S2E13 - Most Casting Stuff

Well, yes.

Wait, and everybody else said they too.

Yes.

Okay. I'm. I'm a little bit out of it today, I guess. It's one of my.

It's all good.

Okay. Hello and welcome to behind the Locked Doors. And yet another time when I forgot to come up with, like, a joke or anything. And the dog is bothering me. He wants to be on the lap. It sucks. Anyway, I am Scott Paladin. I am writing a horny werewolf. Not. Wait, wait, wait. I have written a horny werewolf called It Takes a Wolf. Yay.

Hell yeah.

I'm Sam Stark. I'm working on as in West, a spinoff of the actual play of Unspeakable Distance.

Hey, I'm Jack. I'm also working on AZ and West.

And I'm Interiority. I'm working on Sundered.

Okay. You are really super quiet too.

Yeah. Whoa, Mike.

Oh, no. Oh, no.

We're talking about. Talking about not being able to hear Jack.

And all of a sudden you're normally quite quiet, but yeah, I can just like Max.

I don't have to change my game.

I'm very softly spoken. I'm a nice, soft person, a polite person. Soft boy in amongst all of these rowdy Americans. I mean, what can we expect?

I loved pairing you with Kale for like, the two soft spoken boys. It was just great. The quietest audio forms ever seen. Okay, so let's do our check ins here. Yeah. The last time I said that I needed to be done with episode nine and start into revisions, that has happened. I wrote.

Yay.

So I now have draft zero of the full podcast. So they're. It feels weird. I've been working on this for like two years, but there were some sections in there where it was like, as I was writing, I'm like. And then this conversation happens. I don't know how to write it right now. I'll come back to it later. So now I'm going back and doing those parts right now. Um, so. Yeah, but feeling good.

Yay. Fantastic.

Sam, Jack, how are y' all doing?

Okay. Um, I have been working on still beefing up that second episode. I'm not finished with it. Um, I've been busy with work and dog training and whatnot, but is going. Is going slowly, but it's going to.

And I've done nothing almost.

You've had health issues.

You have good reason.

Yeah, I cannot concentrate. I cannot. I'm having a lot of trouble remembering things. My migraines have taken a sort of a crazy turn and I'm getting An MRI done at the beginning of August. But also on top of that, I do not know where the walker scene that I owe Jack went to. I'm pretty sure that. I'm pretty sure what happened was I wrote it on my laptop because I love being able to like sit in comfort on like a couch or like a beanbag chair and like just type in my lap. And I'm pretty sure that I wrote it on the laptop. And my laptop is currently unusable. It like did the laptop thing that all inevitably all laptops do and it just won't turn on. Luckily, my partner is a computer guy and he is going to extract or whatever magical thing computer guys do when the computer has died. And he's gonna, you know, he's gonna dive into the mainframe and you know, he's gonna hacker it or whatever and.

Sacrifice a goat over a copper bowl.

Exactly. Yeah. And so he's gonna be able to get all of my stuff off of the computer, but he has to physically do that. And I'm pretty sure that's where it is. Cause I can't find it anywhere else. And I am 96% sure that I actually wrote it. So that is done. It just has not been given to Jack yet. That's all good. And then I also. Quick thing that doesn't actually have anything to do with what we usually talk on this podcast, but it's important. My friends, my writer friends and I are doing. We're putting together an anthology of different kinds of stories with a theme around like corrosion. And I think I've talked about it on this podcast before, but I overwrite and I always go way over the word count. And the word count for our anthology stories I think was 10k maybe. And I did a like 35,000 word novella.

And.

And now because, I mean, Dead Space with Dinosaurs was really fun and it just kept going and going. So now I have to figure out am I going to try and pare this down or am I going to write something completely new by Saturday? So that's what I'm gonna try and do this week.

Classic. Well, that's definitely very much sending you strength. Mike, how are you doing?

Oh, I failed completely. And I don't even have an excuse for it. Yeah, I just. I just wish it was. It was.

I think Scott, like did the most. I think Scott, like absolved the rest of us of any of our sins because he finished a draft.

I think Scott stole our energy. I think Scott is some sort of vampire.

Like we have a certain amount of competence that flows between us. You know, when one person's.

It's like the brain. Brain cell, but it's not a brain cell. It's the do things. Cell.

Executive function.

We trade it around. Executive function.

Mom said it's my turn with the executive function.

Yeah, this week it was Scott's turn with the executive function.

Yeah, that was the back of the queue, I'm afraid. So.

Yeah.

Couldn't be helped. Just one of those things.

Yep, it happens.

It just happens.

I mean, you know.

Yeah.

Usual suspects. One of the things I'm finding difficult at the moment is I have a day job which is, you know, obviously very draining. It takes up a lot of time. But I also write for. And the people who I write the money for are like, hey, where's. Where's the words you promised in exchange for the money? So. Yeah. So having those two things on top of each other leaves surprisingly little room for writing for your own project. So.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

It's like.

Yeah, sometimes it'd be like that having.

