Members of the Crew on set for Compulsions

I know I’ve been jumping around in blog topics, but I’m trying to address subjects that can be understood without seeing an episode yet (December 1st!).

Another one of the frequent questions I’m asked is ‘how we put this team together’. The quick answer is that we know people that know people, but really it’s not that simple. It’s true that Cinematographer  Jason Raswant, Production Designer Rachel Payne,  and all the other principals were friends of friends, but you just don’t get them to devote weeks and months on a project as a favor. These are quality crew members that work professionally, doing this is how they make rent, and it’s gonna take a little more than “calling in a friendly favor” to sign on to a project like this. (continue reading…)

Nathan Atkinson directs Seth Caskey and Craig Frank

It’s always good to do as much rehearsal as you can. Alas, many times it just can’t be avoided, sometimes you’re moving so fast in pre-production you barely have enough time to write your lines before going out to roll camera. But in preparing for our show, our team was adamant about doing as much rehearsal as possible.

In the one month we had in between casting and production, we scheduled 3 rehearsal sessions a week. Granted we weren’t calling in our entire cast each time, but it’d be 2-3 of the actors per session.

Why rehearse so much? First off it saves you time and money. When you’re on set you have a team of people working around your actors and director. Plus you have location fees, food, and the lot. Why should all those resources be taxed while the director and actors are trying to work out the characters to each other’s likings and comfort? Let’s get that done in rehearsals, and let’s get it done right.

Secondly, it makes the quality of the story better. When I got to sit in on rehearsals, I was able to hear the lines being said as Nathan and co were going through them. Sometimes I’d hear a line which looked great on the page, but just didn’t sound right spoken by the actor. I would then be able to address the line right then and there, or make a note, digest it, and then come back with revisions a day later. The rehearsal process  made it so that the characters became as much as the actors themselves as the characters were mine. In our show each character is multi-layered, and the key to multi-layered characters is rehearsal

Happy Friday,

When you’re in the final steps in finishing a series Fridays aren’t the relief that most 9-5ers get. They’re just the start of yet another working weekend! Anyway, lets get to today’s topic.

Annemarie Pazmino looks over her lines.

In the early stages of the project I remember having a conversation with Tubefilter’s Marc Hustvedt about the show. He asked me if we were going to cast a bunch of web TV actors for our ensemble. At the time I told him that I didn’t think so, it’s not because we didn’t want to cast Web TV actors, it’s just that we were ‘casting’ a pretty wide net and were going to pick the best person available, web star or not.  So naturally with the sheer number of people that we were having come in to read that weren’t part of the web TV community, I figured the Web Actors would get dwarfed out simply by statistics. It turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong. (continue reading…)

Morning Everyone,

Almost didn’t have time to write this one, but let’s get to it.

Nathan Atkison directs Janna Bossier in Compulsions

John Frankenheimer once said that “Casting is 65 percent of directing”. During our pre-production process our Director Nathan Atkinson would repeatedly recite very similar notions. The idea is that with the right actors you can pull off your characters correctly and give them that realism and believability that’s especially important in a series like ours.

Remember yesterday‘s post about exploring inner evils? Well that’s not something you can properly execute by just handing off roles. Even in our rushed pre-production schedule we made sure to do our due diligence and go through a casting process. Nathan and our Producer Michael Tohl sat through a full two weeks of auditions and callbacks before I got to finally sit in with them and watch tapes. We then sat and discussed for hours before finally nailing down our actors.  The results? An ensemble cast that we are confident will at the very least turn most heads, and at the very most? … you’ll find out for yourselves on December, 1st.

That’s it for today, please feel free to ask questions in the comments below about a specific subject you’d like to see addressed in this blog.

Be sure to sign up on our EMAIL LIST to keep up to date. Hope we get another one off tomorrow.

Hey Everyone,

This our first entry into our creators blog. As we continue to finish up our series we’ll do our best to keep cranking these out for you.

Early in the developmental process, it was important to us creatively to have characters that were human. Normally you think of  “human”  being about having a heart and a soul, and as much as that is true, there is also the dark side of humanity that we as storytellers really want to explore and highlight in our show.

Human’s are inherently selfish. List all the seven sins and almost all humans have crossed every one of them at some point in their lives. Thus we showcase this for all our characters, especially our three leads. No one is truly innocent and  as our director Nathan Atkinson called it… everyone is “different shades of evil.”

Be sure to sign up on our EMAIL LIST to keep up to date as we launch.