It’s been nothing but casting, casting, casting lately. I started the casting process by going for some television actors and making calls to their agents. After that failed I posted a breakdown on breakdownexpress.com. The cool thing about that website is that it only release to managers and agents. So it’s a step up from Backstage or Craigslist where you have tons and tons of actors hitting you up.
Breakdown Express is really clean and you get pretty legitimate actors. Anyway, I did run into one snag with it and that’s the whole SAG thing… Some of these actors won’t work non-union. So I had the choice of getting a SAG Short Film Agreement (and possibly increasing the talent pool of actor’s submissions) or sticking non-union. And, in the end, I’m going to stay non-union. I found six actors I really liked on Breakdown Express.
After that, I decided that six actors wasn’t enough (to fill the 3 roles). Some of them might not end up working out for multiple reasons. So I released the breakdown on Backstage Casting as well. This releases to the actors. I got about 200 submissions to sort through and narrowed that down to about 15 more actors. That took a lot of time.
I reserved a room at the Space Station in Hollywood for Sat. Aug 22 and I’ll have a line-up of around 15-20 actors to choose from…if I can’t find 3 out of that I won’t know what to do! I’ve never held a casting so this should be interesting…
Besides casting, I spoke to the owner of the barbershop in Orange County and he agreed to let us shoot at this establishment. And that went amazingly smooth. He was enthusiastic about it.
A friend of mine that I used to work with, Ryan Strong, offered to do the artwork for me. He’s a great graphic designer and photographer. You can see his stuff at http://www.ryanstrong.net/.
And lastly, my friend Zack Weber (who I’m shooting some music videos for in September) has been actively promoting my film in New York and helping find investors and fans alike. So that’s been a great help!
I’m excited because I’m done with my editing job at MTV in less than a week and I can devote my free time to storyboards and shot lists. That’s the most exciting time for a director in pre-production (at least to me)!
