Today has been fun and also a sign of things to come. You don't realise how tired you feel when you are holding auditions. It is quite draining as you give each person as much of your energy and attention as possible. Since they have finished I have been thinking how it is probably the closest thing to the shoot that I can get. It felt great doing the auditions but as soon as the were over my body just wanted to sleep. Of course I didn't let it and here we are at 23:05 writing a blog!
So how did the auditions go you ask? Well for me this is really hard as I half want to tell you my individual thoughts about each candidate and what worked about their performances but that would be really unfair to all of the great actors who came along today and put themselves out there for a role in the film.
What I will say is that we have a few promising leads that I want to review the tapes of and the rest aren't suitable for the film. One of our production team, Aleyha who isn't on the website yet but was doing the camera work, asked me how I had chosen the candidates and I feel that the same question equally applies to the process of judging an audition.
The question is does this person emit the emotions that I expect in whatever character they are auditioning for. When you are reviewing an actors resume you can tell within a few seconds if they are completely wrong for the role. I found this harsh at first but I think a strong actor understands that when they are turned down for a part it might be down to their appearance rather than their acting skills.
During the auditions this sense is just magnified as you are not just going off an image of the actor but how they are emoting and relating to the character you have created right in front of you. The majority of the time it is pretty evident straight away if there is a connection between the actors and if the actor understands what you want from him.
I think that things become easier once you have seen one person that you like as that becomes the bar that each of the next actors have to reach. This is more or less what happened today. Another watch this space I'm afraid but hopefully by the end of next week we will have a Jacob in place and I will be able to rabbit on about how great his audition was!