Aaron Marcus shares what saved him during an on-camera narrator audition: when his wireless earpiece failed due to corroded batteries, he recorded his lines on an iPhone and fed them through an earbud instead. He explains how ear prompters work and offers practical advice for handling large amounts of copy.
Here's another acting and modeling quick tip with me, Aaron Marcus. For those of you who've watched my other videos, normally I'm not this dressed up, but I just finished an audition that was really difficult. This is the wardrobe I was wearing, and I wanted to share the information with you right away. The reason why it was hard, not because it was emotionally charged or painful in any kind of way, it was an on-camera narrator, and it was a lot of Technical terminology. So we were asked for everybody who's auditioning for this to either memorize it, which nobody's going to do, or use an ear prompter. An ear prompter, if you're not familiar with it, I have a great 3-minute quick tip on howtoactandmodel.com, and you can, you can watch it. But essentially, it's a, it's a little earpiece that looks like a hearing aid you put in your ear. I happen to have a wireless one, and you record all your lines on onto like a little cassette or some kind of recording device, and then you hear it in your ear. And the trick is you have to wait for 3 words to go by, and then you start. So you're always 3 words behind, and it takes some practice. So I haven't used an ear prompter for a little while, and I was excited to play with it again. And I made a huge mistake. I'd left the batteries in it, and it was probably in there for a year. And it corroded it and the recorder wouldn't work. And I'm thinking, I've got to get this thing done. And I'm trying to figure out how I can do this. I didn't have time to go out and even buy another one and I didn't want to. So I had this amazing idea. I just used my iPhone. And what I did was I just recorded everything on the iPhone and then I looped the earpiece My earbuds up my back, and I just had one. It was just kind of sitting behind my ear and kind of went in like this. You can see it. It's a little bit visible, but that, that's okay. It's just an audition, and if I book the job and if they need a wireless one, I'll have it for them. Or they might just use a teleprompter, which would be easy as well. So anyhow, if you're ever in a situation And you're asked to, you know, be a narrator and you've got a, you know, you've got a lot of copy, you're not going to have time, or you might just not be able to memorize pages and pages of really tough, tough words, use your phone and record it and then just play it back, you know, through an earpiece. So anyhow, I wanted to share that with you. If you are watching this on Facebook, Please give it a— please like it. If you're watching this on YouTube, give it a thumbs up. Also, feel free to ask me any questions at my Facebook page, facebook.com/howtomodel. And I'd love to have you share any tips that you have for having to record lots of information for an on-camera narrator job. Please share it here with everybody else. And don't forget, you can watch tons of video blogs on my website, howtoactandmodel.com. I'm Aaron Marcus, and I can't wait to talk with you soon.
