Actors?

Brandon Rice

Brandon Rice

Distributed Producer
Where did most of you all acquire acting talent? Auditions? People you knew? Just curious. For us, we knew a lot of pretty good actors, so we cast those people. I think everyone except one person had some former acting experience in movies, and TV. All of them have multiple credits on IMDB, save one. I have to do auditions for my next short, so I was happy to skip that process this time around. What did you all do??
 
Well, I had just wrapped shooting on a feature in Summer of '05, so I was doing post production when Sci-Fest was announced. I called up most of the cast from the feature and pitched the idea to them and they were gung-ho, so casting for Sci-Fest took about 5 minutes. For the previous feature it was a combination of colaborators / people I know / auditions. Some had previous experience, some didn't.
 
Craig's List, then an audition ... had three female roles to fill, with only one female showing up to the audition ... and we weren't impressed. So we had to start from scratch for the female roles & a well known talent agency in the area came to our rescue & provided all of our female talent, who also all happened to be SAG.
 
I just used craigs list as well to cast a film. I had the ad up for 3 days, got 45 applicants and took it down. I held auditions for 16 people, 15 showed up, and 10 of those people were phenominal actors. It made our decision very tough but it's better to have too many good actors than not enough. I guess it just depends where you live, but the seattle craigs list is great for finding actors.
 
people I've worked with in theatre and taught in acting classes.

I usually get an idea, already imagining so and so actor in it, then before i go nuts writing the thing, I see if they are available/interested and then I write it for them.
 
ditto on the theater connections. My college doesn't have a film program, so ears perk up when I mention moviemaking. Auditions rarely work in this small town, though, so I go see the shows and make it a point to remember how people performed.

Though, now that I think about it, only one of my actors is actually a theater major, and she's unforunately been chopped pretty hard from the sci-fest version. The others were just friends of mine. And the actor that nailed his line delivery every time was a graphics design major I believe.

I looked around craigslist for a little while, but I couldn't find a category that I'd post a casting announcement in.... where'd you post yours?
 
Find the town in your area, otherwise I think it defaults for SanFran ... then, look under employment, under what I think is listed as "GIGS" ... then post it under TALENT.
 
Going to school in small town Louisiana, Casting usually doesn't mean you have a choice. My tactic was to approach the most talented acting individuals that I know from the area. I got a graduate from the theatre program, a political science alumni from the college, and a theatre/music major.

They all did really well, and volunteered their time. Great cast and we had a lot of fun. This was the easiest way for me to go about it.

But I would suggest if you are in the southern central U.S. <www.austinactors.net> I used it for a short I did last summer and cast in Austin- and the response was awesome somethign like 60 or so decent auditions. And when you wave a little potential money at some of the actors I'm sure you could get even more interest.
 
For me I cast it with actors I know from theatre, referrals, and some unexperienced people. The problem was that everything went wrong with people quitting and us losing all of our locations so essentially our whole submission (which we're finishing filming on Saturday) was written on the fly and directed by committee... Talk about collabrative chaos.
 
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