A day job got. I have two day jobs and one of them is teaching at a ceramic studio. And. And I'm doing five classes a week right now, which is kind of a lot. So I've just been.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Emily. Sometimes, like, even if it's. Even if you physically have the time, it's just so draining, you know, like, you know, you're having to deal with other people and, you know, the stress.

And it's hot outside. Like every time I walk out my house, I'm like, horrible.

Yeah, I know. I was. There was a couple of months there where I was like being. I could take my little laptop out onto the deck and like. Or our boards and like, right in the evenings when it was all nice and it's like, oh, this is. This is lovely. This is like. This is so nice. Yeah, beautiful.

I love going outside and I'm like, I hate going outside.

Got all hot and I'm like, no, the star burns up here. Let's not.

The sun is a deadly laser. Actually, fuck this.

I realized that I live in Washington state and it's not known for its sunshine or its heat, but when it does get hot, it. It's usually in July, which is right now. And we're not used to it. So, like, we're not acclimated for this 80 something degree weather, and we're not 80.

Sounds so pleasant to me.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, like, I don't actually know. I haven't paid attention to what the actual temperature is. But when I step outside onto my concrete patio thing, it just. It's like walking into an oven. I'm like, why do I want to be outside? But it has been really nice to hang. Hang laundry outside. Like, I got to actually dry my comforter in the sun. That was really cool. I brought it back inside, and it smelled nice, and it was nice and warm. But, yeah, we're just not used to it up here. And we just burn so easily, even in just this sort of 80ish degrees. And it's terrible. It's terrible.

Okay, well, so we talked last time about casting calls, but I know that there is some. I still have thoughts, and so we're gonna have a whole other episode on that, if that's cool with y'. All.

Give us all your thoughts, Scott.

Go.

I want to hear every thought in your head also. I just want all the listeners to know that twig is being so funny.

Oh, he really is.

Scott's beard, it's really scary.

He's so much man. I put him on the ground.

And now the other dog loves you.

Yeah, now they're. Now they've decided it's playtime. Okay, like, anyway, so we talked. We talked sort of like the broad philosophy of casting calls last time, but there are a bunch of practical considerations that I think are also super important. Can you guys not right now?

They want to participate.

I will put you in the bathroom. Hold on.

Okay, don't test me.

So I thought it would be useful to both. All of us have been involved in casting before and have also both sides of it. I think everybody here has gone out for stuff in various ways. And so I think there's some real value to be gained in thinking about, literally, how a document like that gets put together and how the files from it get processed. So the thing that really killed us the first time was we did not know what forms were the very first.

Oh, God. Yeah.

Breathing space. Casting call. It was. It was. We created a document, gave everybody there the lines and everything. And there was like, here, upload this to a Dropbox or email it to, you know, Ash. And it was like, oh, my God, that was a nightmare. So if nothing else, you guys should know what form, what online forms are. Anybody with a Google account can create a form where you ask questions. So, like, what character is this for? What is your name? What is your email? What is your like? Or how can we get a hold of you? Please, please, please. Yeah, the having to hunt people down on that. First. We actually ran across it later too, with. Even with forms, because people don't feel like inevitably one of the people you'll want to cast will have not filled it out. Right. And sometimes you want them so badly that you go hunt them down anyway. Like, okay, this username looks kind of like this other person who I. My friend on Twitter. Let me go see if that's actually them. Let me send a dm. Let me. I was like, yeah, so remember what.

We said about how actors don't read.

Yes.

When the instructions are fill out the form. Sometimes people go, okay, I won't.

Yes. Or. Or they, they put in. They just fumble information or whatever. That's pretty reasonable.

Yeah, just mistype their email or whatever. It happens.

So if somebody. I will say if somebody has really screwed things up, it's maybe not worth it to go after them because they. That may be an indicator of how they will be later on. We've learned that one the hard way as well. So, yeah, forms are really a killer on that. You should definitely be. What's the word? Yeah, you want to get. The information you actually want to gather from people is like their name. Often pronouns is good too, because especially in the circles we go through, it's not necessarily evident. So a lot of people tell you that a good way to contact them, how they would prefer to be contacted is also really good. Like, hey, some people are just email centric, some people are discord heads. Those are all really important information to have when you're trying to wrangle a bunch of cats. And then you can upload files to this extent. I think this is the biggest problem with Google as using your form base, which is that in order to upload a file to a Google form, the person first has to upload it to their Google account. And then when they submit the form, it moves from their Google account to their. Well, actually it gets copied from their Google account to your Google account.

It doesn't move. Let me tell you from my very, very, very full Google account that it does not move anywhere, which I don't think it's got.

It can mean that somebody like uploads a thing, thinks they finished the form, and then just like walks away.

Yeah, it doesn't hit the submit. I've done that.

