Casting Basics: A Primer

The Introduction as I made it, is simply a statement of goals and intent. In short I want to discuss a variety of fundamentals that apply to casting and creating content with a webcam (and without) that are beneficial to people attempting to enter the scene in that way. Most of the opinions from people in the community that are already popular are to simply, "make shit, put shit out, and keep putting shit out", which isn't wrong at all, but I feel that it would be helpful maybe (hopefully) to have even the slightest guide to give you things to consider or use as metrics for your own performance and improvement. Whether you be casting, streaming, analyzing vods, creating hype videos, highlight reels, blog entries, or anything else you might want to create, I am hopeful that going over some of these topics will be beneficial to you.

There are two factors that have a greater influence on one's casting* than any others, and they are both extremely basic in concept. The first is one's comfort with oneself. The second: One's ability to remain comfortable and collected on camera. They are both extremely simple ideas but together completely dictate how someone appears in the content they produce. They are also skipped over generally because they tend to take care of themselves with time and practice, and are not things one generally notices when learning from another's work unless it's glaringly obvious that the person is failing at one of them.

Being comfortable in your own skin is absolutely crucial to performing in front of a potential (or actual) audience. An uncomfortable person will look and sound uncomfortable and will result in an audience feeling like they are watching someone who isn't remotely comfortable and it will take away from the performance itself. At the same time if you are uncomfortable you will make mistakes you wouldn't usually make which will result in you becoming more uncomfortable and making more mistakes which will continue to spiral and will reflect on your performance as a whole. In addition, if you look and sound and feel uncomfortable you're going to become very uncomfortable which is going to make you more judgmental of yourself which will lead to you becoming more insecure about yourself which in turn will make you less likely to want to continue doing whatever it is you're attempting.

The keys to avoiding this scenario and discomfort are practice, and making sure to laugh at yourself. Make sure to be as serious as you need to be and consider and analyze your play as much as you need to, but make sure to not do more than that. It's important to be able to stop yourself when you're going to far and it's important to laugh at your screw ups and recover. The ability to recover from small things and not let them ruin your performance continually will help you to not be ruined when bigger things happen. Putting yourself in front of a live audience as soon as possible, whether that be friends on skype, or just actively streaming, or uploading your material as quickly as you can will help the most. You can't bail out and stop and critique yourself and start over when there are people watching you, or it's already too late because you already pushed your upload button, or your submit button.

Being comfortable in front of a camera is difficult because it isn't natural to think that way. Typically if you're busy thinking or going through a nice rant you're moving. In my case I'm going from room to room in my house in the dark at three in the morning silently listening to music while I carry out whatever my head is doing. Attempting to take that, sit in front of a computer with the lights on in a rigid chair without moving around staring at a little box two feet in front of my face pretending that it's anything other than a little black box and that I'm not actually alone and carry out a vocal conversation with myself actually makes no sense whatsoever. When you are in your head you go at a much faster pace in a much shorter time or longer time and can go in any order you wish to any degree you wish with any tangent you can think of as on or off-topic as you want it to be. You can stop for lengths of time if you decide to and come back to it or abandon it entirely. A computer prevents you from doing any of that. You have to make sense and you have to be aware of the time constraints of what you're attempting to do and you have to fit everything into that in a way that makes sense. Again, it is something that is remedied largely by practice.

Some of the other helpful ways to deal with this situation involve the time you use before and after your performance. Setting up note cards as you would for a speech with bullet points for specific topics you want to cover, or making literal notes to reinforce the ideas you want to make sure to say, or going all out and transcribing everything you intend to say; all forms of practice you can do beforehand. Even practicing in the form of doing a complete dry run of everything is optional. Afterwards you can then look back on what you did and compare it to what you wished to do, and then decide for each issue what you did well and didn't and what you wish to do better and why what you did and didn't do well were good or weren't or if you would do them again.

There are two primary aspects of consistency: that within your media, and everything outside of it that relates to it.

Consistency is not really important at a foundation level within your performance. Note: There is a lot that BECOMES consistent, but when you are learning there actually isn't, if that makes sense. If anything, you should push your boundaries as much as possible to gain experience and knowledge about everything you can to determine what is comfortable to you to help you develop your own style and give you information on all of the others, since realistically every style incorporates every other to varying degrees. It will also give you a lot of experience and help dealing with any situation requiring you to adapt.

Outside your performance itself, consistency relates to the way and rate at which you produce content and practice. It is vital to maintain consistency in both regards. If you only put out things seldomly while you're trying to get better known or noticed, you will fail. You could put out some of the best content there is, but if you don't do it regularly you will be forgotten and passed up for others that can be depended on. If you practice seldomly and sporadically you won't improve as well as if you discipline yourself to practice regardless of the circumstance or your mindset or any other factors that come in to play at the specific time that you've set for practicing. Not only does consistency in your routine and production help you to gain discipline and a better chance at attention and opportunities, it also gets your mind and body accustomed to whatever it is you do, so that you actually begin to feel more prepared for it because on some level your mind is anticipating doing it (and you enjoy it more).

In short: try new things when developing your style, and remember that it is absolutely imperative that you maintain consistency within your own production and practice rate.

Time management is on par with consistency. You have to be able to set time for yourself properly in order to maintain an actual schedule for producing regular content and improving. It isn't enough to simply say, "I'm going to make two days of the week to do video stuff for 2 hours each session." You have to actually figure out when that is going to be and plan on doing it at that time, and then actually do it at that time.

