Auditions - how - where - why
Saturday/July/2009 05:39 PM
Auditions
I’ll start with an outline of events that worked well for our production then get into some advice that might be better for auditions outside of the major cities. Start by advertising the auditions. Let your casting director field all of the calls (again, the director should be in a room drawing storyboards or researching camera techniques) and make sure you use online casting call collection houses like Nowcasting.com. Go traditional too, put an ad in your local arts and variety paper, or in Backstage or Backstage West. When you put your ad in Backstage, expect to get several hundred headshots. Our first production produced five garbage bags full of headshots (don’t take this personally, but some had to go in the trash). Start creating piles of possible character choices and write the character names on the headshots. This will make it easier when you’re sitting down later to make decisions. Print out headshots from the web (or scan in headshots from the mail) and create a folder of people that you want to see. A good way to decide how many people to call in for auditions is to multiply your cast by 10. We saw nearly 200 people when I was AD for The Second Degree. For DS films’ first production we saw only 78. It turned out to be just as productive and we had just as many good options. It’s my belief that there comes a point where seeing too many people makes you focus on memorable auditions and not talented actors. Video tape every audition. We actually built the original montage of coffee orders into our finished film. We had asked every actor to look straight into the camera and order their favorite coffee house concoction and used that footage to open the film. This will not be possible for every kind of film, but see if there’s something you can use from auditions. Put a greenscreen behind the actors and have them hold up title cards that can be used as transitions in your film. Create a montage of screams that you’ll use in your horror film as part of the audio. Get creative with how you use your time and the time of your performers. It will feel good to check off things that need to get done and if you can do two at a time, fantastic.
Where to audition
Both of the productions that I’ve worked on used spaces at colleges to audition. It is easy to park there. There are people roaming around who can direct people to the right room. There are facilities there (like studio space and performance spaces) that you’re not going to find anywhere else for free. We found a current student at a local community college and paid him minimum wage to operate the camera in the studio while we auditioned 78 people over two days. The studio wasn’t being used anyway and it cost us 35 dollars a day to set up in the lobby of a college film department and share their facilities. Don’t audition at a house if possible. People are already nervous about the kind of production you’re running (it’s obviously not backed by Fox) and the first impression should be that you’re thrifty but as professional as you can be given the circumstances.
Think of other places, too. Audition at a local theater if they’ll give you a space. Talk to them and see if some of the actors would like to invite you to audition people there. It might give you an inside track on some talent that you can use in the production. Hotel rooms are a terrible choice, but hotel meeting rooms are fantastic. Do you know anyone who works in the hospitality industry and can get you the meeting room at the local Marriot for two days over the weekend when most business people are on their way home? On the lower end of the scale, talk to the parks department about any recreation facilities that they have that they might allow a member of the community to use for a day or two. There are a hundred options out there, make sure people walking in to meet you are presented with the best one available. Schedule two days wherever you choose because you want to give actors choices. Create a time table to see four to seven people an hour. This means you schedule seven and deal with how many show up. Post a website with a map to the auditions and create sides (scenes from the film) for actors to study before coming. Put information on the website about what you want the actor to prepare. We have some ideas on that, but they are merely suggestions and it really is up to the director and the producers.
How to audition
People in a small town aren’t going to want to memorize a Shakespeare monologue. People from the big city can polish a single monologue so well that it’s hard to tell what they will do when given a new challenge. With that in mind we’ve created a different way to audition that gave us excellent results.
