Casting, more often than not, is on a tight schedule. It’s one of the reasons we here at Team J love developing rosters of talent.

But while the concept of rosters is all well and good, you still need tactics for how to find the right actor to call in and audition as fast as possible (assuming the client didn’t give you a last-minute requirement and you need the talent for the shoot tomorrow!)

So for those of you in the DC area, here’s one tool to add to your bag of tricks:

Check out the actor’s audition videos.

Team J has been running the Stonehenge Auditions since 2005 and posting the videos of said auditions online since 2006.

You can visit our YouTube channel and scroll through the names. Alternately, you could just type in an actor’s name and “Stonehenge” and you’ll see if they have a Stonehenge audition.

We have over 700 auditions online, but bear in mind, actors can write us at any time and ask for an old audition video to get taken down (usually because they don’t think that video still showcases their best work).

We’re happy to hear that the Actors’ Center film and video auditions are now online as well so you should be able to do the same thing on their YouTube page.

When to use this casting tactic
As much fun as just randomly clicking on videos can be, we’re assuming you’ll want to use this in when you have limited time. Here’s some actual use cases we’ve used and other producers have told us they’ve used.

1) If someone tells you about Jane Actress and you want to quickly see their work

Let’s say you’re at a party. You mention the project you’re working on and you mention you’re looking for an actress who has both clowning and stage combat experience.

“Jane Actress is great at both,” your friend says. When you get home –or perhaps even then and there on your smartphone– you type their name into the YouTube search. Bam!

2) If you’ve narrowed down headshots/resumes to a handful of names and want to see them act

You’ve put out the call for headshots/resumes and received a bundle. You’ve pared down the contenders based on look and the experience they list on paper… but are they really a fit? Checking out some of their recent auditions might help you know before you call them in yourself.

Open a link to the Stonehenge YouTube channel and open a link to the Actor’s Center channel and search the name both places.

Similar Tactics You Can Use
Obviously, you could just plug in their names into a Google search, you might get their website which might have clips, or just clips in general. We’re not saying don’t do that.

What we are saying is that going right to the Stonehenge Auditions or Actors’ Center channel and searching will automatically cut down on some of the irrelevant search results.

For those of you producers who use Stonehenge Casting, Team J’s online casting system, we also keep on pushing the actors to list their clips and demo reels. They can list up to five and you can do a search just for profiles with videos. As of this writing, about 570 do, but obviously we’d like that number higher.

So there you have it: one more casting tool for your toolbox. We’ll be posting more in the months ahead.