Creating the Third Age: Casting

Last time, I discussed the process that led me to begin The Third Age project. By October, we had a couple of episodes scripted, the whole story mapped out, but no one to play the roles. It was time to cast.

Casting in the pre-Internet days for a project like this would have been a major issue; you could either take out an ad in a trade magazine, or just use your friends. A word of advice — don’t use your friends for major roles unless they’re actually actors. Even if they’re “just like” the character, it’s hard to bring that energy on camera.

Luckily, the whole casting process has changed with the Internet. I was working on a shoot a few years ago and one of the actors told me about the site New York Castings. It’s a free site, where you can post ads for actors. I posted an ad for my film, The Perfect Dose, and was shocked when I got a deluge of responses. Considering this was a no-pay thing, I was hoping just to get enough people to fill out the cast, but I got over one hundred responses.

I did the same for this project, and got a similarly huge number of responses. From here, my co-director Jordan and I combed through the listings to figure out who we wanted to have audition. I’m not proud to say that this selection is based primarily on looks. As an actor, your head shot is gold; that’s changing a bit with online reels, but a good headshot gets you in the door. I’ve had a bunch of cases where someone comes in and looks nothing like the headshot. Maybe that’s disingenuous, but the goal is to get in the door; your talent will get you cast, your headshot will get you to the people you need to see.

We sent out e-mails to about fifty people, and saw about thirty people on a Saturday afternoon. My friend Alex, an actor, came in to read opposite the actors. Previously, either Jordan or I had read opposite the actor, and that doesn’t work so well. You become more focused on your own performance than observing the actor. But, having the same consistent read for everyone gives you an idea of what they can do. Alex is in the film as well, playing Mark, so it was a nice chance to see what he could do.

It was pretty crazy to have all these people show up to read for our film, to hear the words I’d written spoken by so many people. I love to talk with the actors after, get an idea about the person as well as the performance. We’re going to be spending a lot of time with these people, so it’s good to be compatible with them. But, just because you like the person doesn’t mean they should get the role. There was one guy, he had an amazing head shot and was practically cast before he came in the door. We talked for five minutes before the audition, about Deadwood, about his headshot, all kinds of stuff. I loved the guy, but then he read and just didn’t do it at all. So, we couldn’t cast him.

Most of the people were good, not great. It’s definitely tough to read for an audition, I’m sure there’s some great actors who don’t do cold reads well, but seeing so many people reading the parts make you notice more when someone jumps out. All the people we cast, with one exception, were easy, no-question choices. And, they’ve all been working out really well so far, which is lucky. On the aforementioned Perfect Dose, there was the combination of actors who weren’t quite on the wavelength we needed and some poor direction/writing from myself hurting the film. It was pretty intimidating to work with pro actors for the first time, but now I’m much more on top of it and did a better job of picking the right people.

Here’s who we chose for the various roles.

Chris Zinone is the closest thing the story has to a main character, a ‘white collar’ drug dealer who’s none too happy with the direction of his life. In the writing, we called him the ‘Han Solo’ character, and in casting, we wanted someone who could match that sort of energy. e ended up casting Brian Townes, who nailed the audition and had a lot of smooth charm that matched the character. As shooting has gone on, the character’s changed a bit. Originally, he was going to be a low level chaos magician, but we dropped that part of the character.

Morning is a damaged woman with great power. She’s an otherworldly character, and that proved a challenge for many of the people auditioning. We got a lot of robotic delivery, and a few William Shatners when people read for her. Admittedly, it was really tough to make right, and I was starting to get a bit down on the script. Then, Misti Garritano walked in and totally killed it; she made me believe the character, and that’s essential for a sci-fi piece like this. If we hadn’t found her, I don’t know if the piece would hang together like it’s been doing.

Jerrod is the head of Wolf Pharmecutical, the research organization that’s also involved in some decidedly otherworldly things. For this role, we got a wide variety of reads. There were some really intense people, some very laid back. The scene he was reading was an interview, and one guy - who we dubbed “crazy guy” - was barely reading the lines, he was just grilling the interviewee like a mad man. I’m hoping to get him in there at some point, but he was not cast. Another guy read the role in what was pretty much a Jack Nicholson impression; he didn’t get it either. We went with Ted Spencer, who brought a mix of sinister and fatherly charm to the character.

The final character we cast that day was Sophie, the interviewee in the aforementioned scene. We came up with a monologue for this audition, and it seemed to be the piece that the actors most took to. I think it’s tough sometimes to relate to genre material, particularly when you’re sitting in an office, far away from the context of the film. So, we had a lot of great reads on this, in a variety of styles. A lot of the people felt a bit too actor-y; it was more a performance of the lines than in an immersion in the character. But Dina Cataldi did a great job and scored the role.

One of the things I really like about doing the webseries, as opposed to a single film, is the ability to tailor the character to the actor in the writing. I know what these people bring to their characters, and a lot of the time on set, they’ll talk about motivations that fit perfectly, but I wasn’t even considering. It’s more of a split custody thing than a simple ownership by the writer. I like that, I like letting actors do their own thing with a role because it makes them feel more like individuals, not products of the same mind.

The tough thing about auditions is we saw a lot of great people who didn’t do anything wrong, who would be good at the role, but wouldn’t be the best. I’m more used to being on the other side of the desk, interviewing for something and not getting it. And, I probably didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just when there’s thirty people reading for four roles, you’ve got to be better than good, you have to be the best.

It always makes me feel like a real director when I do the casting. It’s tough in the indie world to keep going, uncertain of whether anyone will ever see this film that you’re sinking so much time into. But, the fact that so many people came out to audition for the project is vindication.

Next time, I’ll discuss the first few days of filming, some lessons learned and some strange things that happened.

Milton

An Update on The Third Age

The blog may be called "The Third Age Begins," but we're sure taking our time getting to that beginning part. There's a number of reasons for that. The primary one is my desire to have a bunch of material in the can before we start releasing it. Both Jordan and I work full time, so it's going to be tough to do even five minutes of content every other week, and, now each episode is coming in longer than five minutes, so there's a lot to process.

So, I'm hoping to have four episodes completely done before we go live with one, that way we'll be able to keep up the biweekly release pace until the first Volume of the series is complete. The series is structured in three volumes, of about ten episodes each. There'll be a month or two break between each volume to let us get ahead of the release schedule again.

The good news is, almost all the first four episodes are shot. We're shooting the last of those episode next Sunday. Almost everything that's been shot has been edited, there are twenty-one edited minutes, and another five or so that have been shot, but not edited yet. We may end up restructuring the episodes a bit since they're coming out closer to ten minutes than five, but we'll see. Ten minutes would certainly be a more substantial viewing experience, but keeping up that release pace would be near impossible.

We shot some great stuff last weekend, three scenes. One featured Jerrod Wolf, the head of a pharmaceutical company which features heavily in one side of the plot. The other two scenes focused on Christopher Zinone. As the film begins, he is a 'white collar' drug dealer, disappointed and bored with his life. So, there's a couple of scenes depicting his daily routine. We shot one of the scenes outside a laundromat in Park Slope and it was a fantastic location. The glowing lights against the dark of the night reminded me of a Wong Kar-Wai film, and he's pretty much the standard as far as visuals go. I can only hope to even approach what he can do.

When will the series actually premiere? I'm thinking April will give us enough lead time, perhaps tied into the New York Comicon. I won't have a booth or anything there, but it could be a good spot to pass out some fliers and hopefully get some chatter going about the series.

Morning

Creating The Third Age: Part I: The Spark of An Idea

Our history begins now, with the current status of The Third Age. Right now, we are two days away from having all the material for the first four episodes of The Third Age. That is what is currently scripted. Everything that’s shot has been edited, so once these final pieces are shot, I’ll edit the rest together, cut everything into episode form and send it off to be scored. What that means is we can expect the premiere of the series in late March. I want to wait until there’s four episodes in the can, so we won’t have any delays once the series starts coming out.

It would probably be more interesting to hear all this after you’ve seen the first couple of episodes and have an idea of what the series is. However, I’m going to do my best to tell the behind the scenes story of The Third Age to date, without spoiling major plot points.