The DS films audition model (thanks Sackerson): Have the actors bring an item from their past. A game, a stuffed animal, a baseball glove, and have them explain why this item is so special to them. It is an instant window into the personality of the actor. There is nothing false about our emotional connections to the past, and this kind of source material shows how actors deal with “real” moments in front of the camera. That does not mean that you know how they read in character, but it gives a great insight into who they are and how they communicate. A director can often use their natural cadence as part of the screening process. If someone is naturally like a character, and you don’t have months to draw that character out of them, it’s best to know who is going to be closest to each role when they’re being themselves. This is not the only measure of casting by far, but I found it valuable and it also was the start of a bonding process between the actors and the above the line people watching them. It felt like you were getting to know the people while you learned how they presented themselves. After that we had people pair off and read for the parts. It’s good to get a look at what they do with the material before you start dismissing people (or elevating them to the role through their personality alone). When you’re done with the auditions, have the actors turn to the camera and hold up a card with their name and contact information. Prepare the card for them and color code the cards. We had everyone we really liked hold up a blue card and everyone else got white. It isn’t important until you get to the final decisions and you want to look them up on the tape (or the digital media of your choice). Watching how each person looks on screen can be an important criteria. One of the leads of the DS films got her part over another almost equally talented actress because of the way she held a close-up. We had to go to the tape to decide and it’s great if the tape is organized to zip through quickly and find the ones you like best.
Leave the casting director in the waiting room. This might sound sneaky, but it really saved our hides on a couple of casting choices. Once, a person who was up for a major role was given a smaller one, and she turned out to be a very complicated person to have on set (and she was there only two days, we could not have done it for 25) and the other time we were weighing two people for a part and the casting director just threw away one of the headshots. Afterward we heard a story from a crew member who had worked on set with the one the casting director discarded and let’s just say it was the right choice. Seeing how actors treat each other between takes can be a vital part of a small community like the one you’re fostering with your films. People have to hang lights, hold booms and spray and make-up, and dress the people in your cast. Don’t you want them to WANT to do these jobs? Then don’t invite people into the production who are hard to get along with. I know talent is provocative, and it shows up on screen, but when given the choice between equal talents, it’s nice to know that one of them is a person you’ll enjoy the process with and the other is not. If your casting director wants to be in on auditions, find another trustworthy set of eyes and ears to work the lobby. Find someone who isn’t trying to make friends (this is why the casting director is the perfect choice as they notoriously have few to no friends in real life).
Call backs might be necessary so leave that door open at the end of the auditions. Most likely, you’ll find that there are more women than men who have talent. That’s just the way it is.
Auditions are probably not over. Be prepared to find specialty roles outside of your first casting call. We had a hearing-impaired role and in order to fill it we went to websites that dealt with hearing-impaired issues. We got the word out and in the end we auditioned a young lady who EVERYONE in the cast fell in love with. We had several Native Americans audition, but that again came through active participation in community websites. There was on role that we just didn’t feel we had seen the right actor for and we held off. We looked at three leading men outside of the main auditions. We eventually cast one of the leads from a meeting arranged through Nowcasting after the main auditions. The actor was a fantastic choice and we were glad that we didn’t simply try to fit in one of the people from the first wave of auditions. It’s hard to tell people that they’re not right for something, but you don’t have to, just hand them a white card with their name on it and thank them for their time.
Now it’s time to make choices. This is where personalities can clash. It’s safer for the director to take the temperature of the room and then take everyone’s input into a room with the casting director then make the decisions. Everyone is going to like someone who didn’t make it into the film. That happens, but if everyone feels like they were listened to and their opinion counted, it shouldn’t pull to hard at the fabric of this close-knit group that you’ve built. Give the producer a small role if he wants it. It happens to be a great way to make his efforts personal. We had one producer play a role in the film. He did an excellent job and it made working with him an even greater pleasure because we got to see his talents on screen. If the producer turns out to be a bad actor and he gets cut from the film, don’t tell him until the screening then run.
Other methods of casting in a smaller market:
In a less crowded market (LA has so many casting calls a day that one can be rejected twenty times a week if he is “lucky”) you may have to take your camera to the talent. You may have to convince someone to play a part rather than cast one from many. Reluctant actors sometimes have a nice energy about them. Cast a real cop in your town and you don’t need to get a costume. Cast a farmer and you won’t have to tell him what to do in between lines to his daughter, he’ll know his business. Casting like this is nothing new. Eisenstein did it, Ken Loach did it. Don’t be afraid of populating your films with real people. Acting is a craft and an art. That does not mean that a natural talent can’t be included and even featured in some cases. Your film can approach the story with a more naturalistic style if it fits the story.
