’s been a little while since I’ve had an audition. That’s ok, I know that not everything is back just yet and it might take longer for more shows to be back in production. And for a lot of shows, they are trying to limit the size of their casts, so they might not have as many co-stars as they had before. It is getting better than it was earlier this year, but it’s still not back to full capacity.
And I’m also ok with it since I don’t usually get a ton of auditions in normal times. I do want that to improve and I have some things I’m hoping to change in the near future to hopefully help, but for right now I’m more focused on making sure I’m in a good spot to take advantage of what I’d like to do. So while I’d love to have more auditions and opportunties right now, I’m not that concerned that things haven’t changed that much for me.
But I have had some friends noticing an increase in their auditions lately and that’s awesome. Some of them are going into a casting office for their auditions, but doing self-tapes is still a very popular option. And while there are some things I don’t love about self-tapes, there are a lot of benefits too. And learning how to do self-tapes when people are not together in the same place has been something everyone has been learning to do.
Normally with self-tape auditions, you’d have a friend come by to help you by having them be the camera person and saying the other lines in the scene. And even though I’m vaccinated and many of my friends are as well, we still aren’t going to someone’s place to help them record. This isn’t that bad of a plan, because it’s nice that we all know how to help friends do their self-tape auditions even if we can’t get over to them. I don’t hate having to drive across town to help a friend, but it’s nice to not have to do that.
And I got the chance to help friends do self-tapes recently and it really does make me happy. I obviously would prefer to have my own auditions, but even being a reader lets me have a little time where I get to have a bit of acting time. The most recent self-tape I helped with was for my birthday twin friend, Joanna. It was for a film project and I was able to help her over Zoom so I was being the reader while in her house.
It was an interesting audition to be a reader for because almost all the lines were ones I had to read. Joanna had some lines too, but a lot more of her audition was about reacting. So it really gave me time to feel like I had playtime with acting. I wasn’t doing anything too crazy since it wasn’t my audition, but I still tried hard to make sure I was the best reader possible for her.
After going through a few takes with different options, Joanna had a great take that I thought was amazing! We did another one after that just to be safe and she checked her camera to make sure that everything looked and sounded fine. It was perfect and we were able to get her entire audition done in only a few minutes.
But since we both had set aside a bit more time for her audition, we stayed on Zoom and had a nice chance to hangout and talk. It’s a little crazy to think that we are actually having more hangout time in a pandemic than normal times. We usually text throughout the year but only really see each other for our birthday and for our cheesecake outing. But this past year we also had the Drag Queen show and the times we’ve helped each other with our self-tapes. I love that somehow the pandemic has given us more chances to see each other and talk. And since we had just seen each other somewhat recently, there wasn’t a lot to discuss in our post-audition hangout. But it was still nice to have some time with a friend since that’s something I still am not doing that often.
I hope that either I get some self-tape auditions or I have friends who need help so I can be a reader coming up. When there aren’t a lot of things I can control in my acting career, having these moments are so much fun for me to do. And it’s even better when I get to also have a friend hangout after some acting fun!
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Almost Getting To Act (or Being On The Other Side Of A Self-Tape Audition)
Another Self-Tape Audition (or So Grateful For Anything Related To Acting Right Now)
Helping Out A Friend (or Getting To Act)
An Isolation Audition (or Working On My Self-Tape Game)
Making My Acting Bold (or Feeling Great From An Audition)
Self-Tape Saturday (or Turning A Video Shoot Into A Photo Shoot)
