Out of the roughly 500 submissions we’ve received for the roles of the film, we’ve called in roughly 60 actors for an audition.

During our first auditions we’re looking for the following:

1. Professionalism
2. Presence / charisma (as it relates to our character)
3. Physicality (as it relates to our character)
4. Ability to take direction
5. Connection to the script / character
6. Ability to LISTEN and naturally respond to the other characters and not simply recite their lines as a stand alone component to the script. We want to see genuine interaction.

Essentially we’re looking for 2-3 good fits for each character. Once we have a few candidates we’ll call the actors back in for a second audition (known as a “callback”) and we’ll start working with the actors in a group environment in a quest to build towards our final cast.

During our call-backs we’ll be more focused on analyzing the actor’s ability to relate to the other characters and the story.  We’ll also get to see the strongest actors from our initial auditions compete for their roles within one day which will leave their performances fresh in our minds and provide us with the best opportunity to visualize our potential cast.

How to test an actor’s ability to take direction

During our first audition we’re giving our actors “adjustments”. By using adjustments we’re testing our actor’s ability to take direction. This is especially important to independent filmmakers who often work within very short time lines. We may only secure some of our locations for a few hours. We need to come in, set up, get our shots and move on. We can’t afford doing 20 takes. The actors need to be able to understand the scene and communicate that on camera as quickly and effectively as possible. If they don’t give a strong performance then direction is necessary to help guide them towards a stronger understanding of the scene.

The better an actor is at taking direction, the quicker we can move on to our next location. This is why it’s important to test actor’s ability to take direction during the audition process. We’ll likely already be doing 12 – 16 hour days, we won’t have the time to struggle endlessly through a scene.

Adjustments can come in many different forms. It’s common to use adjustments using “what if” or “it’s as if” scenarios. However, for the sake of our auditions we’re using active verbs to adjust our actor’s performances. During rehearsals and filming, direction will take many different shapes depending on the relationship between the actor and director. Every actor responds differently to direction and it’s a director’s job to figure out how to best communicate with their actors. Sometimes it will be with words, sometimes it will be through discussing back-story, sometimes it will require emotional “replacements” & sometimes it will be through the use of images.

I prefer to communicate using detailed back-story. I feel that if the actor understands their emotional arc up until a particular point, as well as have a deep understanding of their relationships to the other characters, then they will be able to intelligently approach a scene.

If their performance was either technically weak or contrasted the overall tone of the film, then it’s the director’s responsibility to adjust the performance.

As discussed above, there are many ways to do this. However, for the sake of brevity let’s examine the use of words and specifically verbs as a directorial tool.

Before we get into the next part of the post let’s do a quick English refresher:

A NOUN is a person, place or thing
A VERB is an action word
An ADJECTIVE is a describing word

A director’s “go to” tools are their action verbs. Bold action verbs allow a director to communicate a character’s relationship to something or someone else. Directing is about taking the actor’s attention off of themselves and allowing them to understand their relationships to ideas, things, places and people. If they properly understand their relationships then their response will be “correct”. It may not be what the director anticipated, but the response will be honest. If a director focuses on a response rather than a relationship the actor is likely to provide a mechanical response to what they think either a director or an audience is looking for. This creates “dead spots” in your story. The actor engages in little mannerisms that they think the audience is looking for rather than honestly engaging in a scene. This is called “result driven direction” and it’s used by directors who are trying to make their actors force a feeling they want their film’s audience to feel. This is why direction such as “be sad”, “be happy”, “be mad”, “be angry” all lead to 2 dimensional acting.  As does calibrating an actors emotional levels. Telling an actor to be more sad, more less angry etc, doesn’t’ help establish a relationship to anything meaningful. Simply trying to turn up or turn down the actor’s emotions will have very little impact on the emotional fabric of a scene.

Instead, Directors need to look to active verbs.

What is an active verb?

An active verb is found in sentences that have something “doing” an action and something “receiving” an action. The thing doing the action is the subject and the thing receiving the action is the object.

[Thing doing action] + [verb] + [thing receiving action]
subject                           verb                      object
The producer              berates                the actors

Action verbs give the actors something to relate the direction to. It gives the actor “context” while at the same time being open ended enough to give freedom of interpretation. For example, if you want your actor to be “mad” you might give them the direction to “blame”. This helps put their concern on the other actor (rather than themselves) and it will likely lead to a more honest interpretation of their “being mad”.

Other active verbs include:

Clarify, justify, accuse, seduce, blame, punish, shame, scold, reprimand, condemn, berate, attack, menace, surrender, badger, browbeat, bully, intimidate, coerce, suppress, deflect, teach, challenge, arouse, assure, apologize, flatter, forgive, confront, provoke, dare, support, cheer,  torment, warn, admonish, threaten, remind, ridicule, console, appease, suffocate, cooperate, mock and the list goes on.

At the end of the day there is no one right way to direct. It’s important that you develop trust with your actors. You need to respect one another and have trust in one another’s abilities and vision.

I’ll paraphrase a line  from a book written by “Judith Weston” entitled “The Film Director’s Intuition”

“The director is the guardian of the story; the actor is the guardian of the moment”

It’s important for a director to respect the unique character interpretation of an actor while at the same time the actor must understand that the director has clarity for the overall vision of the film. An actor must respect that a director is looking out for the heart of their story. If an actor gives a performance that a director feels either contradicts or doesn’t quite fit into the story, then an actor must trust that a director’s involvement in a scene is for the betterment of the story as a whole.

But there are many technical things directors are not supposed to do which I find myself continuously experimenting with. For instance, you’ll often hear that directors are not supposed to intellectualize a character’s psychology or micro-manage their physical details.

However, I’ve found I’ve been able to get much better performances with some actors when I experiment with these methods a little bit. This just goes to show, there are no right ways. The rules should be studied and understood, but a director’s main concern is working towards the strongest performances and best visuals possible. As a director you’re allowed to do whatever you need to do to see your vision materialize.

Due to the nature of their relationship; a dependency is created which is shown by physical attachments, interconnectedness and weight sharing.

The film then explores two different scenarios. Once the codependency is created, both characters become vulnerable yet strong and work together to create something beautiful. The direction changes however when the stronger character abuses their power. The result is destruction, violence and self abuse.

We’ve also used this short as an opportunity to introduce audiences to parts of dancers that they don’t normally get an opportunity to see in a live performance. By moving the camera close to the dancers the the audience can see the dancer as human rather than a disconnected visual object. We’ve done this by showing the small details such as blinking, pulses, breathing, reaction and smaller body parts such as the spinal chord, neck, collar bone, ribs and wrists.

Starring: Caitlin Griffin, Danielle Gardner & Monique Constant

Enjoy.

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How to audition
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*** See the behind the scenes of this video shoot here****

We recently shot the music for the Two Fingers Song “Keman Rhythm”. The song is lryicless, so it really allowed us to interpret the song however we wished.

The song sounds combative and tense, so I knew what I was working with in terms of the tone of the video. But it took some time for me to come up with a story. I tested two different ideas, but ended up scraping them both. That’s when I stumbled upon a book.

I was given a series of essays by Normal Manea. When I opened the book “On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist” there were some scribbles on the first blank page. The book was given as a gift and the sender wrote out a Pier Paolo Pasolini poem as a note in the front. The part of the poem that’s quoted was.

Pasolini quote

Intelligence will never have much value
in the collective judgment of this public’s opinion.
Not even the blood of concentration camps
could draw from a million of our nation’s souls
a clear judgment of pure indignation.
Each idea is unreal, every passion unreal,
in a people who lost their unity centuries ago
and use their gentle wisdom
only to survive, and not to gain freedom.
To show my face – my leanness -
to raise a single, childlike voice,
makes sense no longer. Cowardice accustoms us
to seeing others die atrociously,
locked in the strangest indifference.
So I die, and this too causes me pain.

This theme of indifference stuck with me. I just watched the film  by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne called “L’enfant” (The Child) which also explores the issue of a lost and indifferent generation. So now I had my idea and tone, but how was I going to communicate it.

What I decided to do was to respond to the Pasolini poem above as it relates to the sounds of the song. So I wrote this:

What value do words have?
I’ve yelled “never again” too many times now.
Lacking an audience my words became  less  real, less focused.
I was only able to articulate  need,  not ideas.
In the absence of a  listener I retreated to study new words.
In the crowd I emerged more compassionate and angrier than ever before.
We were  the rebellious voices of dissent.
Our collective chant is the sound you hear now.
A bottomless war cry.
The  sound of pure & passionate  indignation.
But our chants were  as  different as we were. Our demands for “freedom”, “justice”, “power”,      “help” all layered  on top  of  one  another and  became  entangled and deformed.
What words lost  in their definition was rediscovered in their collective vibration.
A new word was born.
Angry, rhythmic  and distorted.
But they couldn’t  understand us.
I will not whisper.
Volume is the ammunition of communication.

… So I whispered “Fuck that. I refuse to be indifferent”.

