Open Casting Calls

Auditions for Spirit Box Radio have now closed. Thank you so much to those of you who have sent us audition tapes, and if you missed this auditions period, don’t worry! There will be more casting calls for Spirit Box Radio and other Hanging Sloth Studios projects in the future. When they happen, they’ll be posted right here!

If you’re looking for information about the Spirit Box Radio Season Two auditions process, here’s a breakdown of what will be happening next:

18th – 28th Feb – consideration period & possible call-backs 

Over the next ten days, I’ll be listening to all of the wonderful tapes you’ve taken the time to send in to us and beginning to make some decisions. It’s possible that due to the volume of auditions, some characters will require call-backs where I ask you for another example of your performance. If you’re asked to take part in a callback, we’ll contact you via the email you used to send your audition tape to us and let you know what we want to hear.

Early March – casting completed 

In the early days of March, we hope to have made offers to actors for all of the characters, and hopefully they’ll have had time to get back to us to confirm they would like to take the role. We’ll also be contacting everyone who hasn’t been successful this time around so that you know for sure what’s going on.

Please note everything below this point is information relevant to the February 2022 Spirit Box Radio Season Two auditions period and has been left here for accountability and reference purposes. The only things altered are the specific available roles listed for this casting period and the listed email address to which auditions are to be sent, which have been removed in an attempt to alleviate confusion. This information will remain on this page until the next open casting call at which point it will be altered and updated.

Spirit box radio CASTING CALLS

These roles are completely open to actors of any gender, ethnicity, and background. The show and communications with the cast will be happening in english. The creator of the show lives in the UK so works off a GMT schedule, but we have some experience working with actors in multiple time-zones and build contingencies for this into our schedules.

We’re extra excited to to hear from you if you’re LGBTQ+, particularly if you’re trans and/or nonbinary, and we’re especially eager to reach POC Voice Actors. Previous voice acting experience is not necessary to audition for these roles.

Please don’t be discouraged from auditioning if English is your second language, or if you have a strong accent of any kind. We mention this as we had some questions about this last time we did a casting call, so this time around we wanted to put it front and centre.

If you feel comfortable playing characters who use different pronouns to those you use, feel free to audition for those parts! We’ll always use your pronouns to refer to you, regardless of what pronouns the character you are playing uses. The only caveat on this is that if you’re not nonbinary, you don’t audition for the roles specifically intended to be nonbinary characters.

We would also ask that all actors auditioning be over the age of 18.

There are nine roles available, with characters who use a range of pronouns, who are of various ages, and can have any sort of accent.

Hanging Sloth Studios is not in a position to pay Voice Actors to industry standard amounts. We compensate our actors proportionately to the size of their role out of the allocated funds we raised in our crowdfunder, so we won’t know the exact amount you’ll be paid until the scripts are finalised in March. The least you will be paid is £15.

Communications about the show and rehearsals are held via discord, including posting rehearsal schedules. If you’re not familiar with discord you’ll need to set one up to be a part of the cast.

Not sure if you want to audition? Auditioning for stuff can be nerve-wracking and a lot of people are not sure whether to give it a go. Take a look at our list of stuff you might want to know first to help you decide!

The Roles Available

Click on each character’s name to learn more about them.

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Some things to note

Your recording space is being auditioned along with you, so do record wherever it is you intend to record your lines for the actual show. If this is not possible for you, or your set up is likely to change between now and late March, let us know when you email us your tapes.

Top-of the range recording equipment is not necessary, please consult The Shiny New Voice Actor’s Guide to Recording at Home for advice on upgrading recording equipment, and how best to use the equipment you already have.

Previous voice acting experience is not necessary to audition for these roles, but if you do have experience with voice acting or acting in general, feel free to tell us about it!

Do take into account the character notes given on the call sheet when performing your monologue.

ROLES WILL NOT BE CAST UNTIL THE END OF THE AUDITION PERIOD.

How do I audition for these roles?

To audition for any of these roles, please send an audio file in .mp3, .m4a, or .wav format of you reading a short (around 2 minutes) monologue of your choice to [redacted] with the subject line: AUDITION – [CHARACTER NAME] – [YOUR NAME]. If your audio file is too large, please send it as a google drive link. Auditions are open from 4^th February 2022 and will close at midnight GMT on 18^th February 2022.

We’re asking you to choose a monologue to read rather than providing lines from the script as most of these roles are for characters who appear primarily in conversation with other characters, which means most of their lines are part of a dialogue. We want to hear what you can do, and that can be hard to gauge in a few scattered, interupted lines of dialogue, especially when you have little idea of what the other half of the conversation would sound like! You can find a range of monologues organised by vibe here: https://www.dailyactor.com/contemporary-monologues/. Feel free to choose a monologue from elsewhere, though!

In your email,

To reiterate, to audition for these parts:

– record yourself performing a short monologue of your choice

– record as a .mp3, .m4a or .wav file

– send this recording to [redacted] with ‘AUDITION – [CHARACTER NAME] – [YOUR NAME]’ as the subject line.

