Casting My First Show

Hello Cyber World! My name is Susanne Dahl and I am the Casting Director for Res. Life. It is my job to work with Res. Life's Director, Patrick Sullivan, and fill the roles of the script with the type of actors he invisions. Though, I have some previous casting experience I called on a few of the pros at BU including Professor Paul Schneider who has directed several films and TV series including a few episodes of "90210" as well as meeting with the Assistant Director of the School of Theater at BU's College of Fine Arts, Paolo DiFabio (isn't that the most amazing name you have ever heard?) for more direction.

After taking in all their words of wisdom, I set out to cast my first show. Res. Life had a lucky advantage. BU has an incredible School of Theater and were able to find our four leads and some smaller roles from their large pool of talent.

The daunting task was to cast the other featured roles of Res.Life including the mom, dad and 10 year-old sister of the main character, a disgruntled middle-aged sercurity guard and about 10 more college-aged males and females to fill the other RA roles. We posted an open casting call on Craig's List and New England Film. From those two publications, about a dozen other casting websites picked up our posted and added it to their own website. We also designed a flyer through the help of BU's AdClub and contacted our fellow casting directors and acadamia for recommendations. From there, I spent about two weeks scheduling and contacting actors.

We held the open call over a weekend in February and auditioned over 100 actors to fill 13 roles. In the real world, I would have had dozens of eager casting interns to assist me, but since we are a student production, our fablous crew stepped up. Where else are you going to see the DP, producer and head gaffer doing errands, organizing actors, filming auditions and food runs for the casting director. It was kinda great. Not gonna lie:-)

The most interesting (and at times draining) auditionees were the 10 year-old little girls. We had over 30 young actresses walk through our door with each audition lasting about 5 minutes. That doesnt seem like an excessive amount of time, but for a hand full of college students who are used to communicating with their peers and intellectuals (well most of us anyways:-) ) bringing our verbage down to a ten year old's level was quite the challenge. We were amazed by some of these young girls and their enthusiasm for their crafts. Some of them already had more impressive resumes than my own. One little girl even had her own TV show! After going through all 30 girls, we picked Miss Kara Doherty. She is a very sweet and charasmatic girl and we are so excited to have her on set.



By the end of the weekend, I think all of us involved rethought going into the business (a very common experience in this business I've heard). However, I was completely recharged the next week when I notified the actors we chose to cast. They were so excited and greatful. We are still in the process of extras casting which is a little less stressful, but equally important to the overall film.

I think the moment I am most excited for is when I get to see the cast on set for the first time. It will make all the millions of e-mails, runs to Kinkos and meetings completely worth it.