You may feel enticed to bring in talent from out of state. This leads to lodging issues, and opens up the possibility for division in the group. If this person is the final piece to a puzzle, put them in place and figure it out. If this is a friend from out of town, tell him that you’re staying local.
I don’t know if this is the place for my friends rant, but I’ll go ahead. On every film shoot you can expect to make one or two new friends who will stay in your life and surprise you. The reverse is true as well. You can expect to lose one or two friends. I don’t know why, but in each of my three films I gained two and lost one. None of the gains or losses were expected. The additions became good friends and the losses tended to be very close friends. I’m not sure if it’s just me, or if it is some cosmic equasion to which those who are freakishly dedicated to film are tuned, but I’ve polled the top people in our last film and they had similar experiences (not quite as predictable as mine, the director claimed to have lost two friends and gained me which he called a half J)
Do not have friends fill the important positions in your crew or cast. If someone you know wants to audition, let them, but do not appoint anyone because you think they are great people and great people won’t let you down. This leads very often to a situation where the end result isn’t so great. The project is terribly important to you, and you can’t avoid it but your crew of friends just sees their responsibilities as a favor to you. Now, I’m not charming enough to warrant 32 days of 12-hour favors. You might be. If not, make sure that your friends earn their way on the staff or cast. It’s much more likely that someone who sees the films as their ticket to something big will come through big. It’s not a knock on your friends or the fraternity that brings people to lean upon social bonds when they themselves are in uncertain waters (Watters happens to be the name of one of the friends I made during the first production), rather it is a component of human nature. People who love you want to see you fail. People who don’t know you yet might be convinced that you’re the type who can beat the odds and produce an epic story out of pure passion and a few pages of paper - and you can carry that uncertainty across the finish line a lot more easily than the cumbersome load of friends piling into your clown car. Your social situation might be different and the people in your town might be the type who you know won’t ever let you down – that’s awesome. I’m just letting you know that in this situation, your best friend is the person who wants the job the most.
I’ll start with an outline of events that worked well for our production then get into some advice that might be better for auditions outside of the major cities. Start by advertising the auditions. Let your casting director field all of the calls (again, the director should be in a room drawing storyboards or researching camera techniques) and make sure you use online casting call collection houses like Nowcasting.com. Go traditional too, put an ad in your local arts and variety paper, or in Backstage or Backstage West. When you put your ad in Backstage, expect to get several hundred headshots. Our first production produced five garbage bags full of headshots (don’t take this personally, but some had to go in the trash). Start creating piles of possible character choices and write the character names on the headshots. This will make it easier when you’re sitting down later to make decisions. Print out headshots from the web (or scan in headshots from the mail) and create a folder of people that you want to see. A good way to decide how many people to call in for auditions is to multiply your cast by 10. We saw nearly 200 people when I was AD for The Second Degree. For DS films’ first production we saw only 78. It turned out to be just as productive and we had just as many good options. It’s my belief that there comes a point where seeing too many people makes you focus on memorable auditions and not talented actors. Video tape every audition. We actually built the original montage of coffee orders into our finished film. We had asked every actor to look straight into the camera and order their favorite coffee house concoction and used that footage to open the film. This will not be possible for every kind of film, but see if there’s something you can use from auditions. Put a greenscreen behind the actors and have them hold up title cards that can be used as transitions in your film. Create a montage of screams that you’ll use in your horror film as part of the audio. Get creative with how you use your time and the time of your performers. It will feel good to check off things that need to get done and if you can do two at a time, fantastic.
Where to audition
Both of the productions that I’ve worked on used spaces at colleges to audition. It is easy to park there. There are people roaming around who can direct people to the right room. There are facilities there (like studio space and performance spaces) that you’re not going to find anywhere else for free. We found a current student at a local community college and paid him minimum wage to operate the camera in the studio while we auditioned 78 people over two days. The studio wasn’t being used anyway and it cost us 35 dollars a day to set up in the lobby of a college film department and share their facilities. Don’t audition at a house if possible. People are already nervous about the kind of production you’re running (it’s obviously not backed by Fox) and the first impression should be that you’re thrifty but as professional as you can be given the circumstances.