People say that every story begins with an idea, a spark of inspiration. I don’t know if that’s how it works for me, there’s usually not a spark, there’s a coalescence of images and moments in my brain. The first thing I saw on this project was a closeup on a woman’s face emerging in a series of brilliant flashbulbs. She was an operative from another dimension fighting for freedom, bringing change to our world. But, what world did she live in, and what brought her here? These are questions that floated around in my brain for a while, until I presented the idea to my friends Jordan Rennert and Steve Deluca.

We’ve known each other for years, and have worked on a number of films together. Hit up www.respectfilms.com for a full history of our past work. We went to high school together, and there, we always wanted to do film projects, but rarely wound up doing anything. However, Jordan and I have done a whole bunch of projects over the past five years or so, and now that we had both graduated, we had the opportunity to take on something bigger and more expansive than was possible before.

During the summer, we’d sit out on Steve’s porch and talk about ideas. It was a non-linear conceptual discussion that frequently strayed from the story into various aspects of our own lives, our memories and also the then airing TV series, John From Cincinnati. Though it’s less overt now than it was then, the DNA of John is ingrained on this project, it feels like a work that takes place in the same universe as Milch’s series.

What I loved about Milch’s series was the fact that he has all manner of crazy sci-fi concepts in the work, but doesn’t treat it as sci-fi, it’s just something that happens to people. Even as a huge fan of the genre, I can understand why people have issue with sci-fi. There’s frequently a distance from real emotion, an emphasis on cool concepts and action over characters. John is a very character centered show, and I’m hoping that The Third Age will feel the same way. Our structuring point in terms of the narrative isn’t so much a plot as it is the various character arcs, following these peoples’ lives and finding interesting ways for them to interact with each other.

The way we work, there’s not a clear line between real life and the movie. Discussion flows all around, and out of various tangents and digressions, a story slowly emerged, raw ideas evolved into specific charcters who got names and backstories as we went on. ‘Girl God’ became Morning, ‘The Han Solo character’ become Zinone, ‘Scientist leader guy’ became Jerrod, this was the process.

As we talked about the story, it became clear that it was a pretty big tale, at least feature film length. Looking at a project so large, I began to think about ways to make the project work. I didn’t want to labor for a year with no finished product. I also realized that most of the people who see my movies watch them on the web, so why not run with that? I came up with the concept of the webseries, serializing the work online in a series of five minute episodes and then putting out a collected feature version at the end.

With this structure in place, the project became a bit more manageable. It’s still a huge thing, but it’s easier to conceive when it’s broken up into episodes. The webseries concept gave a jumping off point, and by the end of the summer, we had a pretty solid conception of the whole story, as well as the various characters involved. But, there was still more work to do.

Next time, I’ll discuss our casting process, the character who fell out of the story and the process of creating the first scripts.

The Morning Teaser

Here's another teaser, this one focusing on Morning. She is a woman removed from reality. Inside her mind there is a world of secrets.



Download

What is The Third Age?

"The old age believed in magic, this age believes in science, but we are on the precipice of a third age, a fusion of everything that's come before." - Jerrod

The Third Age is a webseries about an ensemble of characters caught up in this fusion of magic and science, of people on the frontlines of the war to shape humanity's future. It begins with a ritual, the calling down of a spirit into a man, and from there goes on to chronicle an ever expanding web of lives caught up in a battle between gods.

The series is masterminded by me, Patrick Meaney, and Jordan Rennert. Our goal is to tell a story that uses science fiction as a way to explore the world we live in, and the conflicts that everyone faces. The gods in the story represent eternal forces that change humanity, progress, stasis, imprisonment and freedom. The story isn't so much about the larger conflict as it is about the individual lives affected in its wake.

Throw the RSS feed for this blog in your feed reader to stay updated on the progress of the project. Each episode of the series will be about five minutes, and a new one will be posted every two weeks. They'll be available as direct downloads, and on Youtube. It will run about a year before wrapping up the story.

We've shot about four episodes of material, but it's still being processed. For now, enjoy this teaser, focusing on Milton, the entrapped spirit. The Youtube is available for easy viewing, but download it if you want higher quality.



Higher Quality Download

The Official Third Age Site