Actor Growth

Okay, this is interesting. I got the sides for tomorrow’s audition class. The side looks like it is going to be heavily dependent on the actor being able to pull off reactions as well as establishing the surrounding. The tricky thing is that in this scene a large part of it is like when you hear what the characters are thinking in their head.

Hence, it can be like a guy and a girl on a date and while watching the show you hear their thoughts on how they feel so nervous. Now in this case the sides explicitly say that the actor should read the voice overs as well and there is a lot of action in it.

I’m just thinking, how the heck do you pull this off? Like in the dating scene scenario, wouldn’t that look kind of silly in context of what is going on? One thing is for sure, I am glad I am doing this in the audition class as I have never seen a request like this and it is better to make the mistakes in class.

So today I got the full script for the feature film that will be shooting soon. It looks like the bulk of my work and lines comes near the end of the film. After reading everything this is indeed an ambitious project with a lot of CG effects.

I guess my acting coach was right about this one in terms of the type of roles that I can play. I mentioned before that these are the types of roles I don’t think I would ever get cast for since usually movies are very specific in terms of the type of physique they are looking for in a stereotypical way and this is definitely not what I would consider a type cast for me. And sure enough, I will be playing one in this movie.

That made me think too if getting cast for this role had to do largely because the production people were impressed with my audition and therefore it’s one of those “We should put the guy in something” type of scenario. Good either way I suppose.

Looking at the schedule, I still have a good 3 weeks or so until the shoot. So, lots of time to study everything.

So the next item on the list is trying to find a decent place to get all of our lighting equipment from. At the same time, we need to decide what we need exactly as at this point we don’t have time to go back and fourth.

The director person that was helping me gave me an interesting to think about where if we are shooting high def then that could increase the editing time as high def camcorders already encode the video into a certain format. Afterwards, when you put it in a video editor it has to re-encode it again and takes twice as long.

So many things to think about.

Alright, so with the script basically there it’s time to find the replacement actors. So I guess I have to play the casting director here. I actually had to do that in school for experience and it is kind of funny as when you as an actor go audition you think that the casting director is going to tear you apart.

Really though, whenever people do auditions they are kind of rooting for you as they hope you are the one. Makes sense too when you think about it as why would they want to go through hundreds of people and expect them to be bad?

I guess the other hard thing right now is availability as due to our time crunch it doesn’t really matter if the person is better as if they can’t make it for shoot dates then we can’t really use them.

Wow, what a progression and decision this was. So, because of the nature of the competition we kept the same story theme except we revamped it and made it more character driven. The changes have definitely made the script a lot stronger.

The only thing we haven’t really fleshed out is the action sequences. As it looks now though, we have to start shooting at around the 19th considering the deadline is the 26th.

So one of the actors that I met in the acting group is enthusiastic in helping out and there is also a director who is offering to lend his time and knowledge to help us see the project through. That is great so far. So the plan is tomorrow I am going to meet up with my actor friend and we are going to modify the script a bit and take out things such as gun shots to make it easier to film and edit.

At the same time, one of the original writer is currently helping to tweak the script as well in the meantime. I might need some different actors for the older characters, so I might post an ad or something for it.