Think of other places, too. Audition at a local theater if they’ll give you a space. Talk to them and see if some of the actors would like to invite you to audition people there. It might give you an inside track on some talent that you can use in the production. Hotel rooms are a terrible choice, but hotel meeting rooms are fantastic. Do you know anyone who works in the hospitality industry and can get you the meeting room at the local Marriot for two days over the weekend when most business people are on their way home? On the lower end of the scale, talk to the parks department about any recreation facilities that they have that they might allow a member of the community to use for a day or two. There are a hundred options out there, make sure people walking in to meet you are presented with the best one available. Schedule two days wherever you choose because you want to give actors choices. Create a time table to see four to seven people an hour. This means you schedule seven and deal with how many show up. Post a website with a map to the auditions and create sides (scenes from the film) for actors to study before coming. Put information on the website about what you want the actor to prepare. We have some ideas on that, but they are merely suggestions and it really is up to the director and the producers.
How to audition
People in a small town aren’t going to want to memorize a Shakespeare monologue. People from the big city can polish a single monologue so well that it’s hard to tell what they will do when given a new challenge. With that in mind we’ve created a different way to audition that gave us excellent results.
The DS films audition model (thanks Sackerson): Have the actors bring an item from their past. A game, a stuffed animal, a baseball glove, and have them explain why this item is so special to them. It is an instant window into the personality of the actor. There is nothing false about our emotional connections to the past, and this kind of source material shows how actors deal with “real” moments in front of the camera. That does not mean that you know how they read in character, but it gives a great insight into who they are and how they communicate. A director can often use their natural cadence as part of the screening process. If someone is naturally like a character, and you don’t have months to draw that character out of them, it’s best to know who is going to be closest to each role when they’re being themselves. This is not the only measure of casting by far, but I found it valuable and it also was the start of a bonding process between the actors and the above the line people watching them. It felt like you were getting to know the people while you learned how they presented themselves. After that we had people pair off and read for the parts. It’s good to get a look at what they do with the material before you start dismissing people (or elevating them to the role through their personality alone). When you’re done with the auditions, have the actors turn to the camera and hold up a card with their name and contact information. Prepare the card for them and color code the cards. We had everyone we really liked hold up a blue card and everyone else got white. It isn’t important until you get to the final decisions and you want to look them up on the tape (or the digital media of your choice). Watching how each person looks on screen can be an important criteria. One of the leads of the DS films got her part over another almost equally talented actress because of the way she held a close-up. We had to go to the tape to decide and it’s great if the tape is organized to zip through quickly and find the ones you like best.
Leave the casting director in the waiting room. This might sound sneaky, but it really saved our hides on a couple of casting choices. Once, a person who was up for a major role was given a smaller one, and she turned out to be a very complicated person to have on set (and she was there only two days, we could not have done it for 25) and the other time we were weighing two people for a part and the casting director just threw away one of the headshots. Afterward we heard a story from a crew member who had worked on set with the one the casting director discarded and let’s just say it was the right choice. Seeing how actors treat each other between takes can be a vital part of a small community like the one you’re fostering with your films. People have to hang lights, hold booms and spray and make-up, and dress the people in your cast. Don’t you want them to WANT to do these jobs? Then don’t invite people into the production who are hard to get along with. I know talent is provocative, and it shows up on screen, but when given the choice between equal talents, it’s nice to know that one of them is a person you’ll enjoy the process with and the other is not. If your casting director wants to be in on auditions, find another trustworthy set of eyes and ears to work the lobby. Find someone who isn’t trying to make friends (this is why the casting director is the perfect choice as they notoriously have few to no friends in real life).
Call backs might be necessary so leave that door open at the end of the auditions. Most likely, you’ll find that there are more women than men who have talent. That’s just the way it is.
