Interview: Casting Director on Testing Remote and In‑Studio Auditions (2026)

Hook: Remote auditions aren’t a tool — they’re a discipline

We spoke with Laila Torres, a senior casting director running global campaigns for lifestyle and sports brands. Laila explains the rigorous testing and contingency planning that makes remote auditions trustworthy, and why studios still matter.

About the interviewee

Laila Torres has 15 years of experience in casting and production, directing shoots across Europe and North America. She now leads casting at a multinational agency and builds remote audition protocols for scale.

Q: What’s changed in remote auditions since 2024?

Laila: “The discipline has matured. It used to be a 'good enough' substitute. Now it’s a parallel track with its own SOPs — from pre‑call tech checks to standardized lighting frames. We borrow testing methodologies from software teams that test local and remote services; they think in terms of reproducible environments and deterministic failures, which maps surprisingly well to remote casting. I recommend reading the interview with developers testing local vs remote services for structural parallels: How a Lead Developer Tests Against Local and Remote Services.”

Q: Walk us through a remote audition workflow

1. Pre‑session tech checklist — camera, audio, bandwidth.
2. Lighting reference capture — we give a short how‑to so candidates can match studio light.
3. Scripted movement and improv blocks — same sequence as in‑studio so we can compare apples to apples.
4. Controlled playback — we send a standardized cue track so audio conditions are identical.
5. Immediate offline backup — candidates upload to a secure dropbox; if the live call drops we continue ingestion.

Q: What about testing and performance tuning?

Laila: “We treat local capture like a service. Small performance tweaks — lower latency streaming profiles, faster hot reloads of on‑call visual references — make the difference. For teams building their own capture tools, advice from engineering on performance tuning for local web servers is useful: Performance Tuning for Local Web Servers.”

Q: When do you insist on in‑studio only?

Laila: “High fidelity body scans, full choreography and technical lighting tests still need the studio. Also, when the client wants a live creative direction loop, the immediacy in‑studio provides is unmatched. But remote does 70% of commercial casting now.”

Q: What are the safety and policy considerations?

Laila: “Consent and data retention must be explicit. We follow updated platform policy thinking because creators now travel and work across jurisdictions — see the policy landscape in Platform Policies & Travel Creators (Jan 2026). That guide helped us craft clauses for cross‑border footage retention.”

Q: Final tactical tips for teams starting now

• Create a remote audition kit with a one‑page tech spec.
• Run a shadow day where remote and studio auditions are performed for the same cast to benchmark differences.
• Keep a small in‑studio playbook for edge cases (complex choreography, full body scans).
• Train bookers to read and interpret remote artifacts like annotated screenshots and timecode logs.

“Remote auditions aren’t lower quality — they’re differently engineered. Treat them as a rigorous production channel.” — Laila Torres

Resources mentioned

• Interview: How a Lead Developer Tests Against Local and Remote Services
• Performance Tuning for Local Web Servers
• Platform Policies & Travel Creators (Jan 2026)
• The Leadership Playbook for Hybrid Onsite Events (2026)
• Team Travel and Micro‑Travel: Logistics for 2026 Tours

Author: Modeling News editorial team. Interview recorded January 2026.