Clothing
On set, the character’s dress will be determined by the Wardrobe department, but for an audition you need to give it some thought. Please, don’t DARE arrive for an audition in fancy-dress, but at least be aware that doing an audition for a Diplomat or a General in beach thongs, baggies and tee-shirt, apart from making the wrong visual impression, is not going to complement the mental attitude you require for that more disciplined kind of character.
I find it interesting that the worst offenders for sloppy dress are our older actors. A sign of “Audition Fatigue?” Complacency? Hopelessness? I would be the first to agree that an Audition is about the performance – but it is also about making a good impression as the character. After all, the Producer may be making a considerable investment in you.
A Johannesburg actor who is often in serious contention for bigger roles makes a habit of wearing neat, pressed trousers, a pastel coloured shirt and a very well tailored plain dark blazer to auditions. For a less formal scene, he simply removes the jacket. The overall impression he creates when walking into The Room is that of a serious, working professional actor. A few senior Cape Town actors, who are exceptions to my general observation above, adopt various approaches. They either dress with a “nod” to the character without resorting to “costume”, or they also adopt the jacket and trouser approach. They get the role more often than those who come dressed for gardening or surfing!
Women have more complex choices on the one hand, but also more scope for subtleties. The major obvious choice is between a dress / skirt and trousers of some kind. While men should not ignore Historical Period completely, it probably plays a greater role in women’s dress choices, given the constant changes in fashion over the years. Auditioning in jeans or a short skirt and a tank-top for a historical drama is not going to set a supportive “baseline” for your character’s Posture, Gait, Stance and attitude. Your choice of footwear will also have an effect on the character you present.
For both men and women, it is worth finding a way to spend some time in period clothing and footwear to become familiar with how clothing styles from different eras affect your movement and posture.
On a purely practical level…
Most auditions are recorded on fairly simple video cameras set to “Automatic”, which attempts to average out any scene to a neutral grey and maintain the audio to a pre-set average level. While most modern cameras do this very well, there are things you can do to avoid provoking the system beyond its limits:
Beware of jewellery! Sparkling jewellery, dangling earrings and jangling bracelets are not only distracting, but could cause the automatic volume control to swamp your voice and the automatic exposure control to “blink” the exposure up and down.
Avoid fine, regular geometric patterns and textured cloth, which can cause distracting interference effects with the video scan lines. The digital video compression software used to upload your audition has a limited “byte budget”, so the more fine detail it has to process, the less bandwidth there is to render the subtleties of your face.
Avoid solid black if you are light-skinned and avoid solid white if you are dark-skinned. A large area of black clothing will tend to over-expose a pale face, while the reverse is true of very light clothing and dark complexions.
For a drama audition, please ignore the advice given to Commercial performers to wear something eye-catching and brightly coloured. It may be a tactic to stand out among scores or even hundreds of commercial auditions, but a film audition is all about your acting ability, so do nothing which diverts attention from your face.
For the same reason, do not wear clothing displaying slogans or logos. The human brain is instinctively drawn to text or graphic designs and tries to make sense of it. You want the director looking at you, not at a slogan for a worthy cause.