I’ve never done this before. I’ve never produced a film. But recently, together with Grumpy Girl Films, I organized quite a successful casting for Snapped.

I want to share what we did to help out others who are doing it for the first time too. Because being a newbie is not an excuse for a bad casting.

Our main goal was to find suitable actresses for our two leading roles and hopefully a choice of people for the supporting roles. Additionally, we were aiming to make the whole thing a relaxed and pleasurable experience for all involved. We wanted to give everyone a fair chance because the acting part was way more important to us than fulfilling a ridiculous predetermined physical profile. We were willing to consider everything as long as it still made sense for the character. Age, hair colour, figure are all unimportant – if you can’t act, you can’t act. Hollywood already fuels the photoshopped plastic image of impossible humans, we didn’t want to perpetuate this tradition.

First, we set a date. Then we wrote our official casting call. We put a lot of research into it to make it look professional enough to attract actual actors and actresses but still keep it on an indie film kind of level. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not!

At the same time we were looking for a place that would let us use one or two rooms for free. Snapped is a no-budget film and what little money we spend comes from our own pockets. We found help at the MetaLab. They had room and wouldn’t charge us for using their “library” for a whole day. Thank you, Kay! The main room (our waiting area) at the MetaLab has big comfy sofas. Those actors and actresses spend valuable time on preparing for the role they most likely will not get. The least you can do is make them comfortable. Think of them as guests. You wouldn’t make a guest stand while waiting for you. Your mother raised you better than that!

We distributed our casting call via every possible channel available to us. I haven’t had time to look over the data yet but we reached approx. a third of our guests through agencies, a third through social media and another third through other means. I will update this statistics once I have actual numbers.
We asked people to apply for time slots, so we would be able to plan ahead and to avoid long waiting times. Coming without an allotted time slot was allowed but would mean a longer wait.
In the end, we received a lot more applicants than we could possibly handle in a day and had to put people on a waiting list. There went our good intentions to give everyone a chance.

Our time slots were 15 minutes per person. That turned out to be pretty accurate. With some people we only needed 10 minutes or less, but that made it easier to give some people the chance to try one more time. Our schedule was so full that on paper we didn’t have a single break in 9 hours. So what we did was to take very short breaks in between and it somehow worked out just fine. I’m not recommending it though. Schedule breaks!

Send your hopeful applicants their sides ahead of time. The sooner, the better but at least 24h before the casting starts. It will give them a feeling of security if they can come in prepared and it will make your work easier if they can already perform without looking at the text. Don’t expect them to know their lines though. You’re not looking for the person who can memorize lines the fastest, you’re looking for the person who is best at acting!

Prepare a bunch of copies of casting sides and character descriptions. The actors will probably have them but might be happy to pick up a copy if they forgot theirs at home. I also recommend having some sort of information form for actors to fill out. It’s mostly for you to remember them quickly without having to look at the casting videos again. We had a little photo sticker printer and a camera at the reception desk, so we could put a picture on these forms too.

Set up your casting room well ahead of time, you are on a tight schedule, but you don’t have to seem like it because you couldn’t get up on time. Brief your receptionist and your line reader, check if your camera works and that the light is ok. Make sure your chair doesn’t squeak and your phone is on silent.

Then you’re ready to go and ask the first person in!

It ‘s on! We’re ready to find the perfect cast for our short film “Snapped”.

It doesn’t matter if you are an aspiring actor/actress, a hobby-thespian or an international superstar – we will give everyone at least a chance! The actual casting information is here. It is in German because the film is shot in German.

If you are not comfortable in front of the camera you can still help us by spreading the word. Share the link with your friends (perhaps your cousin’s brother has a wife with a sister who is interested) or maybe even download the pdf-file and pin it to a pinboard near you. You will have our undying gratitude.

Additionally, we are looking for a couple of crew members and I’ll be posting more information on that very soon. So check back or subscribe to the RSS feed.

