Auditionist, co-founded by Will Crosthwait, facilitated video casting for 2400 actors on its books. We connected great actors, singers and dancers with paid roles through video auditions and pre-auditions.

The video matching software built by auditionist allowed productions to add a script or request actions, before actors replied with videos from their phone, camera or computer.

Auditionist mostly cast for online, music videos and television, with our actors appearing in thousands of roles over the duration of the business.

Auditionist was a Virgin startup, and was accepted onto the UK Trade and Industry Passport to Export Scheme and Department of Business, Innovation and Skills Growth Accelerator Program administered by Grant Thornton.

Auditionist agreed a sale with one of the largest extras agencies in the UK in 2015.

Auditionist started in 2012 when Will Crosthwait met Ben Albahari, a former program manager at Microsoft. They scoped out various businesses before deciding that recent advances in video encoding would allow for video auditions or interviews. Deciding that actors were more likely to do this than recruitment candidates, we built the platform for casting to perfect the software.

We chose the name Auditionist and bought the .com domain, filing a trademark to protect the brand. The logo was designed using Logo Tournament, which was a quick way to get a professional looking design. We went through Companies House formation as a limited company and began building the software.

The platform was built in C# and initially offered actors a free profile, which held all their details and allowed them to upload unlimited videos, something the competitors wouldn’t allow. The biggest challenge to this was the range of video formats that we had to process to make the steps to upload as easy as possible. We launched the profiles in late 2014.

Auditionist launched