I chose this idea because it allowed us to play with the deep vibrations of the song. As the deep bass of the song is introduced the text across the screen reads:

But our chants were  as  different as we were. Our demands for “freedom”, “justice”, “power”, “help” all layered  on top  of  one  another and  became  entangled and deformed.
What words lost in their definition was rediscovered in their collective vibration.

The idea, is to communicate that this sound is the sound of layered protest. But as the more layered the words of protest become, the less identifiable the demands are. All that is left is a sound. Interestingly enough, that sound still embodies the main tone of the ideas of the collective. The layered voices become indistingishible from one another but nevertheless still sound angry.

The baseline therefore becomes a word. It communicates all of the demands of the protesters at one time. The sound embodies all of their wishes.

But this new word isn’t understood by the powers that be. If everybody whispered the sound, or took turns speaking, it would be less distorted and possibly understandable, but as our narrator points out

Volume is the ammunition of communication.

Therefore, they refuse to whisper.

The song ends with the narrator “giving in” and whispering “Fuck that. I refuse to be indifferent”.

The music video is a modern day response to the Passolini poem found above.

As the video scrolls across from left to right we see angry, scared, tortured and helpless faces intermixed with photographs of representatives of the state. The video ends on the face of indifference.

Enjoy the video.

Toby Benson (MySpace), a London native, but now residing in Brooklyn, New York grew up under the influence of his father’s (a well known jazz musician) record collection and musical tastes. After discovering his father’s vinyl collection of jazz legends like Bix Biderbeck, Milles Davis, and Bill Evans, it wasn’t long until Toby found himself gravitating to the rich, melodic sounds of the trumpet. Growing up, Toby carried his horn with him everywhere.

Toby is trained in classical composition, attending schools in the UK, India and the United States which have helped him develop his craft. While Toby was in the United States he started developing his love for electronica music.

We’ve recently completed the music video for “Analog Glitch”. The video was inspired by the sounds in the song. The song is composed of two main sound sources. One sound is chaotic, modern and electronic while the other sound shares the musical qualities of a classical orchestra or choir. The lone female’s voice, backed up by stringed instruments and glitches of digital distortion make this off beat song one of our current favourites.

We found images to represent each sound. The chaotic, electronic sounds were paired with images of a dusty circuit board. Cutting in and out of focus through the use of digital effects.

We coupled the angelic sound of the women’s voice with the center of an orchid flower. The flower, not only has the shape of a singing angel with wings, but also embodies some of the shapes of a person such as a mouth, the back of a singing throat and a head. The perfect object to compliment the beautiful sounds within this song.

The video was also an experiment in lighting, editing, compositing, color and space. All of the strobing effects you’ll notice on the top layer of the video are done through a dirty mirror while creating the light pulsing effect with a bright flashlight. This is just one of the many subtle tricks you’ll find in this music video. Enjoy.

Sterling

You can watch the high quality version of the video on Vimeo here

To here more of Toby’s music visit his MySpace Page

The Two Fingers album is an inspirational musical uprising by a seemingly odd group of collaborators. The album was highly anticipated because it brought together the two worlds of electronica and hip hop which have been colliding for years with artists like RJD2, Zilla, Z-Trip, DJ Shadow, Nerd and even The Roots. Two Fingers however is a massive collision of these worlds, equivalent to a 300 car pile up. This album is the wreckage from that collision.

Although the album is classified as a hip hop album, there are still similar (but not familiar) Amon Tobin and DoubleClick confrontational electronic undertones.

Songs such as Ms. Jade’s “Better Get That” involve high frequency alarm sounds seemingly surrounding the listener as they stand still and alone in a dark, empty underground parking lot with unusually bad florescent lighting.

The song “Keman Rhythm” which, beyond its interesting use of Middle Eastern rhythms, introduces a bass line that is not easily describable. It will leave you scratching your head realizing you’ve been introduced to a new sound today.

The song “What You Know” chronicles the problems of police discrimination and the blurred lines between different worlds of gangsterdome. The song contains a dreadful, yet surprisingly hopeful audio which simulate the sounds of a man in a jail cell running a police billy-club along the bars of his cell. An undernourished free man, with the opportunity, but not the ability to escape. This is just one example of the many confrontational sounds you’ll hear on this album. Sway’s vocals only enhance the story of these mad rhythms.

Amon Tobin and DoubleClick are known for their creative slant towards an area of music that goes way beyond the confines of being considered simply “electronica”. Sway on the other hand is undoubtedly UK’s biggest hip hop artist, and offers the album sometimes light-hearted and funny and at other times politically charged and issue based lyrics over Amon and Doubleclick’s beautifully crafted soundscapes.

Two Fingers is a surprising album. It’s not surprising in the sense that it’s a great album (I think most people expected that), it’s surprising because listeners have no idea what to expect with this collaboration.  It’s a new sound with new dub, jungle and hip hop rhythms, highly accented rhymes, and unpredictable soundscapes. Whether you’re interested in the sounds of dreamlike obscurity or mainstream rhythms this album will hit you hard.

Just to give you an idea of how seemingly contradictory this album is, listen to an Amon Tobin Track (Bloodstone) for example.

You can also buy the album below.

Now listen to the recent Sway song featuring Akon (Silver and Gold).

Yes, it’s an odd collaboration, but it’s refreshing to be surprised by music isn’t it?

We are working on the first Two Fingers video for the song “Not Perfect” as well as doing a video for the lyric-less track “Keman Rhythm”.

I’ll continuously update this post with making-of photographs and videos.

Enjoy the music!

tunez

Sterling Pache and Koray Salilh of Romantic Child Studios recently finished shooting the music video for T-West’s “T Dot State of Mind” (Purchase on iTunes). The song reached the top of the charts on Flow 93.5, Toronto’s most popular urban radio station last year. The new video is sure to resurrect the track back to the top of the charts.

The song title “T Dot State of Mind” was inspired from the Nas song “N.Y. State of Mind”, which was in turn taken from the original Billy Joel song “New York State of Mind”. The Nas song rests as a classic hip hop anthem that an entire generation of hip hop enthusiasts can relate to.

It’s not uncommon for hip hop artists to praise the city of New York. Almost all east coast rap artists proclaim their love for their city in their songs. However, up until recently many Canadian artists have tried to identify with our Southern neighbours rather than celebrating our own cities. T-West has pushed the boundaries with this track by helping put Toronto on the map. There is a major hip hop movement that is ready to explode in Toronto. It’s about time artists like T-west helped push the gritty city of Toronto into the limelight.

When we were storyboarding for this music video we were we all on the same page in terms of the tone of the footage we were looking for. We used old Wu-Tang, Talib Kweli, Common, Nas and Mos Def videos as inspiration. Back in the 90’s there were an assortment of hip hop videos out of New York that really showcased the “feeling” of the city. The song “Respiration” by Blackstar is a great example of this type of video. Filled with imagery of pigeons fighting for survival in the city, clusters of cars racing through streetlights, scaffolding on city sidewalks from construction sites and the brick steps of homes in Brooklyn, the video gives you the feeling of New York without actually seeing anything overly identifiable about the city. Without feeling the need to show cliché skyline scenes, the empire state building or the Statue of Liberty, these artists exposed the soul of their city by doing “street videos” with handheld cameras. They filmed in subways, on lesser known streets, in parks and in underground walkways. The result is that people who live in New York City or have spent considerable time there get the feeling of being there without having to see the sign that reads “welcome to Manhattan: Population 13,000,000.

For those of us from Toronto who know and love the city, stock images of the Skydome or the CN tower simply don’t communicate the Toronto that most of us know. In fact no one particular icon, symbol or building represents Toronto. Instead the T-West video communicates Toronto through texture and atmosphere. There is a grittiness and a darkness to Toronto that we wanted to expose. Many of us who spend considerable time in Toronto are familiar with the dirty floors of the TTC, the green florescent lights in St George Subway station, the many underground tunnels the city has that we all flock to in order to stay off the streets in the wintertime, the looks of first generation immigrant grandparents on the Spadina streetcar and so on. That’s the Toronto we wanted to expose in this video. We didn’t want people to see the video and be like “oh ya that’s Jane and Finch” or “cool, that’s young street by my house”, but instead sit back and feel Toronto without having to recognize any particular place, store or city symbol.

The music Video’s storyline is not goal-centric. The song is simply about an average day in the city. Just as the previous two “New York State of Mind” songs were not epic goal oriented stories either. For must of us the day to day in Toronto is a series of trivial events and experiences. Toronto is the streetcar driver being rude when you ask where Runnymede station is, it’s running downstairs to catch your train on the Bloor line, it’s shaking off drunks in the club district when you’re walking around at night, it’s seeing homeless people in the cold trying to stay warm above subway grates, it’s about grabbing a chicken shawarma on your way home from the local Lebanese take out stand. It’s these series of events that make Toronto our home. For this reason, the beginning of the video starts out with T-west getting dressed and leaving for work late at night and then traveling throughout the city. The video includes an assortment of images from throughout the city and then it ends with T-West returning to his starting place. T-west simply acts as a character that pulls our cameras around to expose the soul of the city.

The Music Video will be released Jan 31st 2009. Until then you can watch the making of at the top of this post. You can also read Koray’s “making of” blog post here.