It’s easy to fall into a negative mindset when auditioning for your tenth project in the last day, only to find weeks later that you weren’t given any role with only a faint idea as to why.
We seek out our fellow VA’s for critiques on our performance, contact members within the community for help with enhancing demos, and watch others succeed where you failed.
This leads to feeling that you aren’t going anywhere, that your performance is plateauing or only getting worse from here on out.
“This is the best you’ll ever be.” You say to yourself and think that perhaps passing on the next audition would be a nice change of pace. Much like other artists, progress can be scarcely seen by the naked eye. It’s only when you dive into the nitty gritty and really compare yourself to previous work do you see some semblance of progress.
But what if I told you that you may be closer to getting those roles than you think?
I mean it’s easy to not believe that right? You don’t get a role, end of story, done. But as someone who has worked both behind the microphone and worked with producers I’ve experienced first hand the deliberation that can go into the selection process. Not every casting decision is 100%, sometimes it’s deliberated about for days on end!
There’s a story a teacher of mine told me that I feel exemplifies this really well.
When he worked for a short-story magazine he would take 100 submissions and plow through the first page, removing those with technical problems like improper titles, garrish font choices, and spelling mistakes. He would take 100 stories and knock them down to 50.
Then he passes those stories onto another member who sits down and quickly skims over the stories, looking for ones that would fit the theme they were going for that month or that all would look well together lined side by side. They knocked it down from 50 to 20.
Now it’s the really difficult part as these stories are now all incredibly well-written and competent, all of them have the possibility of making it to the final publication. However, the third team member had to take that number from 20 to 10, not an easy task when dealing with great writing! It’s unclear on the criteria that pushed those 20 to 10, as it was left to the jurisdiction of one person.
The editor of the magazine is now left with 10, incredibly well-written, properly formatted, amazing stories and they have to select 5 to be published. They deliberate back in forth, pour over every page and every word and eventually reach their decision.
Think of it much like the auditioning process. If you can produce high-quality audio that meets the producers specifications, you automatically beat out the ones who can’t! Potentially half of the applicants? Gone.
Then you move to having your audition be selected to move from the 50% to the top 20%. Maybe it was a certain technique they liked, perhaps you had more emotion than others or you had the perfect pitch for what the producers wanted. But now you’re dealing with those who all meet that criteria as well.
You’re now in an uphill battle and much of it is left to both skill and luck. Maybe you make it to the final 10% and then even make it to the top 5 submissions! But with only one possible victor you fall before someone else.
So perhaps in those ten auditions you tried out for don’t always assume you were thrown away immediately. Know your worth, and understand that the pressure is always on to push past the ten percent.