Or if they're. If their Google Drive is completely full, they will not be able to upload even a small file necessarily to be able to send it to you. That is an unfortunate thing. I really like nextcloud's implementation of forms. I just did it for the virtual Tabletop and it works really well. That being said, nextcloud is a huge pain in the ass to set up. So I would not recommend unless you are willing to get into the Linux command line and run it like a sysadmin yourself and are ready to screw around in the PHP config files. It's a lot to do. So I think I just jumped straight into the form stuff. Okay. Laying out the actual document is an important part of the process of putting together a casting call. As well you should. That's the way to put this. You want to reduce the number of clicks people have to do to get to the actual lines. This is a thing I've seen badly done in some other casting calls where, for example, you have the list of characters and you'll have the character description and then there'll be another. They'll have the character description or whatever, all that information, and then another click to go through separately two lines and then another one for submitting. Like, if you can get those, any way you can figure out to cram all of the information onto one page for per character will be huge in order to make it usable for people. So like something like a document that has all of your characters listed out with like a brief description and like, you know, maybe if they've got pronouns, you put them on there or kind of what you're looking for broadly, so people can go, oh, you know, this one interests me, Johnny Everyman, you know, he, him, blah, blah, blah, generic. Okay, that sounds like me. Okay, I'll click that. Or like weirdo, unique person. And like, okay, that sounds like me. You're not. You know, that's so like a list of all of that. And then if you can. If it was me, I don't know if we've done this in the past, but if it was me, put the lines. And then like at the bottom of that is like going to the form and I might even put the lines on the form itself so people can fill it out. I'm not entirely sure which is the better way to do that, but you have to do that for every single character. You have to have a separate one for every character. Then screw that, that's terrible. So, yeah, the. I would also think a little bit.

About the layout so that the people have to click the least amount of things, which means they are more likely to actually complete the.

Yeah. And like, gathering information on your form is great, but if you have 50 questions, there are people who are going to get to question seven and go, no, nevermind. I don't care anymore, actually.

Just kidding.

Yeah, so there's a balance there. Yeah. So, like, it's this. You want to put your information at the top. I might, I might even suggest putting. If you've got like, things that are the same for every character, like, for example, what you should name your file. You know, that's kind of. That can be very important for organization in the. In the past. Maybe putting that on every character page might be a good idea. Like, here are the general things. We're just going to repeat them at the top of every single one of these pages for each of the characters.

I feel like that's a lot, though. I feel like that's a lot of things I do a lot.

Or like maybe just like the bullet points of the most important things so they don't have to go back and reference again, like file name, you know.

As a person, like flipping. Sorry, sorry, go ahead. As a person who does a lot of. A lot of auditioning, it gets really old after a while with, like you said, the clicking for every single thing is very, very annoying. But another thing that's very annoying is the very, very, very long form that has a really, really long description before each character. Like when you have a descriptor that is so descriptive and we want this and this and this, specifically this and this and this, it gets daunting. And you're like, oh, man, I'm not exactly this. I don't think I should do this. There are people out there that don't give a shit and just audition for everything. But it's still a lot. Like, if there's a big long descriptor with a bunch of things before each character, it's kind of like, oh, this is a lot of stuff. So I don't know. I think personally, I am of the. Here is what I need and then this is it. And I love the forms that just have everything that they need right up at the front. What is this project? You know? What, what, what is it about? Like a quick, just sort of summary thing and then like an unspoilery summary thing and then how to do your files and like how you want, like titling your email and all those sort of things, if you care, and then just go to the fucking descriptions. Just write the lines in the thing. Just go. Because more things, more things makes me go, oh, God. Because the other, the other way. Like, you know, we've been talking about how you, like, sometimes we don't want to cast somebody because they don't Follow directions. Exactly. It gives you kind of a feeling about the people that have been auditioning. I get feelings about people that are doing the audition when there is just so much information and so many nitpicky things, because then it's like, do I really want to work with these people? They're really nitpicky about stuff that maybe might not matter in the audition. And in the audiobook world, it is so tedious to get little specific things about every single thing. When you get higher up. When you're auditioning for Penguin and macmillan and stuff, they're like, here's the book. Here's what you read. This person. Yeah, this person has this accent. Go. And I've noticed that also in voice acting as well, when it's a bigger, more money project, they're like, here's a thing that we're doing. Here's a character.

They have a.

They have a Texas accent. Go. And they can. They can usually parse what they need, you know, by how you follow directions and how you. You know, if. If you can actually read. But yeah, that's. I mean, that's the thing. Like, can you read?

Yeah.

But, yeah, I don't know.

Whoa.

There's an enormous. There is an enormous spider in my booth. Holy shit. That scared me. It was just like, hello, I'm just gonna come down from the ceiling in front of your face. Holy shit. Hi, guy.

Can.

Can you. Can you get out of here? Sorry, sorry.

Nobody was expecting that, Sam.

Holy shit.

Come here.

Come on, Come on. I'm sorry. Technical difficulties or something.

Yeah, let's. Spider.

What even.

What even is this thing?

Holy shit.

He wants to podcast, Let him podcast.

It does. It is large enough to podcast. If it said something, I bet you guys could hear it.

Yeah, that's too big.

Trigger.

Warning, Spider. Discussion at whatever time.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, listeners. Holy shit. He's outside of the booth now. Everything is fine. Please continue.

What's up, Scott? I feel like you're about to say something.

Are you barking at me? Are you mad the spider's getting airtime that you're not. One second. Well, since we're breaking anyway.

Yeah, quick break.