I’m terribly excited about this project, I hope you are too.

xx
Finn

This week Sherlock (the BBC series) premiered its season 2 with A Scandal in Belgravia. I have been watching series 1 and have thoroughly enjoyed it, except for the minor hiccup which is that Steven Moffat (and his team, but since he is the big shot he has final say on stuff) does not know how to write women that don’t succumb to the well known clichés used for depicting women in TV and Film. I already knew that going in or to be fair I assumed that his writing women on Sherlock wouldn’t much differ from his writing women on Doctor Who, especially since the source material stems from times in which women didn’t even have the right to own property, or study something that they wanted. I suggest you read “A Scandal in Bohemia”. It’s short, entertaining and even if you’ve seen the TV episode you won’t be spoiled about the ending, because it’s nothing like that. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Moffat’s writing has been discussed ad infinitum online. Just google it. I enjoy his shows as much as the next fangirl but I cringe whenever the woman (and it’s mostly just one) gets to fulfill her plot point in his brilliant storylines. People have called Sherlock sexist, misogynist and many other things. I’ll try to go the other way. I’ll say Moffat’s writing is very androcentric. It focuses on the male point of view and reaffirms the existing status of men in society. He recreates existing power structures by employing TV tropes and by gloriously failing the Bechdel test, which I’m very critical of (Yes, I just ended that sentence with a preposition, deal with it).

I was looking forward to the TV version of “A Scandal in Bohemia”, because finally there would be a big female character that would show Sherlock that he is not invincible. But what they did with her was a gross distortion of her Victorian self.

Adler had to be gay because apparently only a lesbian dominatrix would be a good equivalent to a Victorian prostitute. But then again, we all know that lesbians are ugly hags who couldn’t get a man and since Adler is presented as a beautiful woman she can’t be serious about her gayness and falls for the irresistable Sherlock; who apparently failed biology. Dilated pupils and an elevated pulse can be symptoms of arousal, excitement, fear, drug use, poisoning, strokes and brain tumors amongst other things.
It seems to me that Adler being gay was to satisfy teen boy fantasies. But I will gladly refute that argument if you show me the stuff that was left on the cutting room floor. You know, the material that proves that they were indeed trying to point out that sexuality is fluid while hunting for photographs of what can only be Kate Middleton chained to Adler’s bed by pink fluffy cuffs.

But as it turns out our modern Adler has lost much of her wit. She went and asked the big bad man, Moriarty, for help on how to play Sherlock, because god forbid she would be clever enough to do that on her own. While her Victorian self was able to outsmart Holmes, modern Adler needs him to rescue her. Well, I guess that’s what you get for being a clever, independent woman playing with the big boys.

Now, of course, one could start arguing that the men on the show get treated disrespectfully by Sherlock too and that some of them even need his rescuing capabilities. But this is beside the point, because they also get to be the hero. I would not be writing this if the scales weren’t so horribly tilted.

The importance of entertainment media in our societal evolution grows steadily. What we see on TV we try to copy. To make it painfully simple, if malestream media shows you a rich, good looking guy in a Ferrari you will want to be that guy. If the guy became what he is by suppressing others we will think that this is just what we have to do to get there. And please refrain from telling me it’s not true. If it weren’t, commercials wouldn’t work.

So seeing the same stereotypes of women on TV will eventually lead us to a place where we forget that things can be different. Damsels in distress, the sexual predator, the chaste little girl, the asexual caretaker. Those are roles that in their various disguises women are allowed to fill. On and off screen. (For more on the role of women as virgin/whore read this)

Feminists pointing out that popular shows like Sherlock could easily nudge the status quo to change are not angry man-haters, who couldn’t get laid. They don’t project their fears on others, they are not trying to overpower anyone. They are asking for fairness and equality. I find it sad that young, intelligent women and men don’t seem to get that.

It is about equality, not about taking away someone’s rights.