Place yourself in the mind/ears of a buyer who is combing through oodles of auditions. Usually your agent is the first in a long line of people to listen to your audition. Your agent hears all of the auditions that their clients send in for a particular role. Let’s say they hear 50 people for one spot. If you were to listen to 50 auditions of the same copy, you would be sick of hearing that same copy by 9 or 10. Imagine what it feels like by 25 or 40. And then think about how you’d feel if you did this all day every day…with multiple auditions per day.
I’m going to emphasize here that I’m being very conservative with numbers. There could be thousands of auditions submitted from multiple agencies for one role. But in this scenario, the client requested, “only your agency’s top five!” The agent must cull the 50 auditions down to 5 submissions. If yours is not repeatedly one of the top 5 auditions, your audition may never get past the agency and into the hands of the client.
What are you doing in the first two seconds of your audition to make it to the next round?
Let’s say you’ve made it into your agent’s top five selections…congrats, you get your audition submitted to casting! The casting director asks 25 agencies submit their top five, so casting now hears 125 auditions for one role. Does casting listen to every single audition in its entirety? Sometimes, sometimes not. The voices that are interesting, the really good reads, and the auditions that make the CD’s ears prick up in the first two seconds definitely get listened to in their entirety and selected to deliver to the ad agency.
What are you doing in the first two seconds of your audition to make it to the next round?
Congrats! The casting director has culled the 125 submissions down to 20 picks to send over to the ad agency. The Creatives (most likely a team consisting of Creative Directors, Writers, Producers, and Client Managers) then choose 3-5 people to submit to client, who makes the ultimate choice for who books the job.
What are you doing in the first two seconds of your audition to book the job?