Bathroom, boys.

Dog. Dog tasks.

Yeah, sorry about that. I mean, if Scott wants to cuddle that out, he can just look for. On the waveform for my screaming scream. Yeah, Now I have to, like. I have to look around and make sure there's no more. We get.

Make sure there's no more.

We have a whole lot of. I'm not actually Scared of spiders. Like, I don't mind spiders. It's just when it's very big and it just has. It's like on your microphone. Hello. Like, legs in your face.

But we have a lot close to my head.

Yeah, exactly. Like if it reached out its hands, it would have touched my face. We get a lot of daddy long legs here and they like to be everywhere. And I don't mind them. I just don't want them on my body.

On your head.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Scott, what were you saying before?

All I was just saying there is definitely a corollary relationship between professional money to podcasts or projects, things where people actually are expecting you to be a professional, and the amount of handholding people will do with you. That is a real thing. That if they are paying you, there's a degree to which people expect professionalism out of it. We're like, hey, we hired you to do this job. We're just going to trust you to do it. That is for sure. So we a little bit are talking in the context of hobby projects, beginners, stuff like that, which maybe aren't going to have that same level of experience with the people you're dealing with. You may be dealing with first timers and stuff who will require a lot more handholding, but you are also correct about you can look at a casting call and what people have asked you about and what their requirements are and get an idea about them as well. 100%. I am personally super judgmental about what audio gear requirement.

Yeah.

Where it's like, people are like, oh, you need to have. You have to have an XLR microphone. We will not talk to anybody that has a mic, a USB microphone, or they're saying things like, oh, we need a professional grade audio setup. And you're like, no, you don't get.

Seriously define that for me.

You don't know what that means.

Yeah, you're just saying that like you.

Don'T even know what it means. I don't even. But being that. Yeah, because it doesn't really mean anything. You know, the. The.

And Scott, spilling the tea today.

Yeah, well, I mean like the. There's no proper way to define, like, how we. Basically what you would need to say is, I need you to have audio quality good enough for me to put it out. Basically. That's like the real answer is that like your whatever your setup is, you have to produce audio good enough that I will not be ashamed to put it out that I can actually let people listen to it. It. And there's no criteria that will, like, you know, that will arrive at that, guaranteed. I can't say I need you to have an external microphone. I need you to have a mic stand, a pop filter. I can't say any of that. If you are podcasting like I am right now for a giant empty room and if I like clap my noise, you can hear the volume going around. Like I'm, you know, like, honestly, like there's, there's just so many parameters there and like, you can't say no USB mics because there's tons of really great USB USB mics out there now. You know, even a blue Yeti, which I will, I will crap on all day is, produces perfectly good audio. I know I've worked with tons of people work using blue Yetis and the audio is great. My, my objections to that is that it's too expensive. That's it. That's like the only reason why I would say don't use a blue Yeti. But like for getting quality audio, that's fine. Like, it will do just fine. You know, a headset mic on a pair of gaming headphones probably won't, you know, but like I've heard good audio out of people holding their phones up to their faces. Like it, like there's so many different parameters there that you almost can't write something that will, that will, that will work.

And the technology is improving all the time as well.

Yeah, it's getting, and it's getting cheaper to have like the, the price point at which you don't really need to spend any more money until you are making money with Your voice is $60. That is for $60 you can buy a microphone that will be good enough. Until you are making a living at this, don't buy any. You don't need to buy anything better. You might want to, that's fine. But like, get yourself a Maono HD 300T which is dirt cheap and just forget about it. But you can't like, but so like the. That being said though, if you put in your casting call, I need your audio quality to be good enough for me to put it out. No, I'm not going to tell you what that is. For somebody who's never dealt with audio gear before, they're going to go, well, what the fuck does that mean?

Right? It's like, can I record this on my phone? Like, what are we talking about?

Yeah, yeah. So there, that's, there's cross purposes and stuff like that. Like if you truly expect professional professionalism from your auditioners then you can treat them that way. And if you were expecting to deal with a lot of first timers and people who want to try it out for the first time or, or who you know are still new to the game, then you're going to have to put in more hand holding. But that has its own trade offs and stuff like that.

So.

And I have, I'll say I have appreciated when I have seen casting calls that say on them like right up front, hey, first timers and beginners are totally welcome. We're willing to help you, we're willing to work with you. Don't like be shy about putting an audition in for this if you've never done it before. Because I really do think if you are a beginner, which I was not that long ago, when you're clicking into auditions and you're thinking, oh my God, I'm not like good enough at this to do any of these things, it's like very comforting to see that you're not gonna be, you know, totally dismissed as a possibility just because you don't have experience.

Experience.

Especially for hobby projects.

Yeah. And that's one of the things, especially if you are not paying people, if you're expecting people to work for free. I mean like work is the wrong way. But like you're going to collaborate with people.

Yeah.

To produce something together without money being involved. It's not monetized. Then like I will say you probably do need to expect to work with newbies and you do, will probably need to do some handholding. That's a really valuable thing that hobby projects and, and non monetized, you know, things that people are doing for fun. That gives people experience, gives them confidence, lets them try it out. I've, we've worked with a bunch of people who came in, did some voice acting for breathing space and then walked away and haven't done any since. And that's cool. Like that was an interesting, like that's an interesting role we fulfill in the eco. We fulfilled in the ecosystem at the time. So yeah, it's like if you're, you know, the, if you are not expecting to give somebody something monetarily and in response then like yeah, you're probably going to have to deal with some people who are newer and that's good. It will be better for your project in the long run. It will just be a little bit more of a headache. But like it's, I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to see to work with somebody who's never done it before. And then like, by the end, they're good. They've gotten better over the course of even just a couple of hours of the first ever recording. That is. I find that incredibly gratifying. So. But yeah, okay.

You said eventually, Scott, that you wanted to have the It Takes a wolf project be a paid thing. Is that something you're still thinking you might be able to do?

Yes, I'm. I'm worried about it because I've never done crowds. I will probably. I will need to crowdfund the whole. The full series. At the moment, I'm thinking that'll happen in October.

The.

And. But the version of that is I will be paying out of pocket for my first episode, so I'll be paying the people to start off with to that end. I have an LLC now, so I have an IE number and all that stuff. So I can do the. I can do the tax things. But, yeah, so the. There. Yeah, that's the plan is that we'll. The first casting call, which will be in August, will be for the first episode of Characters.

That's in August coming up. What the hell?

No.

What are you talking about?

Yeah, no, I. I thought I said this when I put. Because that's the. That's the hap. It starts immediately after we do the.

Not the table read.

Virtual table read. And so we'll get the first set of characters in. I'll find. Hopefully I'll find my two leads and then we'll do. I'll use that episode as part of the marketing for crowdfunding so that people can say, I'd be like, here's the first episode. Here's what it looks like. Hope you want to hear the rest of this soon. The thing is, if we fail, if we don't get enough money or whatever, it'll still come out. It'll just come out later when I can afford it. But, yeah, so that's still the plan.

Cool.

Cool. Okay. Is there anything else we wanted to cover on casting calls? Yeah. Again, you have to do not. Do not let people just email you their files.

Yeah. File organization is actually kind of important for this stuff.

Yeah. It is getting like. The nightmare you don't want to be in is you've listened to an MP3 file for a character, and then you go, wait, where did this come from? Who is this related to? How do I cast this person?

Yeah, I was actually trying to think about how that looks from the casting side, because I do a lot of auditions where they're like, send to this email, put in your. Put in the, the title or whatever, like which character you're. And I'm like, how the hell do you keep that organized?

How do you do that?

How does that, how does that even work like that? That is daunting to my core brain.

The answer is that somebody on the other end of that is hand sorting all of those files. And if they're, if they're. Well, I don't know how everybody else's back end would work, but in my world that would have to go into some sort of spreadsheet where it's like I need everybody's information altogether so that I can, as I'm going through it, I can keep it organized. So yeah, they'd have to be, they'd have to be loading it into some sort of centralized file or something like that and possibly renaming files and things like that because nobody's ever going to get up. You're never going to get everybody to do it correctly.

I don't think we ever have in the whole entirety of breathing space.

I mean, it's just law of large numbers, right? Yeah. So the, the effort that you can do on the back end to make that organization easier on yourself is pays off dividends. That's why. That's again, that's why I say use something like a form. Because in both Google nextcloud, not Dropbox, if you upload stuff like that and has questions and that people are filling out, it'll create a spreadsheet as it goes. So all of that information is tied together with a link to the file at the end. And that is very, very valuable because it means that all of that information is right together. You don't ever have to be wondering about where did this file go with this person. You can also look at the list and see oh, so and so didn't fill these parts of it out at a glance. It's just night and day different about how good it is. Now. The trade off on that one though is that like email is probably the most accessible way to send a file. Right. Like if it's a small file. So there are going to be people who don't have a Google account or aren't willing to work with your form or whatever. I feel like losing the people who are unwilling to do that is probably worth the additional, the amount of man hours it saves on the back end of trying to sort through everything. But I mean, to the point where that is so important about like, by the way, you can treat your casting call a little bit like the dry Run for how you handle files for the actual production. Because if you're, if you're using Forms or if you're using Dropbox or if you're having people email you stuff or whatever like that, that is a. That is. All of those same processes and workflows all translate perfectly into managing those files. And that is a not insignificant amount of time that somebody is going to have to invest in the back end on the actual production too. When people send you files. What episode is this for? Who is it? What character is it?

Which session or who does it pass to?

Yeah, yeah, what session? What line? You know, like all of that backend stuff. Like we've had times where it was just somebody's not whole job, but like that was a, you know, four hours a week or whatever of that, of somebody just going in and moving files around.

Sam, do you remember when we were trying to gather all the files for Gospel of Judah? We were like, oh, good Lord, where the hell are any of these fucking files?

Yeah, that was. But that was also. That was. That was operator error. That was a lot of actors putting them in the wrong files.

Yeah, yeah, like, you know, naming them slightly the wrong thing.

Naming them slightly the wrong thing. Exactly.

Yeah. But I'm. That's a quite like down to the point where I think that like I'm still paying for my Riverside subscription, even though we haven't been using it for a long time. In part. Part of that was just because I forgot to cancel it, but also because I know I'm going to go back to it. I really, really think for any simultaneous recordings, I'm going to definitely. I'm going to use it for. It takes a wolf because like the ability to just go in and grab all of the file. Like, oh, here is everybody's thing. It's already uploaded. They don't have to do anything. We still may want locals with backups and stuff like that. That's really good. But like being able to just go in and get perfectly good quality files that are managed. They're already tied in and it's. Okay. Well, I know what session this is because it's. It's in the session that's so nice in Riverside. It's all synced and everything. Wow.

I'm very sorry. My fault.

No, no, it's good.

Poor Sam's computer just blows up every time. Every single time.

I'm on a desktop now though, so next, next time we get together, Riverside.

We should try it.

There's a. There's a tool out there. Called Craig Craig Craig. Which is the Discord version of this where it's a bot that comes in and it'll record the actual Discord call for if you're going to be doing synchronous recordings that way. But there's also a web component which is. That's the same backend as another tool called on wecaster. Both of those I can rel. I can like warmly recommend. I wouldn't say they're the best thing in the world, but they totally work.

They do the.

And there is absolutely the quality on that stuff is not exactly the same. You're not going to get bit for bit the same as if somebody did a local recording and uploaded it just for compression reasons and back end stuff. But for 99% of people it is good enough. Like the. Like there is. You could just use those recordings and the fact that again all of those files will be in the same place and they're already synchronized is enough of a. Of an improvement that I would recommend it for anybody who is not just an incredible like golden eared audiophile kind of person. Like it is good enough that you can just totally use it. It's especially if you're using the web app. Don't. Not the Discord stuff. The Discord stuff has way too much compression in it for most purposes. But the like web app version of it 100 good enough. And it would save and like it's easy to discount how. How much trouble it is to go look for files. Yeah. I mean you can. There are. You could hire an entire person to just go through the raw audio files, do the syncing and like putting it together and then like cutting the takes. Like all of that. Yeah, that's for a single one hour episode of something. That's four or five hours of work. Maybe if you're really going back through and listening to everything because that's how much time it takes to record. And unless you're like listening at 2x speed, which you can do but like cutting things out and stopping to pause and rearrange. Yeah. It's a huge amount of work.

That's what I did for Shelterwood. For every single episode I listened to everything. Sometimes I listen to it twice.

Yeah. It's just a lot of hours, man hours.

It is. It is. And that. And that same stuff happens on the back end of casting calls as well where you're just getting all the files together. Getting the, you know, things putting the form. Love putting the form letters together of rejections and acceptance. Like we've Decided to, you know, like, that's. Do not discount the amount of work all of that takes. For sure. I am interested all of you have been involved or at least witnessed the casting process on Breathing Space. The actual, like, hey, we've now let the gates open and we've let our directors in. And I am curious to see how you guys felt about how that process actually goes. Like the actual, okay, we've got all the casting in, now we've got to get our people. How did you feel about that process?

I loved it. I thought it was so fun. I don't know. The whole casting process, at least for Breathing Space, by the time I was on as someone who was doing casting, was a lot more streamlined, I imagine, than it was at the beginning. And so for the. From the director side, it was just a delight to like experience it from the back end because it ran very smoothly and we were all like, very excited about it and having a really great time listening through everything and making selections and helping each other make selections. Like, it ended up being very collaborative for at least this project because everybody was like, you know, coming to the point with casting a character where they were going, oh my God, I have like two or three really, really, really good options and I cannot choose between them. And then we were kind of like talking amongst ourselves, like, okay, if you need this character to have this person's voice, maybe I choose my like, second really, really good choice so that we don't double cast this person in the same episode or two episodes that are back to back. It was a lot of puzzle, like pieces sliding around. And it was very exciting, super fun.

How about you, Mike?

I kind of remember the first one that we did, season three. I guess the first one I was involved in as a writer and a director. I kind of envisioned that whole process as kind of being like the trading floor of a stock exchange. Yeah, kinda like, you know, like all the auditions were released where everyone was racing to try and listen to as much as possible in the fastest possible time. Because we knew that if we could get our choices in early, we stood a better chance of getting our first choices actually kind of cast. Because invariably the good people would be auditioning for multiple roles and, you know, there would be other people hungry to get them as well. And I remember kind of being in that process and being at a slight advantage because of where I was time wise in the world. I'd finished work, I think, and I was able to kind of get things done, but, like, I was waiting up late at night Having put my options in, waiting to see who else would be choosing stuff. And I remember, Scott, you coming in with your choices, and I'm going to. Scott, just stop choosing other people I want for my episode, please.

I want them just.

No.

Get out of here.

Please, God, no. You can't have all of them. You can't.

And the thing is, at the same time, I'm feeling that exact same way about everybody else being like, yeah, Ash, they gotta let me have people. Mike, you gotta let me have people.

Yeah, well, and sometimes it does turn.

Out that you cast someone more than once because they just do a really great job and you have multiple parts that are really good for them.

