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...

Retroactive Script Notes

A Script Supervisor is one of those positions that, when you are making something for a very low budget, seems superfluous. It's also one of the jobs on set that can be extremely important. The job of a Script Supervisor is to record every shot, every action, to take notes on the script as it's being shot. They also assign scene numbers that go on the slate. Though in reality the convention of how scenes are numbered is fairly straight forward, Sc 1 Tk 1 -> Sc 1A Tk 1, etc, they can get a little tricky at times and as a camera assistant and later as a director I depended on them to help me keep track of what was happening and most important, what had happened and what was going to happen.

I'm just thinking about that now, I as I sit here, going through all the footage from the last shoot and making retroactive script notes.

As a 2nd AC, especially on a film or series, you tend to work very closely with the script supervisor for a long period of time. I have fond memories of more than one.

UPDATE: As an update, I went trolling through some of the blog rolls of the sites I frequent and came across this blog Script Goddess. If you have some time and are interested, give it a look - watch the film she has posted about sleep and read the piece on Brent - he was a good guy - someone who helped me when I was just starting out. In fact, I'm going to crack open the nut that is my blog roll, over one the left there, and add this one.

Gone viral

I know this may sound a bit like I'm blowing my own horn (which, I've learned, is a phrase you NEVER want to use on a porn set) but I'm pretty surprised with the feedback I'm getting on this web series we're doing. I mean, I'm kind of just used to sending stuff out and having it disappear into the void of the endless email, but people are actually writing back and telling me how much they like it. I've even heard from people who heard about it from other people, which means, dare I say, that we have officially gone VIRAL!!!

In other news, we're casting this afternoon for the next three episodes.

Casting again

I've written three more episodes, but they're a little edgier than the ones we have up so far. We're holding auditions on Thursday and I'm hoping we can get a good turn-out. Of course when you're asking people to work for free, edgy tends to be tough. Especially when some of that edgy revolves people walking around with very little on.

My casting director, Mark Sikes, is good, so I'm not too worried.