Places to hold auditions in L.A.

R

ronin99

Active member
Hello,

I am not familiar with the L.A. area but I will be holding an audition there. I have spoken to various places and they are rather expensive $50 an hour. Can anyone recommend a specific place to hold the audition for relatively cheap or better yet free? Libraries?

Any help is greatly appreciated.
 
Find a small theater in North Hollywood (NoHo). It should rent for around for around $75 to $100 per day.
 
the stella adler on hollywood blvd is 25 per hour.
its an impressive place all around and makes actors feel at home, or at least in a place they should be, inspires them to be at their best.

how many hours do you need anyway? 10 min per reading, believe me after 3 hours you'll be tired and it won't be worth it after that as your concentration and patience wanes.
 
These rates are way too much in my opinion. You should be able to get a room for a day for no more than $100. Honestly. Let's say a 10 x 15 room is MORE than enough for holding auditions, and there are a lot of businesses with extra office space now, trust me on that one, so if these guys were lucky enough to get even 10 days per month booked that'd be $1,000 for a pitifully small space like that. This $25/hr, $50/hr thing is nonsense. Do they have expensive recording equipment that you can do ADR with? No? Then that doesn't command any hourly rate. My editing suite I wouldn't charge $25/hr for and I spent $20,000 on it.
 
I'm in the same boat as you, I'm wondering how I'm going to conduct auditions for this short I want to film. I might just do it at my condo, I could go to the terrace area (public, but for home owners / renters / guests only) to make people feel more comfortable, and it's usually not too noisy to be distracting. But that's still not ideal. I could just use my condo, as long as I have someone else there to record auditions and supervise so I don't get accused of anything, haha.
 
jonathan, you're mixing apples and oranges. We're not talking about a recording studio or sound stage. We're talking about audition/rehearsal spaces.
would you record ADR as you say in someones bedroom studio or industrial basement? No?
You expect a certain degree of professionalism, regardless of the price.
Why shouldn't actors, in many ways your most valuable commodity, expect a degree of professionalism from you? You think 12.50 is too much for a professional space, one that an agent will gladly send their client to, professionalism spreads, even if you don't cast the actor, if they actor tells the agent or other actors of your professionalism and courtesy, that'll get around.
I think you need to put a professional foot forward from the top. When an actor walks into an audition, before they even meet you they know what level you will expect from them, and will set their minds and emotions to deliver, they want the part, they're inspired. and when you walk into a place with integrity and the height of the form, a place haunted literally by the energy of great talent that has been in those very rooms, they'll want to blow you away, because that is where they want to be. not in some apartment or cheap office space, but a real place for real craft.
you shoot yourself in the foot and discredit yourself by cheeping out on one of the most important parts of the process. how many directors have said its all in the casting?
cut 1 hour of ADR (350.00 per hour?) from your budget and cast properly, and you might not even have to ADR because you cast talent that knows how to control their vocals, a professional. Just like a professional in any craft wants to treated as such, what you put out you get back in equal measure and I'm thinking about things far beyond money.
ever hear the line: pay the 2 dollars harry.
 
There's no reason for things to cost as much as they do honestly. The more time I've spent in Los Angeles, the more I realize that you need to have connections so you don't get completely taken to the cleaners.

Let me give you a few examples. When I first came here, I rented from Birns & Sawyer and I bought from them, too. I didn't know any better. They were close to the film school I went to, I guess they seemed nice enough, a bit stuck up but they were helpful. I later realized I could rent this stuff on Craigslist for half the price, at worst, or from friends and contacts I now have who own the equipment and probably use / rent it out a LOT less than a rental company anyway. Plus I know some of these guys are very careful with their gear so I know it'd work. I own my own equipment anyway, but the point is I didn't know better. Now I know I can get a grip truck for about $500 a day, actually probably cheaper, that's fully loaded and comes with a Best Boy for $100/day (I'm shocked this company pays their Best Boy just $100/day but whatever, I don't pay my crew that little...).

As for ADR, $350/hr is highway robbery. I mean absolute highway robbery. I ADRed my first student film, took about maybe 4-5 hours. One of the film school students was a fantastic sound designer, really a great talent, he had already graduated from Full Sail in Florida and came to my film school to learn even more, so he was already a professional but he was just striving to learn everything he could about the craft. He setup his own south booth in a closet of his apartment. He sound-padded the walls, he rigged a very expensive microphone into it, and he had all of this equipment that cost tens of thousands of dollars in the bedroom that he was using as a work room, multiple Mac Book Pros, Pro Tools, mixing stations, you name it. It was like... the most technology I've ever seen stuffed into a room. We were able to get fantastic ADR done at his place for nothing, just because he was a fellow student and we asked for his help.