– the deadline for auditions is 18^th February 2022

Not sure if you want to audition?

We’ve made a list of stuff we want you to know about being involved in the hopes it will help you to decide whether or not you’d like to audition!

You Don’t Need to Have Loads of Experience to be a Voice Actor

Not a single actor involved in Clockwork Bird had expecience as a Voice Actor before they took on their roles. Daisy, who plays Shelly, IS a professional actor, but she’d never performed as a Voice Actor before Clockwork Bird. Jessie and Alex’ only experiences with acting had been doing drama at school before they came on board!

Being a great voice actor doesn’t mean being able to ‘do accents’

Some voice actors have a lot of range and their speaking voices are completely different to their character voices, and some can play multiple characters in the same audiodrama without you even noticing! But not ALL great Voice Actors are like that. Some of them are known for their very particular voice – and they can’t really change it! Just think of Jonny Simms from the Magnus Archives. We’d recognise his voice for the Archivist ANYWHERE, and it’s almost identical to his usual speaking voice. On the Hanging Sloth Studios team, we have a range of ability in terms of being able to change our voices. At the end of the day, we’re casting specific characters who need the right voice to bring them to life, and that might be yours!

We won’t be discriminating based on your accent

We’re asked this question a surprising amount so we thought we’d include it here! Unless explicitly stated on the call sheet, any accent is fine for any character we list, and you shouldn’t be discouraged from auditioning if you have a non-British accent. If English is your second-language, we’d still love to hear from you, as long as you’re happy working in English and understand that as a primarily UK-based studio with a limited number of people, there may not be anyone else speaking your first language on the team.

It can take a lot of time to record

Recording a few lines of script might sound like it’s only going to take a couple of minutes, but it can take a while to set up your recording equipment, and usually it takes a couple of runs at a line to get it right. Sometimes you’ll send stuff to us that we aren’t quite happy with – it might not be a problem with the performance per se, but more that it just doesn’t quite fit in – that means you’re going to have to re-record the line, which means all the same setting up all over again. This is particularly important to bear in mind given that at the moment, Hanging Sloth Studios is not in a position to pay Voice Actors to industry standard amounts. We compensate our actors proportionately to the size of their role out of the allocated funds we raised in our crowdfunder, so we won’t know the exact amount you’ll be paid until the scripts are finalised in March. The least you will be paid is £15. (want to help rectify that? Become a Patron!)

We won’t be discriminating based on the gender or trans status of performers

There are characters who are cis, characters who are trans, characters who are non-binary, characters who are complicated combinations of the above, none of the above, and those where it just isn’t relevant because they only pop up once and are never heard from again. Guy with a high voice? Agender with a low voice? Feel free to audition for whoever you feel comfortable auditioning for! Whatever pronouns you use, we’ll use the right ones for you when we talk about you regardless of the pronouns used by the character you are playing. Feel free to disclose information regarding any of this to us when you email your audition tapes, but we won’t begrudge you for not doing so. Just be sure to include your pronouns, and if the ones you use publicly are different to the ones you ask us to use in the email, let us know about that too! We will, of course, never share sensitive information without explicit permission from you.

You need some audio equipment – but not loads of it!

The mic we used for recording Clockwork Bird was a budget microphone and we use a berringer UMC2 Mini to process the audio. All together, the set up cost us about eighty pounds new. If you don’t have any recording equipment other than your built in phone mic, let us know when you email us and we’ll take that into account, and we can help find a solution if we do choose to give you a role. Not having a top-of-the-line microphone should not stop you from auditioning to be in one of our audiodramas.

Hanging Sloth Studios records remotely – you’ll be recording on your own a lot of the time

This is a given in times of COVID-19 but even beyond that Hanging Sloth Studios is primarily based online and all of our Voice Actors will work remotely, as opposed to coming into a studio to record. This might change in future but for now, that’s how we’re set up. That means you’ll be recording your lines on your own, without anyone there to supervise you. You’ll be given specific deadlines and you’ll always be able to contact us to let us know if you won’t be able to make them. We try to build contingencies for illness and similar things into our schedule at Hanging Sloth Studios, so don’t worry if your schedule is erratic. There might be a way for us to work around it, though do bear in mind that, as mentioned above, recording can take a bit longer than some people anticipate.

It’s okay to change your mind after you audition!

Sent us an audition tape but changed your mind about it afterwards? Shoot us a follow-up email letting us know. Got the part but not sure you really want to take it on now you’ve been faced with the reality? Just let us know – we won’t be offended!

The one thing we do ask is that if you firmly accept an offer of a part, you’re really committed to seeing it through. Obviously, nobody can account for all situations and nobody is going to be upset with you if you take on a part and are unable to actually Voice Act for us because of some disaster of any proportion. You can just let us know with as much time to spare as possible.