Auditions are probably not over. Be prepared to find specialty roles outside of your first casting call. We had a hearing-impaired role and in order to fill it we went to websites that dealt with hearing-impaired issues. We got the word out and in the end we auditioned a young lady who EVERYONE in the cast fell in love with. We had several Native Americans audition, but that again came through active participation in community websites. There was on role that we just didn’t feel we had seen the right actor for and we held off. We looked at three leading men outside of the main auditions. We eventually cast one of the leads from a meeting arranged through Nowcasting after the main auditions. The actor was a fantastic choice and we were glad that we didn’t simply try to fit in one of the people from the first wave of auditions. It’s hard to tell people that they’re not right for something, but you don’t have to, just hand them a white card with their name on it and thank them for their time.
Now it’s time to make choices. This is where personalities can clash. It’s safer for the director to take the temperature of the room and then take everyone’s input into a room with the casting director then make the decisions. Everyone is going to like someone who didn’t make it into the film. That happens, but if everyone feels like they were listened to and their opinion counted, it shouldn’t pull to hard at the fabric of this close-knit group that you’ve built. Give the producer a small role if he wants it. It happens to be a great way to make his efforts personal. We had one producer play a role in the film. He did an excellent job and it made working with him an even greater pleasure because we got to see his talents on screen. If the producer turns out to be a bad actor and he gets cut from the film, don’t tell him until the screening then run.
Other methods of casting in a smaller market:
In a less crowded market (LA has so many casting calls a day that one can be rejected twenty times a week if he is “lucky”) you may have to take your camera to the talent. You may have to convince someone to play a part rather than cast one from many. Reluctant actors sometimes have a nice energy about them. Cast a real cop in your town and you don’t need to get a costume. Cast a farmer and you won’t have to tell him what to do in between lines to his daughter, he’ll know his business. Casting like this is nothing new. Eisenstein did it, Ken Loach did it. Don’t be afraid of populating your films with real people. Acting is a craft and an art. That does not mean that a natural talent can’t be included and even featured in some cases. Your film can approach the story with a more naturalistic style if it fits the story.
You may feel enticed to bring in talent from out of state. This leads to lodging issues, and opens up the possibility for division in the group. If this person is the final piece to a puzzle, put them in place and figure it out. If this is a friend from out of town, tell him that you’re staying local.
I don’t know if this is the place for my friends rant, but I’ll go ahead. On every film shoot you can expect to make one or two new friends who will stay in your life and surprise you. The reverse is true as well. You can expect to lose one or two friends. I don’t know why, but in each of my three films I gained two and lost one. None of the gains or losses were expected. The additions became good friends and the losses tended to be very close friends. I’m not sure if it’s just me, or if it is some cosmic equasion to which those who are freakishly dedicated to film are tuned, but I’ve polled the top people in our last film and they had similar experiences (not quite as predictable as mine, the director claimed to have lost two friends and gained me which he called a half J)
Do not have friends fill the important positions in your crew or cast. If someone you know wants to audition, let them, but do not appoint anyone because you think they are great people and great people won’t let you down. This leads very often to a situation where the end result isn’t so great. The project is terribly important to you, and you can’t avoid it but your crew of friends just sees their responsibilities as a favor to you. Now, I’m not charming enough to warrant 32 days of 12-hour favors. You might be. If not, make sure that your friends earn their way on the staff or cast. It’s much more likely that someone who sees the films as their ticket to something big will come through big. It’s not a knock on your friends or the fraternity that brings people to lean upon social bonds when they themselves are in uncertain waters (Watters happens to be the name of one of the friends I made during the first production), rather it is a component of human nature. People who love you want to see you fail. People who don’t know you yet might be convinced that you’re the type who can beat the odds and produce an epic story out of pure passion and a few pages of paper - and you can carry that uncertainty across the finish line a lot more easily than the cumbersome load of friends piling into your clown car. Your social situation might be different and the people in your town might be the type who you know won’t ever let you down – that’s awesome. I’m just letting you know that in this situation, your best friend is the person who wants the job the most.