Casting may be the most important aspect of your spot. You might have the best camera, secured an incredible location, and combed through hours of music to find the perfect song, but if your cast can’t convey a lasting message within 60, 30, or 15-seconds, your spot has failed.
I’m no expert at the casting process, but Marc from our new Community Resource partner Casting Frontier is! Check out his top ten tips and best practices below:
Contrary to popular belief, actors are not (always) desperate to be in your project. You want the best actors, don’t you? Great actors don’t struggle to find work. Work finds them.
Here are some general guidelines to assist anyone that wants the best cast they can get for their project:
1. You’re not really a producer until you’ve told some of your friends that they didn’t get the part. A little healthy competition could go a long way in getting the best talent. Don’t just give roles away to your friends. Make them earn their roles!
2. Get a casting director. Many of them will cast a commercial or short film to mentor a young filmmaker; otherwise casting associates and assistants would love a casting director credit.
3. Take advantage of CF Cast (aka self-tape auditions) for all types of roles and projects. If you’re short on time and/or budget, choosing to allow talent to submit self-tape auditions can help quickly identify those actors to bring in for in-person auditions.
4. Use Casting Frontier’s Cloud View to see a talent’s true look. Actors are notorious for using old headshots to try to get work. With Cloud View, you will see the actor’s most recent polaroid that will give a much better idea of what that actor actually looks like.
5. Auditions are your first impression; make a good one. Actors want to see that the people running the production know what they’re doing. Be confident and think ahead about the questions that may come up about the script, the characters and the scenes.
6. When you call actors in to an audition, provide them with the entire script. Sides are a common option, but if you want actors to do their best, give them all the tools. “No script” will seem like it’s a bad script.
7. Only hold callbacks if you need to hold callbacks. Justify this with a new script/sides or by pairing the actors up to check for chemistry. Don’t just call actors back because you are indecisive.
8. There are plenty of perks for actors that do not cost a dime. A nice billing, a serious commitment to delivering back-end profit participation, or something as simple as a contractual agreement to deliver footage to an actor in a timely manner will express you plan to have a long-term relationship with them.
9. Don’t let your actors act hangry! Provide nutritious meals and have plenty of water on hand.
10. You want your cast to have a quiet space so they can be at their best. Hopefully, you haven’t cast an actor that expects a trailer, but a private room is a big gesture that will go a long way...
There are many ways to complicate the casting process. Use these guidelines and you can avoid most of them.
Post free casting calls for your projects anytime at Casting Frontier.