Yeah, the. The. I'm saying I can't. Sam, I'm sorry. I can't remember if you were actually a casting person or not at any point.

I. The very, very first thing I ever auditioned for in the VO world was Mike's episode. So he was the first person to ever cast me in a voice acting thing.

Right, Right.

I had come. I'd come from audiobooks, and so, yeah, it was. It was a season three In Breathing Space.

Yeah. Yeah. But I just don't. I was like. I remember you being in the background. I can't.

You were in the background because you were an editor, I think.

Yeah, you were. So, like. I'm like, yeah, I think you were just editing. Yeah. Okay, well, so you at least saw some of that. Probably the flurry of messages that would happen on those days. Yeah, that is a thing. I. There's that horse race mentality. A little bit of, like, the gates have opened. We all have to go, go, go, go. Like, literally by season four, I think I took the day off so that I would know I had time, because, again, there was a time component. Now if you're running a project on your own and there's only you and maybe a collaborative team where you're not doing a big anthology where there's seven writers, director, people, all that. That's probably a mo. That's probably an aspect of casting that does not exist in other projects. It's probably a very much a breathing space anthology thing. That being said, I look back at that and I'm like, man, I wonder if there was a way we could have made that feel less.

Yeah, I know.

Like, it was super. Like, the flurry of activity was real. And I do feel like that's a bummer for the people who are like, I am stuck at work until XYZ time. I cannot even open my files until like 6 hours after everyone else has gotten access to them. Whatever. Yeah. So it's like hard to balance like the fun and excitement of like doing it all together and then also making it not feel like there's a big time pressure and also like making it nice for the actors who are waiting to hear back whether they've been cast or not and like getting those decisions to them as quickly as you can but still giving yourself time to like consider and make good.

I would, and I would, I would recommend that you give. You definitely give yourself more time. There was a, there was a feeling of like a 24 hour turnaround on breathing space. We're like, we're going to get it done. That is too, that like even if you're working on your own and you can do it that way, I would say give yourself a little bit more time.

Sit with your decision.

Unless. Yeah, unless you are Mel, Mel, you get it done in a couple of hours and everybody knows and everybody gets their emails like the next morning. But if you're not Mel, then don't.

Do it like that one more time. Yeah, yeah.

I'm like, look, if, if you're a. I say this with all my love in my heart, but if you're a freak, then yeah, you can't be influenced by me if you're built different, if you're better than the rest of us. But I would say that my recommendation, if you are, if you, if you're, if your worldview can be breached by my advice, I would say give yourself a little bit of extra time to go back and listen to stuff and shuffle through things so that you don't feel the pressure now. The. There was a real electric excitement when we were doing those casting calls, which was cool, but I would love for a feeling of these things going a little bit more methodically in the future. And then there was a second thing I was going to ask about. Oh yeah, okay. So we also had an unofficial policy at the time. I don't know if we really talked about this, but we didn't let. Not let. We discouraged people from going in and listening to stuff as it came in. It was mostly a listen to stuff when it comes all together. That was a guidance that I gave at the time because I felt like if you. Familiarity breeds love a little bit. So if you listen to a audition once or twice or three times before you make your decision, the ones you listen to more, I feel like are going to get a little bit more bias. And that bias is people who get their stuff in immediately. If there's more time for it to sit in the queue for you to listen to it, then there's more of a chance for you to build a relationship with that audition, whether or not it is the best one or not, versus somebody who puts in it, you know, 11:45, right before the thing closes.

Which is like, by the way, like 80% of the ones, like so many of the auditions in the last 24 hours every time.

Yeah, it's. It's harrowing.

And then there's the whole. There's the whole closing the casting call early, which is a thing that happens. Happens a lot. It's to the point now where there are little dev studios and little indie places that are like their slogan or their logo or whatever. We guarantee we do not close our casting calls early. And that's like, oh, my gosh, that's so amazing. It's like a thing that doesn't happen. It's crazy. And so if you can hold off, if you can have the intestinal fortitude to not listen to all of your stuff before it comes in, you don't run the risk of closing your case casting call early, which is such a shitty thing to do, in my opinion.

Yeah, Yeah, I think I'm with you there. If you, if you have declared that it's going to run a certain amount of time and then you're like, well, we found the people we want. We're going to close it, that does feel shitty for people who. They're like, well, I have two weeks to get this in, you know, and this weekend I got to watch my kid or I got to go to a baseball game or whatever. And then they're. They find out, oh, wait, no, you missed your window because you weren't Johnny on the spot. Yeah, that sucks, too. I think I'm 100% with you on that one. Yeah. So if you are in the background of working on a casting call, I would suggest not listening to stuff until they're all in. But there are workflows for which that won't work. Some people will either not be able to help themselves, or maybe you are running a casting call until you just kind of. Until we get people. That would be a reasonable way to do it. Just say, we're going to run this until we have what we need and we're going to close them as they come in. And if you're under a time crunch where you, like, need to get some people in so that you can start working on, to get audio in the bag so that you can get this out by a certain date. That extra time might be important to you because it also takes a lot longer to record than you think it will.

