Auditions, casting and directing actors
18.1 We
made a backstage profile! We struggled a bit at beginning, but we managed it in the end.
We thought we had to pay for it, but then we found out that students can make
profiles for free. We used the email we made for our film and added the details
we needed.
This is what we sent out:
Protagonist
Lead
Female
18-25
Any ethnicity
"Our Protagonist is an anxious and introverted young woman who sometimes struggles to find the line between reality and her paranoia. The film will follow her mental check list that she has created for herself as a coping mechanism, to prepare for the worst. Despite usually avoiding these situations, she finds herself incredibly anxious walking home one night, after a costume party."
We also added our casting call poster, as well as a couple of storyboard slides.
We ask for a headshot and a reel. Some people sent out cover letters, which was nice.
DIRECTING ACTORS workshop 1
Notes:
-What directors look for in their actors and what actors look for in a director
-chemistry
-No result directing, working around that
-actors doing the key scenes
-different key words
-hello, hello, been waiting long, ages
-brushing teeth scene
-who what when where
-different scenarios ie seduction, confrontation, entrapment etc
-Anya script
-Margarite, working with her on wednesday for mock audition, need to send her info
-for non dialgoue audition, think of what kind of scenes are needed, physicality, emotions for close up, so we should create two different scenes for margarite to act out
-I think the actor can bring something to our character, flesh her out more, she is kind of open
The directing
acting workshop was incredibly helpful for Laura and I. I think we learnt a lot
from it, and also had some recap from last year. We have no experience with working
with actors, so we are a little nervous about the auditions as well as the
actual shoot. This workshop has definitely given us some really useful keys if
we ever get stuck. We´ll steer away from result directing, try to give our
actress some space and key words. Hopefully our actress will be able to take
notes, add elements to the character herself, and be easy to get along with.
It´s also important that she is good with emotions and body language as our
film doesn´t have much dialogue. Next week we will have a mock audition with Margarite.
DIRECTING ACTORS workshop 2
-Practising auditions with margarite, we sent her some stuff so she knows what its about
-Went well and we feel more confident for our auditions.
This
workshop was really useful again. We didn´t know how to hold auditions at all, but
we learnt a lot of good stuff today. We were too slow but it´s just because we hadn’t
practised beforehand. For the actual things we will split who´s saying who clearly
so we don´t get awkward silences and seem unorganised. We also learnt how to
talk to the actor (like saying “in your own time”). I think our first online
auditions can just be fifteen minutes long. We also went through lots of scenarios,
so we can pick the best few for our real auditions. I really like the clapping
one (every time I clap it´s a scary sound you hear, so you get more and more
nervous). We also liked asking thoughts on the film, so we´ll keep that.
We´ll
organise our online auditions as follows: 1. Introducing ourselves, what were
going to be doing tonight, how are you etc 2. Why did you apply? What are
you´re thoughts on the film and it´s meaning? What kind of “rituals” do you go through
to make yourself seem safer? 3. Improv scenarios (clapping, bus stop maybe? You´re
on a phone call…
AUDITIONS
We got a bit under 50 applications in the end. We went through the first ones quiet quickly. I sent out a short message to everyone we said no to and we narrowed our applicants down to around 25. I was able to narrow a few more down before sending out a message for online auditions for the 24th and 25th feb. Our plan at the moment is to have online auditions Thursday and Friday for these 21 candidates, and out of them we will choose our favourites to audition in person. Hopefully we can narrow it down to around five people. We are planning to have the auditions at uni, and most of the actors are from London, so we don´t want to invite too many people, especially at the beginning stages.
A lot of
the actors cancelled or didn´t answer at all so we ended up having auditions
for a lot less than 21. I think we did well and even though we were nervous to
begin with, we handled it nicely. They were around fifteen minutes as planned,
and we kept to what we had planned to say. We recorded all of them so we could
watch them later as well. We mainly stuck to two scenarios with different variations.
One was the clapping one where we saw the actors take on the emotional range of
confident to extreme fear. The other one we had was sitting at a bus stop. A
drunk man is staring at you walking towards you. We had variations where he
talked to her, she is calling her friend, or a woman walks in and she feel
relief. All in all, I think our online auditions went great. We were also able
to choose our top five quickly: Lola, Hannah, Emma, Ellen and Brooke.
CASTING
I made this pdf to send out to the actors. I originally made it for Margarite for our practice auditions, but I thought we could use it for applicants as well. The only difference is I took of the storyboards, as we have that on our backstage.
I don´t think we will actually use it in the end, as we are still developing our story and we are not sure how it will end up looking like in the end.
We have
changed our story a bit. We decided that she is closing up at work instead of
coming from a party. If she was at a party she could maybe just stay the night
at her friends whereas from work it´s more urgent for her to leave. That does
mean though, that the actress wont be wearing a costume :(( So we can´t really
use the old moodboards or costume collages. We might still keep that she has
some interesting looking make up that maybe changes throughout the film. We
also decided on a name for her! Her name is Beatrice so Bea (pronounced Bee)
for short. I think its cute. But yes this change meant we had to rewrite the script and we also don´t have much to send the actors. We wrote two parts of the script (the beginning and end) to send to our actors.
We’re planning to invite our top five to online auditions this Sunday 6.3. Unfortunately a few of them messaged that they couldn’t make it and only one had confirmed, so we decided to have them send us self tapes of two scenes from our film we sent out.
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We went through all the tapes and by far our favourite is Hannah. We emailed her, but she said she is unfortunately busy on our film dates. We realised we could still film during the last week of march so we emailed those dates to her. It’s actually more convenient for us anyway as we will have more time to have practice shoots, test shots, get more funding, finish our script and story boarding. I’m also hoping to add to our instagram before actually filming.
WE FOUND OUR BEA!
Hannah accepted the role! We are so excited to get started!! We are ecstatic that we have found our protagonist. She is so talented I´m sure she´s going to be brilliant. I just sent her the actors agreement and we´re also looking at hotels and BnB´s.
We have added extras to our backstage profile.
We also added the message to facebook originally and got a few replies for it. We have our woman and maybe the group of guys. We mainly just need someone with a car and the drunk guy role. I´m fairly confident we will find these people in time. We were also thinking of asking Julia to help us out by driving by in her cry for the lighting.
This was the original message we put out:
EXTRAS NEEDED
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