As I hope you know by now @vachemorte and I will be releasing our film as a series on Steemit on January 8th. This is part 2 of my blog series where I talk about the process.
After the script was all said and done (see part 1) we sat on it for a little while. We knew that filming The Juju Gum Conspiracy with little to no budget and only the two of us would be a huge undertaking. We discussed various plans but for a while actually making the movie seemed like a pipe dream.
@vachemorte tends to have a few weeks off for summer vacation every year so in the spring of 2014 we made a decision that would set everything else in motion. We would start filming at the end of summer.
The next step was... you guessed it! Casting.
Process
Now we had a few friends that dad already done some acting gigs so we wrote some of the characters with them in mind. But the script called for around 80 people. Our first hurdle was figuring out how to do this casting, we had never done one of this magnitude.
Our plan was a classic in the independent film industry.... Craigslist/Kijiji.
We put up an open casting call for actors with speaking roles and background, come one come all. We also had a browse through Model Mayhem where some actors had profiles and put up a casting there as well.
The day of the casting finally came, we had cameras all set up, lines to give people and a plan for attack. Here was our process:
We meet the actor and chat for a few minutes about their experience. We asked them if they wanted a speaking/background role, if they wanted a speaking role we quickly assessed which character we thought they would fit and gave them some lines and let them go back to the waiting area for a few minutes to practice.
If they didn't fit a character we would just improv with them a little bit. We had two games for this. The first was sell us this toothbrush. We gave them an unopened toothbrush and said give us your best sales pitch. The second game was don't touch this. We told them to imagine we were trying to steal one of their possessions and to improv on how they would react.
If they didn't want a speaking role we usually just spoke for a few minutes and got some footage of them for visuals (we have a lot of this but to keep things short I didn't include it.)
When we opened the doors quite a few people were there already and all in all that first day we saw around 100 people!
We did a few more castings over the next weeks for people who weren't able to come on the initial casting as well.
The entire experience was surreal. We got to see our characters come to life for the first time. Some of the actors took the characters to places we didn't expect and our film really started to feel tangible.
I have prepared a short film with some casting reel to give you a demonstration of what the process was like. Not everyone we saw is in here, for brevity's sake. Most of the audio is from the camera and the footage is mostly raw.
Casting Chaos
running time: 10 minutes
We will be releasing the film as a web series here on Steemit starting January 8 2018 over at @vachemorte! For more details see the announcement here and just in case you haven't seen the trailer yet:
Join me again next week for Part 3!
