FTM – Art of Auditioning
Posted on 19. Jan, 2009 by Scott Carnegie in Blog
I was providing some videography and technical assistance to Film Training Manitoba this past weekend. They were putting on a workshop called “The Art of Auditioning”, which was being instructed by Jackie Lind, an EMMY award winning casting director based in Alberta.
She was teaching the students how to have great audition and how casting decisions are made; hint – it’s not always about the acting, sometimes it’s the producers niece that gets the role 
Jackie was very precise with the feedback she gave, and worked hard to get the best performance out of people. As usual, I learned a lot just from observing the process, which is one of the benefits from helping at a workshop like this.
What I was doing was taking video of the “auditions” by each performer, playing back the takes onto the HDTV monitor that was set-up and helping with DVD playback. I set-up some lighting and used my green backdrop 
(which I usually use for green screen chroma keying) to add a nice color to the background.
Over the course of 2 days I shot over 4 hours of footage of 15 different actors. I was using the Sony XDCAM EX-1, a beautiful camera I used a few months ago on another FTM production. The tapeless workflow it uses was perfect for this job.
I am compiling all of the takes of each actor into a DVD that will be given to the attendees. I wasn’t quite sure what the best workflow would be to achieve this. When I ended up doing was unloading the contents of the SxS cards (the format the EX-1 shoot on) onto my laptop and using the Sony Clip Browser software to convert the clips to the MXF format, which is what Avid Media Composer (my editing software) uses. One they were converted I imported them into the Avid and put all of the takes from each actor onto their own timeline. Up to this point everything is in High-Definition, 720p 24fps.
I am now in the process of exporting QuickTime movies in Standard Definition which I will then import into Sorenson Squeeze to create the MPEG files used for the DVD authoring. From there, the MPEG files are imported into Adobe Encore for DVD authoring.
Wheh! For short projects this doesn’t take so long, but with over 4 hours of material this process does slow down a bit. I’m still experimenting with ways to make this workflow more efficient.
So in a few days (likely early next week) all of these lovely actors will have DVD’s from this session, so they can see the progress they made through 2 days of rigorous training.
