EPTTwo months ago, I tried getting into casting. Previous attempts of getting into e-sports hadn't really worked out for me, I wasn't the best writer, nor the best player. (I won't be getting in technical details of casting in this blogpost.)
I wrote "trying to get into casting" for a reason, things didn't work out for me so well when I started off. Having no knowledge of casting in general and no real experience in talking in public either were the main reason for that. As a result, my first uploads to youtube were "unrefined" to say the least. Not remembering what the map was called, not remembering the colour players were starting as. From a casting point of view it wasn't good. But production might've been even worse, showing xsplit constantly, uploading my vods to twitch.tv made for a somewhat annoying viewing experience.
At this point I was quite discouraged, I had 1 fan watching my videos and giving me feedback and that was it. I was forever alone, casting games only for myself to look back at. Needless to say I was getting very discouraged at this point, so I dropped casting for a few days, thinking about a "followup" move that would catapult me into the limelight! This move came in the form of a reddit thread where I asked for feedback to the reddit community. It's hard to decribe how I was feeling after posting the thread, refreshing the page frantically hitting the "F5"key. Super worried people might not like it, and start trolling.
http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/ku0rj/starting_caster_looking_for_some_feedback/
The first reply came in: "I'd give you some feedback, but it'd only drain your energy and deal a proportional level of damage."
Sad about this first comment I pulled away from reddit and didn't check back for a few hours. Surprisingly, next time I checked the thread was filled with constructive feedback and trolling/hating was limited to that earlier post I quoted. Thrilled by all the replies I went on a casting spree and cast pretty much every IEM Guangzhou replay I could get my hands on. Sometimes even getting 300!!! views on my youtube channel.
Ofcourse getting 300 views on a youtube video is nothing special and not hard to achieve at all, but it gave me the motivation to see this through. The amazing feedback from the reddit thread inspired this all. The thread is full with valuable lessons for any starting caster. I highly recommend checking it out if you have any interest in starting casting yourself.
With feedback and some experience under my belt, I started the next chapter in "my casting career". I did this because generating views and publicity on youtube is quite tough, also, Livecasting seemed much more fun! I found that the best way to get noticed is to cast live tournaments which are on the TL Calendar. A lot of tournaments allow early rounds in tournaments to be cast by anyone. Which is a great way for casters to get listed in the "ON AIR" section on TL. (But it's very scary to cast for a live audience without alot of experience. In my youtube days I had to restart a game atleast 3 times before I called the starting positions and players properly >_> )
Doing that for sometime, I ended up casting the Playhem EU daily finals someday. It was during the MLG Orlando finals and the Official Playhem crew was out there, covering beta streams. Doing this got me noticed by their admin Ben, who saw potential in me and asked me to contact him on skype. I was shaking, nervous and couldn't believe someone said they had seen potential in me.
The day after I got on skype, and there was an invitation from the Playhem Community manager "Neeb". Funny to note is that this was 15 minutes before the EU daily tournament started. He and Ben asked me to cast as a trial for Playhem. And after an 15 minutes I was live with "Kibbelz"for my first ever co-cast. Things went well and after a few days they asked me to solo-cast. We went through things real fast, giving me the login info for the stream, sending overlays and getting ready. They knew me for about 3 days now and I had never solo-casted for them before. Even though I was sick in my stomach from nerves, things still went "ok" and after that cast I felt like I was on top of the world. I was stunned and incredibly happy getting my first positive feedback from some viewers.
Now I am an official caster for PlayhemTV. We've got the best team you could possibly wish for. It's all fun and the atmosphere is amazing. I look forward to casting for them for alot longer. My personal highlight so far is casting their $1000 OPEN tournament 2 weeks ago.
I wrote this Blog for those people asking questions such as "How did you get into casting?" or "How can I get into casting?" Thanks for reading (:
I have tried casting once, and it was in my native language (Norwegian, lolz) and I didn't actually have any clue how HARD it is! It is hard to be able to be entertaining and also keep talking logical and wise. The amount of knowledge of the game and comfort of your vocabulary is also pretty imense! Props to you casters, you do a hard and important job that some people take for granted. You make the game much, much more entertaining!