And I'll say this too quick. When you are running a call for a specific amount of time and you've told people you have this long, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes you get really good auditions the first day that it's open. And sometimes you get the absolute best one you've ever heard 15 minutes before the call closed. Like, you don't know if the audition that you heard three days into the two week thing is exactly the one that you want until you've heard the ones that came in 15 minutes before it closed. Sometimes the people who get in at the last second do an amazing job. And, and if you miss those people because you closed your call a week early, you'll never even know. Like, that's just kind of a bummer.

Yep.

Yeah. Okay, we've been, we've been at this for a little while. Let's go ahead and. Okay. Is there any kind of takeaway? We have this. We say, I say, I think we all agree. Roll your casting call as long as possible and leave it open as long as you say you're going to do it. And do whatever you can, even if it's not stuff that we've suggested here. But if you think of some brilliant way to manage files and make it easier for you on the back end to like sort throughout it, do it and then tell us if it works. Because that's valuable knowledge. And other than that, I think everything else is just, you know, consider how it, Consider what it is to. If you're making a casting call, consider how it is to be the person doing that. The submissions. You know, think through what it would be like to fill out 50 questions or think through what it's like to click through a bunch of things or look at a page and go, if I was an actor, what would I want to see?

If you know an actor, have them read it over for you before you publish it.

Yeah, that's a really good idea. Yeah. Okay, let's do our goal setting. So I have. So two weeks from now will still be before the thing? I think. Yeah, it'll still be sometime in July.

So.

Yeah, sometime in July when next we meet. So in that case, I am, I'm gonna have the first broad, broadest set of revisions on all of my episodes done probably by this weekend.

Hell yeah.

Because I only got one left. So that then it goes out to a bunch of readers. So, Sam, I know you said you were gonna do it. Don't worry too much about. I know you've got stuff going on because I've got. I've got some other people I'm gonna send it out to that'll get my first broadest feedbacks from people being like, hey, you should rewrite such and such. I want them to Scott Paladin me and tell me I need to kill one of the characters at the end. So that's the plan is I will have sent. Those will all be out and I will hopefully have gotten some of them back. And other than that, I'll just be working on like line readings and stuff. Oh, and I need to have probably start. I guess by then I'll probably have started like telling people about the virtual table read. Like that'll go out and saying, hey, we're doing this. Try to get people to show up to it rather than just the actors. I mean, we'll have fun if it's just the actors. But I'd love if there were some people in the. Yeah, that'd be cool. So that'll be my tasks is start marketing that and then also get my revisions done.

My goal is the same as last time, which is still finish filling out episode two. And Sam, your job is to take care of your health and relax and take it easy.

Yes, 100%.

But also.

I do have to get that dead space with dinosaurs either rewritten or a new thing by Saturday because that's the deadline for my own anthology that I'm like one of the heads of. But I'm also going to get on my partner about getting stuff off of the laptop so I can. Yeah, so I can get you the walker and bot.

Yeah, it'd be cool if we could.

Beginning of the other episode.

Right. If we could deliver the completed longer draft of that by two weeks from now, that would be rad. That is mostly on me to finish doing that.

But yeah, if we could have the draft of episode one and two pretty much done. Doesn't have to be perfect. And then maybe hand it off to another person to read and just see how it feels, that would be amazing.

Yeah, I have like a couple of like small line dialogue edits I would like to make in the first like chunk of stuff too. So if. And same with you. If there's like stuff you're like, Wes wouldn't say that. Like we can kind of make those little edits too and then hand it off to somebody. That'd be cool.

It would Really, I would. I would love at least, maybe just at least the first episode to get it off to somebody who's never, like, looked at it before, before next week and just see how it feels to somebody else who hasn't been looking at it for months.

How about you, Mike?

Well, I mean, first one, the obvious one, is make any progress whatsoever? Like, I'm going to be kind to myself. Like, you know, if I write a couple of words, you know, I'll consider that homework done. Like, I did it. Like, I need to kind of get back on the horse. So I'm going to make it as gentle as possible. And secondary goal is to remain, like, a solid form at all possible during the heat wave. Like, try not to become liquid, because that really does interfere with typing process. Like, I've messed up so many keyboards, bones, man. Yeah, like, just doing that.

Turning into a puddle of slime.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, if. If I can, you know, just. Just maintain corporeal stability, then if you can't.

If you can manage to not be Odo from Deep Space Nine and just, like, slap yourself into a bucket at the end of every day.

Yeah.

Then you're doing good.

Yeah, exactly.

Yes.

How relaxing does that bucket look, though, right?

I want to be in the bucket so bad.

Okay, well, on that note, bye. Bye.

Bye, bye, bye.

You know, barking to Micron. You want to bark into the microphone? No. Okay, well, that's all right then. So thanks for joining us this week. And if you want to learn more about the podcasts and projects and all that stuff, then you can head over to www.library.horse or if you want to give us a little bit of money, help us make these things, then go to patreon.com cursedknowledge you don't get anything for it. You just, you know, put some green in our hands so that we can make some projects. Anyway, later. Sam.