Casting Call Catastrophe

As the title of this post suggests, our casting call did not go as planned and was nowhere near what we thought it was going to be. Only 2, two, TWO people showed up and neither of them were exactly Saoirse Ronan if you catch my drift. The lack of turnout was a miscalculation on our part though. I think we underestimated the teenage need for relaxation and the power Friday has on the motivation of students. If we held the casting call on any other weekday, turnout might’ve been better.  Both of the girls who auditioned were very polite and listened to our directions, but they didn’t grasp the emotions in the way we wanted. You know what they say, if you want to get something done, you gotta do it yourself. My partner Shreya will assume the lead role as she will be able to visualize what we want in the project better than the actresses who auditioned for the part. We briefly considered holding a second casting call, but with the SAT coming up as well as important field trips, we decided it was better to just leave everything as is.

One of the girls who auditioned asked if I could pretend to be a dead person to help them formulate a monologue. While she was performing I was trying so hard not to laugh, acting is tough man. The other girl who auditioned had an accent that was a little hard to understand, this is not important because we would not have a lot of dialogue, but she seemed to need to rely on dialogue in order to emote well which was somewhat problematic. Blogger won't let me post the second video, so I'll try to include it in the next post,

Scratch That, Strike It From the Records

So we’re basically starting over. We are keeping the same theme but we are changing the plot of our opening a bit to better fit our skill set and convey our chosen message better.

So earlier I had said we were going to start the film with a series of flashbacks triggered by our main character walking through the bedroom of her friend who passed. I also proposed the idea of having her be at the beach or their favorite spot but we are not doing any of that! Now, we are going to have her express emotions of sadness and depression as she gets ready to go to her friend’s funeral in her room. After consulting our teacher, we realized that our idea was unrealistic as we only have 2 minutes to accomplish this project.

We are currently revising our plot and have come up with a pretty basic outline. Since our opening will basically be focused on one person we needed an amazing actress who would be able to emote without using too much dialogue. In order to achieve this quality we asked Ms. Lutwin, the drama teacher, if she would be alright with helping us hold a casting call. I didn’t expect it to be so easy and she was so kind and considerate while we were asking about our casting call. The whole process was a great experience. Lutwin said she had about 3 or 4 girls in mind already who fit the description of who our character is. She said she’ll let them know about the casting call. Fingers crossed!

Our casting call will be held on Friday afterschool in front of the Drama Room, and the people who audition will have to improvise a brief monologue about grief and the loss of a friend. We decided to use this method of testing because we wanted to see who could get into this grief/depressed mindset the fastest and who emoted the best.

Storyboard and Schedule ideas

            For our cast, we wanted to use good representation. We have considered a casting call because we want a good actor for our opening, but depending on how our scheduling works out it might be easier to use one of Shreya’s friends who is in drama. While a casting call seems like a logical idea, it takes time to plan and you’d have to pick a location and the school might not let us hold an afterschool event without certain forms being filled out. Anyways, our main character is a girl who is at least 16 years old because she can drive. I need to discuss dates with Shreya but we are tentatively setting next Sunday as our potential start date for production/filming.

            Something we haven’t discussed is mise en scene and how things like costume design and lighting and color would affect the piece. For color at least I know that i want the colors to be present but definitely less saturated in the beginning. But in regards to the other techniques I haven’t thought about it. I want our main character to be somewhat kiddish, like on the cusp of maturity but not quite there yet, she is still naive. 

These are all topics that I will have more definite answers on in my next blog post. What I really wanted this post to be about was the storyboard. I  completed the first half of the storyboard and I think it is representative of what we want to accomplish with this piece. I’ve included my storyboard below, please don’t make fun of my awful drawing skills. (I know Van Gogh is probably weeping at this)