The Castability Method

 

To help you find your path to discovering your potential, we have created a system to measure your ability. The Castability system provides you with small, manageable challenges, chosen by you. For once, you’re in control. You think you belong in a three-camera sitcom as the funny neighbor? Go for it. You think you’re meant to be the villain in a feature thriller? Your call.

 

But understand one thing: whatever you choose, we will give you data on your performance that has never been available to you before.

 

We do this by utilizing working casting professionals to evaluate your performance against four other actors performing the same scene. We have partnered with casting professionals not for their status, but for their talent developed over many years of evaluating thousands of actors for thousands of roles. 

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Here is how it works:

 

• Download the Castability App on your iPhone or Android.

• Create an account and build a short profile

• On the dashboard, choose “Shoot a Scene”

• Following the selections, choosing the genre and archetype that you’d like to submit. Castability uses archetypes to help identify types of characters suited for the actor. (More about archetypes here)

• Next, you will find a scene we’ve written for the occasion. Using the app, you can shoot it as many times as you want, using the in-app scene partner, or by uploading the scene as a file.

• Once you’ve nailed the take, submit it for your first challenge. Once four other actors have submitted the same scene, one of our Casting Curators will provide data back using our Castability method, and to invite one actor into our Castability Gallery. 

 

About Our Curators

 

Our casting curators are led by our Director of Casting Relations, Amanda Lenker Doyle, CSA, and meet the following requirements:

• Currently employed in a Director or Associate level position by a studio, network, or production company.

• Or a minimum of 100 weeks in the last 5 years as an on-line Casting Director or Associate Casting Director casting principal roles in Film, Television, or Theatre.

 

The Curation

 

Once you complete a Castability scene, a casting curator will review you on the four following criteria: believability, creativity, specificity, and personality. They will then make a decision on castability. Our curators are asked to make those decisions based on the following:

 

The Curator Simulation

The casting curator has been hired onto a production with four main power brokers who have different casting visions: the executive, the producer, the director, and the writer. The only thing they agree on is they like diversity in race and encourage actors with disabilities. Since they cannot agree on anything else, they've asked the casting curator to rank actors by the following preferences:

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Believability: The director cares about believability because they want the actor's work to blend seamlessly into their work of art. 

Specificity: The writer cares about specificity because they want every detail of their story to be told and no moment they wrote to be missed.

Creativity: The producer cares about creativity because they feel the script is a little flat and wants to find actors that bring the script to life with unique choices.

Personality: The executive cares about personality because personality sells. They want someone the audience can't take their eyes off. The "it" factor. 

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The casting curator then comes in to determine Castability. Who would they want to save in their files based on this archetype and genre to bring in for future roles?

 

Data, Data, Data

 

All actors, after each challenge, receive a report on their placement, which provides them with insight never before provided to actors. This is because no one has every collected results from the hard decisions that casting directors have to make for each and every audition. Casting Directors, working fast and under a budget, don’t have time to provide meaningful feedback, and these hard decisions are rarely perfect or under their control. 

 

By measuring these imperfect decisions many times over, we will be able to provide you realistic insight on the results. We’ll show where you score on the metrics against where the most castable scored. This will tell you if being believable or creative mattered, or if personality or specificity mattered more. We’ll tell you how you were perceived and help you focus on where you can develop your strengths. 

The Castability Method will for the first time bring some transparency to a system that has for so long kept the actor in the dark. We hope you enjoy it, learn from it, and are empowered with information that directs you in your career. Thank you for giving us a try and... break a leg!

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