You can make things as structured or loose as you want. You can literally say, "Okay I know regardless of what else I'm doing in the day that after 630pm I'm going to have three hours to do anything I want. Therefore I'm going to set aside 7pm to 9pm for improving." And then you have to do that. It could be something like, "I have school from 9 to 5. From there I know I'll want to wind down and eat dinner for a few hours, so I'll go ahead and say that from 5-7 I'm busy relaxing and eating. Therefore I have from 8-10 to do my media stuff if that's a day that I'm going to be doing it on." Obviously if you're only doing a certain number of days a week it's more advantageous to do them on the same day each week, or as close as physically possible. If the times can't match on those days, consider looking at other days or other times. If they just can't period, they just can't period.

As a producer of any media you have a grasp over the tone, emotion, and flow of any work you produce, regardless of the medium you are using. Whether you choose to acknowledge that and use it to your advantage is your own choice, but understand that even if you choose not to use it, it will be a factor for the viewer.

For example, if you're making a hype video for a player and you decide to just put the videos in whatever order is your favorite or that spoke the most to you, and it turns out that you inadvertently ended this thing that was supposed to be uplifting and exciting on two consecutive examples of them facing a soul-crushing defeat and crying on film, you're going to have to deal with your piece looking like that. Similarly, if you're a caster and you don't talk with a lot of tone whatsoever, realistically you are never going to be able to convincingly uplift any scenario no matter how exciting it might actually be, because it's very difficult to go from flat to genuinely excited in a way that's going to bring an audience to excited with you.

While we're talking about emotion, there is a very big line between using tone to aid in guiding the tempo of a game and devolving into a screaming unintelligible noise making thing on camera. The latter of the two does not add emotion or anything else positive to a game. Especially when it's about something that realistically has almost no impact whatsoever on the game itself. Flashy explosions do not cause emotion, just like a jack-in-the-box in a horror movie does not make a movie scary: it makes it full of jax-in-the-boxes.

Critique and feedback are two of the biggest components of improvement. Unfortunately they are also two of the hardest to deal with and do properly. In general people are not very good at giving critique and separating it from flat-out bashing without becoming too "uplifting", and the only thing people are worse at is attempting to receive feedback.

I'll attempt to explain this from the perspective of a former art major because it's just easier. When we would put up a painting it was the job of everyone else in each class to tell you and everyone else what they thought worked really well, what really didn't, and why. Some people would take everything in stride, and some people would try to defend their work. The point is not to attack or defend the painting though. The point of critique is to make you answer and think about why you did what you did. Someone might say, "I really didn't like that you used such a limited gray scale focusing on only very dark colors. I think it would have been much better if you had used more of the gray spectrum." You might be thinking, "Well I did that because I was trying to set the tone and it makes sense in relation to the rest of my piece." As you go through the rest of the critique, it might become apparent that no one had a clue that that's what you were attempting to do. You might have had a reason to do it, but your execution wasn't complete, because only the color was dark and the rest of the piece really didn't match your theme. Or, in some cases, you could get criticized for your color choice, and sit and go..."I just sort of did it because I felt like it", which is a terrible answer.

The point of critique is to make you defend the choices you made with actual decisions, and to resolve whether or not you stayed consistent with those decisions throughout your work. You will never have the opportunity to tell your audience beforehand, "Well this is what I was attempting to do and if you look at it this from this perspective you can see that I was trying to do this." If your piece requires you to explain what you were attempting to do, it doesn't actually stand on it's own.

Casting, writing, media production in any other form follow the same rules.

Also, it is important to always try to keep an open mind. Some people choose to have others view their feedback for them and then carry it to them. It has it's advantages, but I think early on it's a very restricting idea. I think even later on you should still pay as much attention to any feedback you get as you can tolerate. When you stop paying attention to your feedback you stagnate. There is a difference however, between acknowledging feedback and critique and doing what people tell you to.

You are selling yourself to your audience. You cannot help that you are ugly. You cannot help that you're voice is not meant for speaking if it's like mine. If you look like you haven't showered in a week and a half however, you can fix that. You can totally take a shower and shave your face and look presentable. If shaving isn't your thing, you can still groom appropriately and trim and do whatever you need to in order to look nice. As nice as you can anyway.

There are three advantages to making yourself look better: you build confidence, you prepare yourself for whatever it is you're going to do, and you make yourself more marketable.

If you come out looking like a slob you will get a lot less leeway than someone made decent. You can call it unfair, you can call it biased, you can call it whatever the hell you want. That's how it is. Besides, frankly if you can't be bothered to make yourself look at least presentable how much effort can you really be giving into what you're doing? And regardless of what your answer to that might be, what do you think the people looking at you are going to answer for that? Put effort into yourself.

On the same vein of presenting yourself, you choose your image on screen. If you want to be an absolute golden boy of esports, you can choose to do that. If you want to just be yourself, whatever that is, you can choose to do that too. Whether you want to be yourself, be someone new, or just edit a little bit out of yourself and smooth the rough edges, it is entirely your choice to do so. Just be aware of it and whether you think you need to do it at all, and if you choose to, be consistent about it.

I'm not going to summarize the video itself so much as just saying: I hope that if you watched or read this it was in any way shape or form helpful to you. Again the videos themselves have a lot more content than what I've put into text. The text really isn't meant to be a guide as much as the others. But whether you watched or read or whatever, I hope that it was in some way helpful if you're trying to do anything in the community or gaming and that you could get something from it.

All of that I know was very baseline and very generic, because that's what it's intended to be. Again though, I think the very baseline and generic should get some attention from time to time, and can be helpful, I hope.