 You really don't need all of this equipment, but you can take your auditions from looking like this to this. If you are just getting into acting, I highly suggest you don't buy any of this. Just choose a blank wall in your house and make sure that room doesn't have a bunch of noise coming into it, it has natural lighting. Get a tripod, if you wanna make your life a little easier, that's going to be the most frustrating thing. If you don't have a tripod, it's going to be figuring out where you're gonna put your phone so you can film yourself in the right framing. Camera I use to film all of my self-tapes and all of my YouTube videos is actually my phone. I'm filming on a phone right now and 1080p is already amazing. Some people film in 4K, really not necessary, especially because you're gonna likely compress it to put it into WeTransfer or whatever, casting ask for you to send it over through. But you do have to be careful if you're filming in bad lighting. Your phone is going to be very grainy. That's one of the things that a lot of phones aren't good at is filming in bad lighting. So as long as you have good lighting, natural lighting is the best right now. I'm filming at night, so I'm using all artificial lighting, natural, indirect sunlight, and you're using your phone, the quality is most likely gonna be great. In addition to my phone, I do have a couple of apps that I use in order to make my auditions a little bit easier. I have been using the Filmic Pro app for a little over a year and I mostly use it to fix the lighting or the focus and it does film in 1080p. You're able to do it 4K or even higher, $15 on the app store and it just looks fancy. I'm using an old script so that I don't get in trouble. You can switch it to go faster, slower. You can flip it, you can move it around so that you can use it as an eye line. This is just in a pinch. I do try my best to memorize the script instead of having to use the teleprompter app. The apps that I use to edit the auditions are Adobe Rush on your phone. It's a free phone app that is really good. I use that when I have to edit my auditions on the go if I'm on vacation. I prefer Adobe Premiere Pro if I have it available, usually desktop or laptop. And then iMovie, which is super easy, super basic, the fastest for me because it's the one I'm most familiar with. And then to improve the audio of my self-tape auditions, I do add a tiny microphone that was only $25. I like it for indoor filming as well as outdoor filming. I added the bunnies. I got them from Amazon. The dead bunnies for audio, just so when there's wind, it's not, you know, so it sounds better. This is the quality of audio that Filmic Pro gets from my room. I do have carpet in this room, a bed, because I am in my bedroom, curtains, and then that wall is pretty much blank except for the papers. And then this is the quality of audio with the microphone and the dead bunny. If you don't have carpet in the room that you want to film in and you don't have a rug that you can use, I highly suggest getting blankets and jackets and just putting them all over the floor because that's what I used to do when I lived in a studio and I had, it was basically empty and I had hardwood floors on top of getting a better microphone that won't catch all of those noises bouncing off everywhere. Lighting, because I do not have consistent natural lighting. I use a ring light that I have been using since late 2017 with a diffuser because if I don't use a diffuser, this is what it looks like. I mean, I could dial down the brightness of the app but then it just, you know, it's dark in the back. It doesn't look quite as good. A clamp to put the diffuser on the ring light and then if I need a little bit more, I do have this newer rectangular light that I will either use for my backdrop to pop or if it's late at night, like right now, sometimes I will need a little bit more but I have like my lamps. But really for lighting, it's so tricky because you have to try different things and even when you try different things, if you try that at a different time of day, it's gonna look different or if you get more tan or if you lose color in your skin, like you're just gonna always have to be playing around with it. At the very least, I would say get a ring light with a diffuser so it does allow you to film at night. This is what I would be setting in without my ring light. For my backdrop, I am pretty obsessed with savage paper backdrops because it just makes me feel like I'm actually in a studio and I know right now this lighting looks a little bit crazy but for my self-tape auditions, this is more the lighting and the quality that I like. I do have this gigantic blue one. This one is the 86 inch blue paper backdrop. I have the beautiful savage stands that are so sturdy because if you saw my previous studio, like self-tape studio, of course I have these stands. These are very flimsy. It's still the same ones that I've been using for years. Around $35 on Amazon. So they were just annoying to move around. If I set them up and left them, they were fine but they were just wobbly and now I have some very sturdy amazing backdrop stands but I'm obsessed with these because especially for the full body shot, like you maybe could think that I was in the studio because it looks get fancy and I've just gotten a little bit carried away. I have a bunch of colors that I don't really, really need. Blue, I love for auditions. I used to only really use it for commercial auditions but now I use it for pretty much everything because I just really like it. I have baby blue, gray, red, purple, back here and pink. I have tried in the past to use it for different things but really blue and gray are the best as far as auto white balance and being able to show the true colors of everything. So if you are in the position where you're like, okay, I'm gonna invest in a backdrop. If you wanna keep it safe and like you're gonna, you know it's gonna look good on you, gray. Gray is super safe. I find that using the 86 inch for a full body shot is a lot easier than trying to use these 53 inch ones but both of them really work. I used to do my full body shot with this gray one all of the time, of course vertical because if you do horizontal full body shot, you're just gonna need a lot of space and I haven't been able to do it with my setup. I do film in my bedroom. In my bedroom is about 12 by 13, I wanna say and this backdrop is 86 inches. On top of that, I have to find room for the stand. So I basically take over almost half of our bedroom which is fine because all we do in here really is sleep. If you don't have a bunch of space to just keep it up which that's what I do to just make my life easier and be able to film at a moment's notice. I would suggest finding a place where you can pop this up easily and then be able to put it away and use the space more. When I lived in 120 square foot studio, I used to pop this up, just take over my entire studio because it was so tiny. Do my audition and then store it. The good thing about being in my bedroom is that I have carpet and curtains and it helps a lot with the echoing but because I have carpet, if I were to step on the paper backdrops especially with heels onto the carpet, it would get crunchy and look really bad. So I have a cheeseboard. I should really just buy plywood so I can stick it under but I have a cheeseboard that I put under my paper backdrop and then I put weights in the corners to make it nice and seamless and then it just looks like I have hardwood floors. You just have to have a marker so you know where you need to step on it because I have for sure ripped through paper by stepping just slightly right outside of the cheeseboard. Other than those 99 things that I use for my self-tape auditions, something else that is essential other than memorizing your lines so that you don't have to be thinking about the next word you're saying is having a reader when you have a scene. So I personally prefer for the person to be here sitting on my bed, being my eyeline and being my scene partner, somebody I know and if that can't happen, I usually go into some kind of app. There's a lot of different apps for readers or even on Zoom with a friend but doing something like actor trade which actor trade is free, just trade time with other actors. You can rehearse, you can film auditions really just don't have an excuse for it and I think it's gonna make your audition so much better. So yeah, a reader is another thing that I can't really show you because nobody's here with me but I definitely use readers. Here's today's featured channel and if you can't afford right now to develop your self-tape audition set up, it's totally fine. It's priceless to get good at memorizing so go watch this video and see if any of these tips might help you.