Christa Schamberger - Independent Casting Director

STUDIO & TECHNICAL FACILITIES - Casting Connection Studio
151 Ninth Avenue, Highlands North, Johannesburg South Africa

The acting area measures about 5m x 4m (15 x 12 foot) on fitted carpet against a neutral grey cyclorama. Auditions are videotaped on a Canon Digital camera fitted with a Sennheiser MK300 mini shotgun microphone. This delivers good sound quality while allowing the artists freedom of movement for action scenes. A number is superimposed throughout every audition, facilitating identification at any point on the final compilation.
Lighting is provided by a custom built 2Kw Soft Box to the left, filled by a large Polly-bounced fill off-centre right. A central backlight / kicker is also used. Video is captured direct to hard drive in full DV quality. This eliminates the digitising process, which reduces costs. Material is archived until the end of Principal photography in South Africa.
The Director's viewing area / interview area is behind the camera and has a separate door for access to the office, toilets and kitchen.
Unlike most other studios, our DVDs are fully authored, with menu-buttons for each actor's audition. While this first stage costs more it makes best use of DVD as a non-linear medium. An archive copy of each DVD is kept at the Studio.	Since co-productions require multiple copies of auditions to be sent to different parts of the world, the lower cost of producing multiple DVDs compared to the real-time duplication of tapes makes DVDs effectively cheaper per copy.	A satisfied Producer pointed out that, considering the expense of getting his Director and other Producers in the same room, the aditional cost of menu-driven DVDs was more than offset by not having to hunt & peck through either an untitled VHS tape or a DVD without a menu. Directors value the ability to make almost instant comparisons between contenders.
Not all South African Actors have head shots. We therefore take clearly numbered reference pictures as part of the Audition.	Reference pictures are printed up four or nine per page, depending on the volume of auditions, which stage the casting has reached, and budget.	An Index Folder is suppplied with each DVD. First-round auditions are usually compiled in numerical order, but DVDs may be sorted by role or other criteria, depending on your preferred working method.

On-Line Auditions We can upload compressed auditions to your own FTP site if required. If this facility will be required. please initiate discussions on the technical details at an early stage. We need to know your preferred video format, for a start! We prefer the Windows Media format because it provides an excellent balance of quality and speed. Windows Media files CAN also be played on Apple computers! You will naturally require access to a high speed connection and possibly the facility to burn your download to data CD or data DVD. In 2007 we distributed "Generation Kill" Auditions (Out Of Africa Films for Company Pictures UK for HBO) and "Rough" (Sienna Films Toronto & Philo Films SA) by uploading to the CastIt system based in Santa Monica. Not all Producers have the budget or need for the sophisticated CastIt online streaming system however, while the public file transfer sites (YouSendit and TransferBigFiles) are often congested and slow - they also hold the files for only a few days. The Scriptwright Audition Access page We have our own Upload / Download facility, which has proved both popular and useful. Our web site server is located in the United Kingdom, since most of our clients are in Europe or the USA and the "pipe" to South Africa is comparatively congested and slow. The Scriptwright Audition Access page has been kept simple. Producers receive a Link via e-mail to their own password protected page on our sub-domain. While video clips can be viewed online, the intention is that the files are downloaded and saved to your hard drive. These files may then be burned to an ordinary data CD or data DVD and viewed on a laptop on location, if necessary. Thumbnail headshots of each actor may also be downloaded and saved. How it works: When the Auditions have been encoded and uploaded, you will be sent an e-mail with a clickable link which will take you to this page. Clicking on Your Production Name will bring up a dialogue box requesting the User Name and Password in the e-mail. You will then be taken to the first page of your Auditions, from where other roles may be accessed via the navigation bars at the top and the bottom of the page. The thumbnail headshots are 300x225 jpegs which may be downloaded for printing. Auditions are reduced to about 360 x 288 pixels (Half size) for uploading, but once you've saved them, can be viewed at the "2x" setting in your media player. We prefer Windows Media file format for the video clips because of their small size and relatively good quality. (...and they are playable on Apple!) Quicktime files can be supplied on request, but they are much larger for no improvement in quality. A snippy little Note about Quicktime: While we can also supply Quicktime files, the balance of quality and file size is not as good. Quicktime files in fact use a daunting variety of Codecs which you may in any case have to download - and good luck to you! The major disadvantage is that they can be as much as six times the size for comparable quality. Upload times from South Africa can be very slow, so insistence on Quicktime could get expensive. Quicktime uploads are henceforth not going to be "moderated" or discounted for line conditions. I also want a life! If I have to babysit an unnecessarily long upload, I want to get rich! Please send Technical queries only to:

NOTES:

Studio charges are set at the beginning of each year and are structured so that Producers pay only for services they require, as opposed to the blanket fee approach adopted by some studios. Casting Director's fees are negotiable according to the length of time required for any given project. Please send an e-mail to Christa or call with your queries for specific quotes.

The technical operation of the audition studio is managed by Scriptwright cc, which is a VAT-Registered Close Corporation. Studio-related costs such as studio hire, DVDs, copies, photographs etc. are invoiced separately by Scriptwright cc.

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	Christa Schamberger-Young
+27 11 440 3477	Independent Casting Director Emmy Award Nominee 2009
Johannesburg	(The Casting Connection cc)	South Africa