Casting Call Club is a website to recruit voice actors, artists, music composers, video editors, and generally people of any kind of creative skill that can be done over the internet. However, voice acting has always been its main focus. Buford Taylor, the creator of the site, describes it as follows:
“Casting Call Club is where you practice. It is a safe place to hone your skills and level yourself up. I’ve always dreamed that CCC becomes the place that people point to when they are asked how they got started.”
“Some of the success stories coming out of CCC are amazing. We’ve had people go from 0 to 100,000 YouTube subscribers in a year. We’ve had people land roles in games like Mass Effect and Nier. But the best feeling isn’t the big successes, it’s the first.”
—Buford Taylor
It could be due to the site being geared towards voice acting, but it’s somewhat surprising how CCC isn’t popular as a resource among visual novel developers, especially since it’s been around since 2015. It’s also worth mentioning that a project doesn’t require a voice acting role to be searchable, or eligible to be featured on the platform.
The site is largely free, but users have the ability to subscribe to different tiers for benefits such as:
- No ads
- More customization
- The ability to have multiple active projects
- The ability to have your project featured in search
- And more!
In this post, I’ll be detailing some aspects of the process to using Casting Call Club and how I went about recruiting some extra members for my own VN project, A Whole Lot to Love.
Briefly, I’ll mention that I paid for the $4/month ‘Apprentice’ subscription to have the project featured on the site. For those who aren’t familiar, the main page of CCC is a big list of active casting calls. The closer to the deadline, the higher on the list it shows up (And vice versa). Featured calls are the biggest on the list, and are also sorted by deadline. (Although you can change that to “project rating”, whether it’s unpaid or not, etc.) ‘Featured’ casting calls also are labeled as such in the bottom corner of each post.
For this project, the deadline ran from November 1st to the 10th; by the 5th, we already had a good amount of people submitting auditions.
Naturally, more auditions are submitted as the post rises higher and higher on the list.
Recruiting via Casting Call Club is also a great opportunity to recruit voice actors for your project! Adding voice acting into a Visual Novel is a huge undertaking, especially considering how many lines would need to be recorded. On the other hand, you can recruit voice actors to voice your characters in a trailer, which could be beneficial for the project’s overall marketing. It could even help your project attract more attention on CCC itself!
I reached out to Buford Taylor for more information, and his thoughts about using his service for this purpose, as well as other related questions.
Grayest: Do you have any relation or experience with Visual Novels?
Taylor: I personally am a consumer of VN. I like VN games, especially when they include puzzle aspects. I like voiced and non-voiced VNs. I don’t have any experience producing VNs other than facilitating others through CCC and CC (Closing Credits)
G: How do you feel about users using CCC as a method of recruiting for VN projects? (or anything not directly voice acting related?)
Taylor: Using CCC for VN recruitment – I think that would be amazing. VNs IMO are some of the best way to break into storytelling and to gain an audience. Many readers start with comics/manga/VNs before going into pure text or audiobooks, and I think VNs are a perfect format for gateway fandom, and still a legitimate and growing format for hardcore fans. CCC was built for this exact thing in mind.
G: Do you plan to develop CCC into a site that isn’t as voice acting focused as it is now? (eg. being geared towards artists or composers just as much as voiceover folks?)
Taylor: Yes, I have plans to increase CCC’s scope into non-voice projects, starting with writing and VNs. I would like CCC to branch out of voice acting.
G: Has CCC has birthed any hypersuccessful graduates?
Taylor: While I can’t say that CCC is the cause of their stardom (that’s all them), CCC has been graced with lots of people who have done well in their careers. If you looks around on forums, twitter, discord, a ton of people say they got their start on CCC. I should probably gather some proper recommendations at some point.
G: What is the longterm goal for CCC?
Taylor: I think CCC is on a path of being THE place to find and collab with like-minded people to work on projects. I mentioned before that I’d like CCC to branch out of VA, and that’s the next goal, but the longest goal I can think of is to be a viable option for people to find other people to build stuff they love. If I can do that, I think I’ve accomplished my goal.
I want to thank not only Buford himself, but BurgerVO and Jfizzy69 for facilitating this interview! Of course, you can check out Casting Call Club here. Enjoy!
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