The making of a great film begins with a thought, a thought to an idea, and idea to a concept, and a concept to a storyline. From there, the development of the characters begin to bleed cohesively with the story. The characters become the glue that bonds the audience to the idea that was once a thought. The Choices team had over 50 actors interests within two days, and the idea of having to comb through this massive wave of people seemed daunting. Intimidating couldn't describe the pressure we felt, but once we discussed how we envision of project the idea of selection the perfect cast came a bit easier.
Thank goodness for Google!
To maintain our sanity, the process began with separating the reels, audition tapes, and headshots into categorized files on a google drive. So those from Nija Rivera went to the Beth folder, those from Joey McFadden went into the Eric file, and so on and so forth. During our class time, we kicked off by watching the audition tapes through zoom and discussed their strengths, weaknesses, and whether to not they could be coached into the playing the role if we see potential in their initial table read. We also considered how old do they look in comparison to the character themselves. Then there came a point to discuss the character choices in relation to the actors themselves. This is when we had to discuss whether the actors playing relatives could pass for their role (Caroline & Eric vs. Beth & Joanne). For the only actress that auditioned for Joanne, we agreed that she came across much older than what the role asked for. As a last minute decision, the Choices crew looked at of of the Producer's mother, Gina Vazquez, mother of Kiana-Alexis Salley.
All in all, the crew didn't place too many boundaries on the selection of the cast because everything seemed to changed everyday during the preproduction phase. We focused on how strong were the actors, and how well can they encapsulate the feeling of being tossed between love and career success.
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