When I was doing some corporate work recently, I needed voiceover work done. I learned that I could save a TON of money by hiring voiceover talent NOT based in Los Angeles necessarily, but professionals who had their own recording setups and could deliver to me finished audio files by uploading to a server and just having me download. It's not like I was being a cheapskate, heck I paid this lady $1,500 for two days of work! But it was still a lot cheaper than paying a great voiceover talent AND renting a recording studio for two days. I saved $1,500 in my budget that I was able to pocket for my own profits.

Recording ADR isn't that big of a complexity that it should be anywhere near $350/hr. My friend (I think I can call him that now) Rich, lead singer of a band that I've shot two music videos for now, does recording for other indie bands to make his living. He has about $100,000 in professional equipment at his house, an insane setup (we shot it in our first music video for him, where we were showing the band members sort of in their natural element, before coming together as a band), and he charges $35/hr for his time and the equipment use. He charges $20/hr to friends. That is just unbelievably cheap. I mean he could definitely be making $80/hr no problem, he's so talented, he's about 34 now I think and has been doing this since he was a teenager, he's recorded and produced dozens and dozens of bands including his own. But he charges so little, I guess because he said these bands don't go anywhere else but to him and he feels it's enough money for him to be happy, I guess.

I am sure that if you're doing a $100 million feature film, you probably have no problems paying whatever it takes to make your ADR absolutely, 100% as good as it can possibly be. But I can certainly get 90-95% that good for pennies on the dollar, and for my purposes that's fantastic. Heck recording my voice on my low-end, crappy iSight camera on iMovie it sounds decent enough and I'm in a condo with high ceilings and sitting two feet from it. It sounds unprofessional but it's probably about 75% there. So if I was doing pro work I'd want it at least 90%, professional, but $350/hr? That has to be a joke. You need a sound-padded room, with the ability to loop dialogue repeatedly, record it with a nice microphone, and that's about it. It just has to be very clean. You can then layer ambience or whatever else over it, under it, etc. I fail to see why that is such an immense task it commands more than $75-100/hr for the room and a sound expert. I can find people who do that for less than that, for sure.

The same is true with auditions. My friend Bryan held auditions for his very high budget short film, a Korean War movie, and he was able to find a nice classroom at a college because of his connections to his university, apparently a guy was on the board at this L.A. college or something, and he got the room for $50/day. It worked great, he setup a coffee / water station outside with some chairs, I don't think anyone felt it was unprofessional.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be as professional as possible, but for god's sake you should be getting a reasonable, earthly rate for services and goods. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a plain white room to do auditions in, in fact that's pretty common, and you need a couple of chairs and a table at most. If there are no simple rooms in the city of Los Angeles that one can rent for a maximum of $200/day, I'm sorry, there's a business opportunity right there. The price of commercial real estate isn't that high nor is rent that high that you couldn't make a killing by offering reasonable rates on audition space if it's really the case that nobody is being fair with that. I'll tell you if I owned a small building with green screen space, a soundstage, a few editing bays, an ADR area, and 4-5 audition rooms, if I could fill half those audition rooms only half of the time each month, let's say 2 x 15 days x $200, that's $6,000 per month on rooms with no equipment in them! A $1.5 million building with 20% down is going to have no more than a $10,000 mortgage per month, so if you could actually make back 60% of your mortgage from just the audition space, you could make a killing on the building itself and that's assuming only filling the audition space 25%. That isn't charging enough? I don't know man, seems like a pretty sweet deal to me! Rent the soundstage for $750 to $1,500 per day depending on length, the green screen room for $1,000 or something, and your ADR setup for $500/10 hours without a tech or $800/10 hours with it and you'd be making a nice little profit.

All I ask out of any business here is fair treatment and fair profit. A production company makes a 15% markup on services rendered. There's no excuse for businesses I deal with to be gouging me for 200, 300, 400% markups. This is Los Angeles, there's enough competition I can just take my business elsewhere!
 
Great place to hold castings and auditions

Great place to hold castings and auditions

Try this place out, I was there couple day back and I loved it. Only $30/hr and they have a video room upstairs for the casting director. All the equipment is included in this rate (cameras, lighting, screens, etc..)

www.infinite-stock.com

they are at: 1308 Factory Pl, Downtown LA
 
I've also used Cazt on Formosa in Hollywood. It's free and a very common place to hold auditions. I actually was so impressed with the service I interned there for awhile.
 
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