Saturday, May 24th, 2008: The Auditions

The day of the auditions. This is one hell of a long day. We’re to be in Grimsby at 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning and finish the auditions up at around five. Then we go to Toronto, where a film of ours “Rose” is playing. I’m a little bummed about having to go to this thing up in Toronto as the UFC is on that night as well, and I’m a huge fan. But, I’m supposed to go back to Toronto on the Monday to be on the radio and talk about the film and the festival, so we’re going to have to go to this fest in Toronto and I’ll have to DVR the UFC. It’s just not the same. There’s just something missing when you watch a live event later.

Anyways, the day starts out with Bob, Bill and Kyle meeting at my place to scoot over to the auditions. Bob takes one look at the new rig on my camera, which is the adapter, the rails, and the matte box, and says we can’t use the setup on his tripod. His tripod has taken a beating with the amount of times we’ve put his jib arm on it, and he’s worried the weight of the new rig will be too much for his tripod head. Damn. Never even thought of that. Looks like I’ll have to spend more money that I don’t have. Luckily it looks like there might be some paying projects on the horizon, so hopefully with these new toys, we’ll be able to get some more work to have this gear pay for itself. We’ll just have to go a little harder for these projects than we have in the past.

We arrive in Grimsby about a half hour late, as is how we operate. For some reason we’re always late, and I don’t really understand it. We never try to be late but it just somehow happens every time. Oh well, I guess it’s just our thing, but I would definitely like to make our thing something else in the future. Like if our thing was to be really, really good looking, that’s something I’d like a lot better.

So we arrive a half hour late and there’s no Steve and no Alicia. We start to worry as we set everything up. Maybe they came and went already, figuring we weren’t going to come or that they got the wrong place.

Nah, they’re just later than us. That’s not going to be good. We were hoping that they would be the yin to our yang; to give us some credibility in this department as we seem to have no control on our arrival times.

We’ve all decided to dress up somewhat to lend us some professionalism. We didn’t tell Steve this plan because we figure the good doctor would arrive somewhat dressed up as that seems to be his custom. Well, isn’t a curveball thrown and Steve arrives looking like a drunken country club outcast. It’s definitely not the outfit we expected Steve to show up in, but it’s alright as Steve is reading with the actors, and we have a good laugh over it. Steve’s got this great personality where he can basically do no wrong, and you’d laugh if he told you your mother’s a whore and being abused next door like she deserves to be. There’s something about the guy that calms and relaxes you. When Bill and I first met him, we both agreed he was a great guy, and Logan, who was in a short Steve wrote that we crewed on said Steve was a great guy within minutes of meeting him. It’s rare to find a person like that. Anyways, enough about Steve.

Alicia brings her friend to greet the auditioners as they arrive, give them paperwork, and take control of the sides. I can’t remember her name for the life of me right now (I think it was Andrea), but bless her heart for doing this most mundane job. Turns out she hasn’t even slept yet, and she’s here helping us out with a job not many people would do. She’s definitely a life saver. I’ll have to get her name from Alicia and give her props in this diary.

Everything gets set up, the actors start coming in, and we all start doing our thing. I’ve had a few auditions in my life, and they just suck from both sides of the table. I auditioned for a couple of things before, and it’s nerve racking and hellish, but I’ll have to say that being on the other side of the table is harder. Once you audition, you can pretty much go home and put it behind you. On the other side of the table, you’re there all day, and you’re hearing the same lines over and over and over again. Some people are really good, some people are really bad. If you get a string of bad ones together, you can easily start doubting your writing abilities and wonder if the dialogue you wrote is as good as you thought it was.

We have a bunch of young kids come in to audition for us, which is understandable and we let them do it to offer them experience. Who knows? We might need them in the future, even if our immediate projects don’t require the younger age group.

Lucky for us, most of the people that come in to audition range from good to really good. There were a couple of weird ones, but they managed to liven up the day rather than put us off. We would like to use most of the people that came in to audition, but we only have a few roles that are available.

For the people that come in and audition: please realize that the process of selecting a cast has to do with your acting ability, but it also has to do with other factors as well. If you didn’t get selected for a part at any audition, don’t take it as a personal attack on your abilities. When putting together a cast, you have to consider a lot of factors, such as how two, three, or four actors will look together, that they’re in the appropriate age ranges to other actors, if one actor can intimidate another, how believable it is that these two would be a couple, how believable it is that these two will be friends, and so on. There’s a bunch of factors that go into putting people into a role other than acting talent.

We have a steady stream of people in and out all day. We try to get them to read more than one role, but based on how behind we’re getting dictates this. All in all it was a good day and we’ve definitely got our hands full in trying to narrow the field for our cast. The day went super silky smooth thanks to all the organization from Bill and Alicia and Alicia’s friend.

Kyle agreed to take the tapes and put them onto DVD so we can watch it later while trying to select the cast.

We run a little late, and scramble to clean the joint up and get to Toronto for the festival, which starts at six. I think it’s about five now. Yeah, we’re going to be late again.