What is a self tape? Selftape meaning, length and deadlines

A selftape (or self tape) is an audition you film yourself, usually at home, and send to casting instead of auditioning in the room. For a lot of film and TV roles it is now the first round.

The email lands at four in the afternoon. Sides attached, a character name, and one line near the bottom: "Please submit a tape by Thursday." You read it twice. You have a phone, a scene you saw ten minutes ago, a deadline, and nobody you can ask to read it a fourth time this month without feeling like a bad friend.

What does "submit a tape" mean?

It means the audition is a video file and the room is your living room. The request usually comes through your agent, and Spotlight's guide says it contains all the information needed to record your video.

That information is the whole job. Role, sides, deadline, and then the small instructions that sink tapes: where the slate goes, how many takes, how to name the file, how to send it. Acting Magazine lists the ones actors most often ignore, and the pattern is the same each time. A cap of two takes means two takes. A slate at the end means the end. My own rule on top of that: if something is unclear, ask your agent or the casting assistant before you film, not after.

One practical detail from Spotlight: once a tape is submitted through its platform, you cannot edit or delete it. Watch it through to the last frame first.

What goes in a selftape

Most tapes have the same parts, in this order unless the notice says otherwise.

The slate is a few seconds of you saying who you are. Name, sometimes height, location or agency, whatever the request asks for. Some casting offices want it at the start, some at the end, some as a separate clip, and some do not want one at all. I wrote a longer piece on how to slate a selftape, because it is the first thing casting sees. If the notice uses other words you are expected to know, acting terms explains sides, avail, pin and the rest.

The scene is the sides you were sent, played against a reader who stays off camera. Spotlight asks for a mid-close shot, chest to the top of your head, with the camera at eye level and your eyeline close to the lens so casting sees both sides of your face. I put the reader right beside the camera and look at them, which keeps the eyeline where Spotlight wants it.

The picture around you matters less than people fear, but not nothing. Spotlight asks for a plain background (grey works best), soft light on your face, no window behind you, and as little background noise as you can manage. Sit close to the phone for sound.

Skip titles and music. Casting wants the scene, so start on it.

How long should a self tape be?

A self tape should be as long as the scene and under any limit in the casting notice, which with no limit given usually means one to three minutes. There is no industry-wide number, and the notice always wins.

Acting Magazine breaks that down by size of part: roughly thirty seconds to a minute and a half for a co-star, two to three minutes for a guest or recurring role, and up to five minutes for a lead, with each individual scene staying around one to two. That is one trade publication's rule of thumb, not a casting standard.

The distinction that catches people is scene length against file length. If the notice says "under two minutes", that is the file, and a slate, a pause before you start and a second scene all count against it. Trim the top and tail, and do not cut the end off abruptly.

On takes: send what was asked for. If casting wants one, send one. If you do send more than one, Spotlight's advice is to make them clearly different, not three versions of the same read.

Format basics: landscape, labelled, sent as asked

Shoot landscape unless told otherwise; Spotlight and casting director Frank Moiselle both say so. The exception is vertical-first work such as short-form drama, where the breakdown will usually say so, and I covered that in vertical selftape.

Name the file so nobody has to guess: your name first, then the project and role. Moiselle's example of what not to do is "Movie 1". MP4 is the safe export, and Spotlight's own upload takes MP4 and MOV among others, so a normal phone export is fine.

Then send it the way the notice says: through the platform, a download link, or whatever that office asked for. If the notice does not say, ask. The whole sequence, from sides to send, is in the selftape checklist.

Selftape deadlines: what "by Monday at 5pm" means

The deadline is when the tape has to be with casting, not when you start sending it. "Due Monday by 5pm" means the file has arrived by 5pm. A long take exported from a phone can sit on a slow upload for a while, so finish filming well before.

Read the time in the time zone of whoever sent the request, unless the notice says otherwise. If the casting office is in Los Angeles and you are in New York, 5pm their time is 8pm yours. If you are in Copenhagen and the office is in London, 5pm there is 6pm for you. When the notice does not name a time zone and the two of you are in different ones, ask.

Vaguer wording has no fixed hour. "By Monday afternoon" could mean one o'clock or five. "End of day" usually means before the office closes, not midnight. "By Monday" with no time at all is the riskiest, because the office may start watching first thing that morning. My rule for all three: if you cannot ask, aim for Monday lunchtime at the latest, and earlier is better.

If your agent submits the tape for you, their deadline comes before casting's. They need time to watch it and send it on, so ask them when they want it, and treat that as your real deadline.

And send it early when you can. A tape that arrives a day early can be watched before the pile gets tall. The last hour before a deadline is also when uploads stall and files go missing. The extra evening of polishing is rarely worth that risk.

What casting actually watches

Fewer seconds than you would like. Nik Whitcomb, casting associate at PR Casting, said in advice posted by Acting Studio Chicago, "we watch the first 10 seconds of your tape" before deciding, and I went through the rest of what casting directors have said publicly in what casting directors actually notice in selftapes. The practical result is a tape that starts almost immediately, with a first line that already has a choice in it.

In those ten seconds they want to know if you understood the scene and if you are listening to the other person. Production value barely registers, as long as they can see your face and hear you. A clean wall and clear audio will do more for you than a second camera angle.

This is also the real difference from auditioning in the room. There, casting can redirect you and watch how you take a note. On tape there is no redirect. You get as many attempts as your patience allows, and then one take represents you, so the work moves earlier: you decide what the scene is about before the camera goes on.

Selftape without a reader

Everything above is solvable with a phone, a plain wall and a window. The reader is the part that breaks.

The standard advice is a friend or fellow actor, speaking quietly, sitting beside the camera. That works until it is eleven at night and the only person home is reading a dying father's speech like a shopping list, or you have already asked the same friend three times this month. If nobody is free, the NYFA advice is to rehearse the scene a few times and record at least three takes with different choices.

What you want is something to react to at the pace the scene needs. That is the job I built blablabla for. blablabla is a selftape reader app: it reads the other character off camera while you record, with a teleprompter for your own lines. It is built for the night you need to tape and nobody can read with you.

It waits for you instead of running at a fixed speed, so the pause your scene needs stays yours. Retakes cost nothing, because the reader replays from audio saved on your phone, and that works offline. You bring the sides in as a PDF, a Word file, a Final Draft file or a photo of the printed pages.

There are limits. It reads the lines the same way every take and will not surprise you the way a good human reader sometimes does, so use it to build the scene and then try new intentions on top. I compared the other options in how to selftape without a reader, and the wider picture of working alone is in the complete guide to rehearsing alone.

Before you press record, read the email once more and find the one instruction you were tempted to skip. Do that one first.