Monday, May 19, 2008

Casting again - or why it's important to show up.

The last week has been particularly brutal on my sinuses. It tends to happen when the weather changes, which it did last week, from kind of cold and muggy (down here at the beach) to really hot and dry. Now I love the hot and dry - I really do, but it takes my inner cavities a little while to get used to it, which makes it hard to sleep and - well - live. The tragedy is that I don't think this weather is supposed to stick around, which means I'm going to go through all this again.

Now - on to the regularly scheduled blog post(which may not be as witty and erudite as previous entries due to the sinus medication cloud my brain is currently swimming around in).


My partner, Steve, and I did some casting on Friday, with our always wonderful casting director, Mark Sikes. It wasn't for GCC, but for the actual paying gig. It was fun and we saw a lot of good people. But it was interesting. Generally with the freebie stuff we've been doing you don't see a whole lot of actors but you kind of know that up front. Yesterday, with a paying gig to offer, we saw quite a lot of people, yet it was still pretty surprising that there were quite a few no-shows. In a business where 50% of the job is just showing up - a heck of a lot of people didn't show up.

And there was another phenomenon that I thought was quite interesting. As this project is an informational, "how-to" video, we had some voiceover work as part of the sides, being that voiceover work is going to be a substantial part of the production process. I can NOT BEGIN to tell you how many actors walked into that audition and asked if we were going to do the voiceover. And then, when we said, yes, in fact we do want you to run through the all the material we took time to assemble and photocopy and get out to you, at least half of them hadn't prepared it and wound up reading it cold (and given that it was somewhat complex and technical, tended to stumble and bumble through it - one guy actually jut gave up in the middle and walked out).

Let me just tell you, in case there are any actors among the three of you out there reading this, that if a producer/director/casting director actually takes the time to include some dialogue (even, and let me make this perfectly clear, even if it is only just YOU speaking) in a set of sides and then sends it out to you there's a better than even chance we didn't do it just so you would have something extra to wrap fish with once the audition was over.

I mean, I'm just saying...