The emails are still coming thick and fast. I think the pace has slowed down and I am filtering them out on casting call as they come in rather than waiting till the end of the day. I am also on top of moving my emails to their specific folders as well. This seemed to work quite well for me. Not sure I am ever going to read the emails at all though. Sent the casting call notice text to Spotlight so will hopefully see what they provide shortly.
The big thing is that I will be auditioning for the very first time tonight. Luckily I get email responses throughout the day from the actors confirming that they can make it tonight. A couple can’t make it but I manage to email and get responses from some other so I have a full compliment of six lined up for tonight.
For the auditions I have decided to get the actors to prepare a monologue and to do a cold reading of an excerpt of the script that they will be given when they arrive for the audition. I will film all of the auditions so as to understand what the actors look like on screen as well as how I feel they come across in person.
The 1.5 hour journey to the warehouse from work seems to take forever. I have to leave early to get there on time and rush from the train station at the other end. My friends are coming to help me out. Tonight there will be three of them. One to meet and greet the actors as they arrive and the other two to help me in the auditions. One reading to the actor and the other working the camera. I have a girl and a boy helping with me so the girl can read as Ailidh and the boy can read as Jacob and whoever is not reading can work the camera.
All sounds good but my friends also have to make the 1.5 hour journey so I am on my own waiting for the first actress to appear. The seconds seemed to last for hours! The first actress was five minutes late as well so for a moment I was thinking that no one was going to show up. Once the first one was there the others came in quick succession.
Before I knew it I was doing my first audition. I can’t really remember it in detail to be honest. I just tried to do what I felt was right in this and all of the other ones. All of the actors were really nice and I quickly relaxed and got used to it. The first thing I realised was how early on you can tell if someone is right for the part. It is not as if they are a bad actor but they just aren’t what I pictured in my head. You can’t really change the shape of someone’s face that easily so they are basically never going to be offered the part.
So what do you do when by the moment you are shaking their hand you have mentally decided that you aren’t going to give them the role. Well, to be honest I always think that if I were in their shoes then they deserve to be treated equally with the ones that I think are contenders because they have taken the time out of their lives to come and audition. I hope that it will also give them some audition practice as well. Also you might review the tape afterwards and see something different on camera to what you have seen in person so it is always worth putting in the effort. Also if I just sent them away then we would just be twiddling our thumbs till the next person shows up.
After the set of auditions were finished I felt that I was getting the hang of it. I also realised that I didn’t need thirty minutes to run through what I wanted to run through. I think that fifteen minutes is probably enough time on average to run through an audition.
I am not going to comment on the actors at this stage as I will wait till I have fully reviewed the tapes but I will say that there was a mixture of abilities and suitability for the roles.
Getting home I decided to upload the video onto my computer whilst checking emails and going through the casting call submissions that had came in when I was at the auditions. I also had an email from Spotlight to let me know that the casting call had been put live.