How do you manage those acting auditions? Here’s part 2 of all the casting call process.
The day of the audition:
- Arrive early.
- Set-up the space
- Camera set-up.
- Brief your ‘assisting’ actor.
- Have your assistant prepare the ‘sides’.
Arrive before the actors!
Set-up
Get to your audition venue and set-up. Clear the space you’re using and make room for your candidates.
Do you have a camera?
It is a great idea to have a camera at the location to record the performances. This is necessary for reminding yourself later of each audition and watching for nuance and insight that you might have missed on the day. Ideally, have someone else operate.
The camera should be static and a wide enough angle to capture full body shots of all the actors involved plus all of their movement. You don’t want close-ups; you should be watching faces with your eyes, not hiding behind a lens. Later on you can review whether the actors are using their bodies well, whether they are stiff, uncomfortable with physical closeness, have ticks etc, all this will be on the camera footage.
Just to add, your location should be lit brightly enough for filming and you should state that the footage shot will not be used for anything other than private viewing, i.e. for purposes of reviewing these auditions.
Having another actor present
If possible get another person, preferably another actor or if not an actor somebody with some life about them, who can read well and put some emotion into it. Don’t get a friend who is afraid to read out loud. It is better not to read yourself as part of your awareness is taken up with conscious processing of the lines and you as the director need to focus on the subtlety of performance.
Having another actor there also helps you to direct the auditionees because you can prime your actor-assistant with instructions to make it different, change their lines, move differently and so on. This is all to see how your candidates adapt and react to new, surprise or subtle changes in direction.
Make notes
Make notes on each audition, marking down your instinctive impressions about the person performing, whether they followed your direction and so on. The most important quality for an actor is being able to “listen” not just to you and your instructions but to the other actor they are working with. Really good actors are always listening which is another way of saying they respond in the moment to what’s happening, they react to the people in their environment. So you could say that you want “reactors” not actors.
The material
Have your assistant hand out the “sides”, which are the one or two pages of material to perform. It would be good, ideal even, to have pages from your own script. The benefit of using your own script is it gives the actors a chance to assess your film for its content, don’t forget they might choose not to do it! Many actors will obviously be looking for good show-reel footage and even if desperate won’t do just anything for the sake of it. Often it is a good idea to use well written, established dialogue material that you’re familiar with. Not that your stuff isn’t well written, I’m sure it is.
(You could send the audition piece to people via email but this only works if everyone gets it. Those that do get it will have more time to work on the lines, if they choose to, whereas some who don’t get it are then put at a disadvantage come the audition. If everyone sees the material for the first time when they arrive then it is a level playing field and more accurate for you to judge.)