Today, for a short trailer we had auditions. In addition to that we got an opportunity to block and rehears a scene that we will be shooting and I am glad we did. The scene we rehearsed was somewhat of a complicated scene for me to set up, so to get together with my Co-Director and Production Manager, who is extremely talented, it was a blessing and a great learning experience. Needless to say we have a very good working idea of how we are going to shoot the scene.
So back to the audition, we made mistakes. First, the audition was set up for 7 hours. This is fine if you are seeing 40 or 50 people that day however we did not. As a matter of fact while I was there we went through 4. Secondly. we did not do was have preselected lines before picked for the actors to read. Instead we were there debating what pages they would read from. We looked rather discombobulated. And we were. It was beginner mistakes. So we learned that we need to be better to be prepared.
I also got the best bit of advice from my Production Manager, which I hadn’t realized, which is when you get the actor in front of you give them direction. You need to set up the scene for them. What is there motivation? What are you looking for out of them? Yes it sounds like a no brainier, but if you never have done it before you might not think of it.
My journey into film 