Monday, January 30, 2006

Finding the Cast

Now that we had a draft of the script, it came time to finding a cast. One thing that has always been a painful process for me with filmmaking is holding casting auditions. Although it's a relief to find the good actors, you usually have to weed through a lot of people that either want to be actors or think they are actors (think American Idol and you'll get the picture). We wanted to shoot the movie before the end of the summer since the script called for it and also to fit it into my schedule, so we decided to have limited auditions, inviting actors we knew to come and audition and having an open call to a limited number of people. Since the script was an adventure film that would go all over the state with a very small crew and luxuries, I wanted to make sure our actors were team players, willing to help out with anything when needed. So in addition to finding actors that could act and willing to work for very little money, they had to be good to work with - no divas would work on this show.

We had several actors show up for the auditions and overall the experience was pretty good. There were still several that couldn't act, although they did provide some nice entertainment. At the end of the audition we had our main guy, Kyle, and narrowed down the roles of Allyson and Trevor to 2 people each. We had call backs a few days later and were able to finish casting our main roles. As it turned out, 2 of the 3 main actors were crew members I had worked with on other projects, so they were excited to have a chance to show their acting skills and I was glad that they had some film experience and knew how things worked. Below are the actors we cast for the leads: