American Idol national auditions

[Jennasis]

So Idol is in NJ today doing auditions at the Izod center at he Meadowlands: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/08/american_idol_auditions_draw_i.html

So who the heck is in the room judging?? Is it just Randy?? What the deuce is going on? I had heard they'd announce officially who the new judges were yesterday but that did not happen right? So...

 

[clutter]

I'd heard that its only Ryan right now, filming the crowd scenes. The producers do the screening, then there will be call backs later.

 

[SydSim]

A friend is there right now.

 

[tiggger1]

My friend's husband has worked for Idol as a production assistant ( he picked up Ryan Seacrest at the airport and ran errands) when they are in Boston for the last 2 years. He said that the only people at the first auditions are the producers and Ryan. The judges don't come into play until callbacks

 

[Jennasis]

Ah! Thanks tiggger1 and clutter. I figured they must to some editing, cause there's no way all 10,000 people get in front of the 3 judges anyway. So they do all the city auditions, narrow down to a few (100?) in each city who come back and audition for the new judges.

 

[golfgal]

My friend's husband has worked for Idol as a production assistant ( he picked up Ryan Seacrest at the airport and ran errands) when they are in Boston for the last 2 years. He said that the only people at the first auditions are the producers and Ryan. The judges don't come into play until callbacks

Ok, that makes sense because of the twins' friends from high school is on his third round of auditions and we were wondering who the heck was doing the judging.

 

[tiggger1]

It is actually a cool job. He think he was working for a temp agency when he got got the job. He started off running errands like picking up water and making sure the production team had what they needed. They asked him to come back for call backs and he did the same thing.. Last year he got to pick up Ryan and video crew at the airport. He also got asked to fly to the next audition place because they needed some equipment that got left in Boston and it was cheaper to fly him out to bring it instead of buying it new.

 

[mrsv98]

Seacrest is a great Twitter-er to follow He tweets a bunch and has been talking about the audtions for the last week or so. He generally does his radio show from the location city and then shoots for AI.

The initial rounds are people being seen by teams of producers. They pick the best, worst, strangest, most compelling stories and those are the ones who later get to see the judges. IIRC, in Chicago last year, there were 10k people at the United Center in July and then those who were chosen came back later, I want to say in Oct. to go in front of Simon et al. Since the season doesn't start until Jan with live shows not until Feb they have loads of time to go through all these various steps.

 

[bicker]

This is pretty-much how they've always done it - first audition in front of production staffers, and then a few get to the judges. This is the second year, I believe, that they're having the judges portion of the auditions together into a shorter period of time, further into the year, after the publicly-announced auditions in each city.