In the comments to my post yesterday about Custom Demos and Watermarks, David asks…
Bob,
I’d be interested to know what criteria do you look for when deciding when to create a custom demo. Does it simply come down to the budget? What about the opportunity to obtain future work or to land an on-going contract?
Perhaps I’m not reading the audition leads carefully enough, but the vast majority of them don’t provide enough information to determine whether on-going work is likely. But, in those situations where on-going contracts are involved, yes, that is a factor.
One key key point is that even an on-going contract that involves a lot of time and a relatively small budget isn’t one to which I’m going respond. I only reply to jobs for which I wish to be cast. And for those jobs, I audition regardless of how many other auditions have already been posted.
The other point here, however, isn’t specifically about custom demos. It’s about budgets. For me, even if no custom demo is requested or required, a job for $100.00, in general, isn’t going to get my attention.
Here’s the exception: when the project is small, that is, when it won’t involve more than a half-hour of my time and even more importantly when there’s great copy. I remember an audition posted a little over a year ago through Voices.com for a local retailer. The budget was only $100.00 but the copy was so well written that I did a custom demo for the client anyway. I love reading great copy, so the delight of reading that piece of copy was so great that I couldn’t wait to record the piece. (By the way, I did not get cast for that job; but I loved reading the copy anyway.)