Filming it. Phone, horizontal, one sitting.

Casting has said what it wants to see. This is the boring part: how to make sure they can see it.

Your phone is enough

Probst: just turn on your phone. You don’t need to be a movie maker. Nobody on any recent cast hired a crew, and the best-loved tapes in casting lore were shot in kitchens, on lunch breaks, and — in one case — walking to a car. Any phone from the last five years films better than the cameras the shows themselves used in 2000.

Horizontal

The Big Brother tips give the reason in six words: your video will be shown on a TV. A vertical clip on a wide screen is a thin strip between two black bars, and it’s the single most common thing wrong with these videos. Turn the phone sideways before you press record.

They’re listening more than looking

Kass talked about inflection and the way someone laughs. Malcolm Freberg said it isn’t what you say, it’s how you say it. Both are about sound. A soft picture of someone you can hear clearly beats a sharp picture of someone you can’t.

• Film in a room with soft things in it — a sofa, curtains, a bed. Not a tiled kitchen with the fridge running.
• Stay within arm’s reach of the phone. The microphone is in the phone.
• Outdoors, wind is the enemy. Find a wall.
• If you put music under your voice, keep it under. Music over speech is the first thing that turns to mush.
• Kass’s warning from experience: tapes arrive with no audio. Watch yours back.

Light on your face

Face a window. Don’t sit with one behind you — the phone exposes for the bright window and you become a silhouette. At night, a lamp beside the phone, pointed at you. The official tips say daylight and no filters, and they mean it: a filter is a small lie about your face, and the whole process is built to catch small lies.

One sitting, or an edit

Casting leans toward one take: turn it on, talk. Spillman’s model tape was “off the cuff.” Kass said the best videos aren’t rehearsed and that a great tape with effects and music doesn’t make a great contestant.

Editing isn’t forbidden. Plenty of cast members cut their videos. But every cut, title and transition is a place for the compression to leave marks later, and an over-produced tape reads as a performance. If you edit, keep the cuts simple and let the shot sit still.

Length

Up to 3 minutes. Under is fine — Yam Yam won and says keep it short. The first 30 seconds are the ones Probst, Tannenbaum and Grodner have all said they judge on, so the interesting thing goes first and the record-button fumble gets trimmed.

Watch it on a phone that isn’t yours

Send it to a friend and watch it on their screen. You’ll hear the fridge. You’ll see the window. You’ll notice the first ten seconds are you reaching for the button. Then fix it.

The file the form will take

The three forms share the same rules: under 3 minutes, and a file under 50 MB, in one of mpg, mpeg, avi, mp4, wmv, mov, 3gp or mkv. MP4 if in doubt.

Fifty megabytes is small. A phone filming at its default settings produces somewhere between 400 MB and 2 GB for three minutes — ten to forty times over. So nearly everyone has to compress the file before the form will accept it, and it’s worth knowing what that does. A compressor reduces the resolution (a face in a kitchen doesn’t need 4K; 1080p or 720p looks identical on a laptop) and, mostly, the bitrate — how much data is spent describing each second. Done carelessly, the walls turn to blocks, your face smears when you move, and the audio goes thin. Done properly, you can’t tell.

If you know your way around video, HandBrake is free: MP4, H.264, two-pass, about 2,000 kbps average, 128 kbps audio, 1280×720 or 1920×1080. Check the result is genuinely under 50 MB, not 50.4, and watch the whole thing before you upload. If that paragraph meant nothing to you, a compression service — including the one that runs this site — will do it for you.

To check a file’s size: on iPhone, save it to the Files app and look under the name; on Android, the details menu in your gallery; on a Mac, Get Info; on Windows, Properties. Remember 1 GB is 1,000 MB.

A note on links

Some people, when the file won’t upload, put the video on YouTube as unlisted and paste the link. Big Brother’s casting director has said his form accepts unlisted YouTube links. Survivor’s and the Race’s ask for a file, and the applicant community’s view of a link where a file was asked for is that it reads as lazy. If the form has a field for a link, use it as an extra. Where it asks for an upload, upload.

One video

One per cycle. A Survivor casting producer asked publicly for people to stop sending several. If they want a reshoot, they’ll ask, and being asked is good news.