Enter and follow our Monthly Audition Contest. It’s smart!

EdgeStudio.com’s Script Recording Contest is going monthly, so now it’s easy for everyone to fit it into their schedule! Accordingly, we’ve also changed its name, to the Monthly Audition Contest.

On each month’s first Monday, we publish a short script. [This week, it starts on Tuesday, due to Labor Day. – Editor] You record it and upload your recording. The next month, we’ll announce the winners, explain why they won (including you, maybe), tell why others didn’t, and give Tips on how to improve your reads in the future.

We’ve held this friendly competition for years, and it has proven to be a valuable resource for novices and working pros alike. In fact, as David Goldberg noted in a similar, one-time contest in 2014, many of the mistakes made by newcomers are also unwittingly made by working pros. Better to learn from those mistakes here, than by losing real auditions, right?

Actually, there are lots of reasons to enter.

• Practice under pressure. Being given a script and a deadline often stimulates creative juices, and, on the other hand, it sometimes brings out bad habits. Both are good to get feedback on. The situation is more “real” than practicing at home when you don’t have a deadline to meet.
• It’s a professional-grade script. The genre varies from contest to contest, but the nature of the assignment does not – it’s always a short script of the type you might encounter in a real audition. A great way to hone your audition skills.
• Being a short script, there’s not a second to waste. It “focuses your attention,” making you deliver your best, most distinctive read in just a few words. That’s especially important in an audition situation. In actual auditions, professional casting pros don’t waste time listening to entire submissions that are mediocre. If you don’t sound both professional and stand out from the crowd in some way — in the first few seconds – the casting screener has moved on to the next prospect before you can say, “Hey, wait a minute!” (Our contest judges, on the other hand, are not so impatient – this is a teaching experience, after all.)
• If you win, you get bragging rights!* Winning our contest is not going to impress professional casting people in itself (you’ll need more depth and a consistent performance track record for that). But it does show you take an active interest in your career and self-improvement, that you follow Edge Studio (we’re widely recognized as a professional industry leader), and it “couldn’t hurt.”
  *If you win, you might mention it in a cover letter or add it to your resume . But do not put the recording on your demo reel, since others could do that, too. Your demo scripts should be unique to you.
• Prizes. In addition to awarding the three prizes for placing First, Second and Third, everybody wins a prize just for entering: a free check-up with purchase of any one private coaching session.
• After the deadline, we post all the entries, so you can compare your work against your peers. Who do you think will win, and why?
• Feedback on your work. We explain generally why some people didn’t win. The “Why Some People Didn’t Win” comments are useful to everyone, at every level of experience, whether they entered or not. And occasionally we give Honorable Mention to a good example that didn’t win.
• Edge Studio Voice-Over Tips: Each comment on why people didn’t win includes a Tip on how to fix that weakness. This is one of Edge Studio’s many teaching vehicles, and we make it a positive experience. Often the tip is something pretty simple that many people overlook. It can improve your next performance in minutes. Something that many people, though, don’t realize.

So you’ll benefit just by following the Monthly Audition Contest. (And also review the hundreds of previous weekly contest winners.)

But you’ll learn so much more if you do enter. Over the years, we’ve received entries from novices and people at all levels of experience. In fact, past winners have entered contests even when they were temporarily ineligible to win (because they’d won recently). They enjoy all the other benefits of participating, and sometimes serve as an especially good example. That’s yet another benefit.

Oh, and one more benefit that we shouldn’t overlook:

It’s free audition training, and easy to enter!

ADDITIONAL READING:

Do you make these 13 common mistakes in voice over?
https://edgestudio.com/blogs/do-you-make-these-13-common-mistakes-voice-over-these-tips-will-help-