Self-tape basics: the slate, the frame, the sound and your hands

Most of what is written about self tapes is about the acting. This is about the other part: the half-dozen technical decisions that happen before you say a word, and which quietly determine whether the acting gets looked at properly.

None of it is difficult. It is just easy to get wrong when you are doing it alone in a hurry, which is when self tapes are always made.

The slate

The slate is the bit at the start where you say who you are. Name, and whatever else the brief asked for, which is usually height, location, or your agent.

Two things go wrong with it. People perform it, and people skip it.

Performing it means arriving in character, or in an audition voice. The slate is the one moment that is not the scene: it is you, so be you. It is also, quietly, the only chance the room gets to see what you are like, which matters more than the thirty seconds suggests.

Skipping it means not reading the brief. If the brief asks for a profile turn, or for you to hold up your hands, do that. Those requests are not decoration, and the second one has a reason.

Your hands

Some briefs ask you to show your hands in the slate. It looks arbitrary and it is not.

Hands are one of the few things a camera cannot fake and casting cannot see in a headshot. Age, scars, tattoos, whether they match the character. For any job where hands are on screen in close up, someone has to know.

If you are asked, show them. If you are not, do not add it.

The frame

Head and shoulders, a little space above your head, eyes roughly a third of the way down. Landscape or portrait according to the brief, and if the brief does not say, ask whoever sent it rather than guessing.

The common mistake is standing too far back. A self tape is not a stage: the frame that reads is closer than feels natural, because the thing being judged is your face.

Behind you, plain and light. A blank wall is ideal. What you are avoiding is anything with a pattern, and anything with depth, because both pull the eye off you.

The sound

Sound is the part that gets least attention and causes the most damage. Bad picture is annoying. Bad sound makes a tape hard to watch, and hard to watch means watched less carefully.

The fixes are unglamorous. Get closer to the microphone than you think, which usually means getting closer to the phone. Turn off anything that hums. Record in a room with soft things in it, because a bare room with hard walls will give you an echo that nothing later can remove.

If your reader is coming out of a speaker, use headphones. Otherwise the microphone records their voice as well as yours, and you cannot separate them afterwards.

Your reader

Whoever is reading the other lines should be quieter than you and slightly slower than feels right. They are not auditioning. Their job is to give you something to react to and then get out of the way.

If you are working alone, the same applies to whatever is doing the reading for you. What you want from it is a cue arriving at the right moment, not a performance to compete with.

Length, and knowing when to stop

Do the number of takes the brief allows, and if it does not say, stop when you have one that is alive rather than one that is clean. A take with a mistake and a pulse in it is more use than a fourth attempt that has gone dead.

The technical part above takes ten minutes to set up once and then never again. That is the whole argument for doing it properly: you are not doing it for this tape, you are doing it for the next thirty.