Casting complete

So we began our scheduled auditions yesterday and finished them up earlier today. It went really well: a lot more people auditioned than I thought would and everyone was really great. The tough part was narrowing down our choices.

Jordan brought his camera and we recorded all the entrees on film, which we reviewed later. The initial auditions had actors performing a series of silent behaviors (i.e. escape from a room with no doors or windows) which they had time to review beforehand. After careful consideration, we decided we would have callbacks for a select four.

For the callbacks we had them all come in (there were 2 girls and 2 guys) and perform together, switching up partners halfway through. We came up with the idea to play a fun improv game with them: we prepared two slips of paper, one for each actor, and each slip had a certain objective written on it that the actor must perform regardless of the other actor's behavior; for example, one slip might say "You are trying to get the person next to you to dance" while the other slip would say "You are trying to sleep". Once we felt the scene had played out, we would simultaneously throw new slips out to them which they then adopted. We had them also do all of this silently; we are aware of the intense irony of this game, by the way. We ended up choosing Neal and Natalie, two Juniors.

- Pete