Sound before picture
Counter-intuitive, and still the number one rule: a slightly dark tape is watchable, a tape where the text is hard to hear is closed within ten seconds.
A recent phone’s microphone is good enough if the room is. Look for a bedroom rather than a living room: bed, curtains, rug, open wardrobe — anything soft absorbs reflection. Kill the fan, the air conditioning and the fridge if you can hear it, and wait for the street to go quiet. Stay within two metres of the device.
Always record ten seconds and listen to it on headphones before shooting the real take. That is where you hear the hum you had stopped noticing.
Light, in one sentence
Face a window, in daylight, with no light behind you. That is the whole rule.
What ruins an image: a window at your back, which makes you a shadow; a ceiling light alone, which hollows out the eyes; and daylight mixed with warm bulbs, which turns skin green. Shooting at night, two lamps either side of the camera at face height beat any ceiling fixture.
Framing, background and orientation
The default is a chest-up frame: the whole head, a little room above, down to the upper torso. Some requests want a wide shot as well — do that second, not instead.
The camera goes at eye level and stays still. A ten-dollar stand solves this permanently; a stack of books also works.
Background: a plain wall — grey, beige or pale blue — at least a metre behind you to avoid cast shadows. No bookshelves, no picture frames, no plants, no green screen. Wear plain clothes that suggest the character without costuming them.
Orientation: whatever the request says, and it almost always says. With no instruction, horizontal remains the safe default for scripted work. Never deliver both — choose.
Doing it without a reader
This is the most searched difficulty, and the honest answer is that a live reader is a real advantage you should fight to keep.
A person beside the lens, off camera, reading quieter than you, gives you a live eyeline, real listening and true breath — three things no pre-recorded track produces. You look at them, not at the camera.
If nobody is in the room: get someone on a video call, phone propped beside the lens, sound out loud in the room at low volume. That is clearly better than a recorded track, which forces you to act to a dead rhythm. Reading both parts yourself is the last resort and it shows.
Look into the lens only when the request asks for it — common for commercials and for slates.
The slate, the file, and what to send
If a slate is asked for, keep it short: name, height, city, nothing else. Shoot it separately from the scene, and never reshoot the scene to fix a slate.
Name the file First Last — Role — Project. A casting director receives hundreds of videos; a file they cannot find is a file that does not exist. Send it the way you were asked, with a link that does not expire — a free share link that dies after seven days is an application that disappears while the decision is being made.
Send your best take, not all four. Choosing is part of the job.
What it should cost
Nothing. A phone, a window, a soft room, a plain wall and someone to read with you.
Paid self-tape studios and coaching exist and are genuinely useful when you have no usable space at all. They should not be the condition of auditioning, and anyone presenting them that way is selling you something.