An online casting platform is a website or app through which film, series and advertising productions post roles, find actors and hold auditions remotely. Actors keep a profile on it, with photos, a short showreel of their past work, their height, age range and the languages they speak. Casting directors, the people who choose actors for a production, post a short description of each role, called a casting brief or a breakdown.
How does a remote audition work? The casting director posts the brief with a few pages of the script, called sides. Actors who fit the brief apply. The ones who are shortlisted record themselves performing the scene, usually on a phone, and upload the video. This recording is called a self-tape. The casting team watches the self-tapes on the platform, marks the best ones and shares them with the director. The final round is often a live video call.
Say a casting director in Kolkata is casting a Bengali web series for a streaming service. She needs a woman aged 55 to 65 to play a retired schoolteacher, who must be fluent in Bengali. She posts the brief on Monday, with two pages of sides and a deadline of Friday. The platform shows the brief to actors whose profiles match the age range and the language, and 420 actors apply. She shortlists 35 from their profiles and showreels, and asks them for self-tapes. By Friday, 31 self-tapes have arrived from Kolkata, Siliguri, Delhi and Mumbai. She sends six to the director. The director watches them on the platform and meets two of the actors on a video call. One of them is offered the role. Without the platform, all 35 would have had to travel to an audition room in Kolkata.
Who pays? Productions often post roles for free or for a fee, and many platforms also charge actors a yearly subscription for a profile or for applying to more roles. Platforms check that a production is genuine before its roles are shown, because fake casting calls are a known way of cheating actors out of money.
Casting is the last step of pre-production, before the shoot, as described in film production and VFX. For a series that will be released in several languages, the casting team may also note which actors can dub their own lines, instead of relying on AI dubbing and lip sync. The platform stores thousands of video files, and the videos are compressed with a video codec so that they upload quickly even on a slow phone connection. Actors from smaller cities can now audition for the same roles as actors in Mumbai, which matters in a country where many series are made in regional languages.