Casting Keys & Kingdoms

I impulsively created a bunch of casting calls for the characters of Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices. Did that instead of my assigned task, which was The Little Mermaid Retrospective #3... fortunately, the retrospective got done the following day. Anyway, I figured, hey, nice to have these casting calls, I'll put them out next month...

Nah, I'll put them out this weekend. No patience in me. Probably for the best I decided this series shouldn't be for-real animated; in addition to not having the budget for real animation, I certainly don't have the patience either.

So, yeah, that's what's going to happen -- this weekend, I'll open the auditions via a Facebook event, inviting all the actresses I know and telling them to invite every actress in Quincy. Then hopefully everyone who's interested will send videos of themselves doing the monologues and doing some singing, and then a month from now Team Salmon will deliberate on who will be the voices of the Choices!

Team Salmon consists of, well, everyone from my social inner circle, the people I started hanging out with in late 2013 to talk about Cars and My Little Pony, but the main branch of Team Salmon, the ones who'll be doing the casting, are the four founders of TAPAS: myself, Kenzie, Naty, and Stacy. It all began when I first asked Stacy to join in the projects, adding her highly-developed artistic talent to the writing and light drawing that myself, Kenzie, and Naty were getting up to, and I realized we could be, well... this bears a bit more explanation.

In the western-made anime RWBY, every team of Huntsmen has a four-letter name, consisting of the members' initials, that spells out a word evocative of a color. Sage, Stacy, McKenzie, Nathalie -- SSMN, or Salmon. That's a color! So we're Team Salmon. While I'm giving away the secrets of where my company's weird names come from, keep this under your hats, but TAPAS stands for "Totally Awesome Productions And Stuff" -- which, yes, makes the full name "TAPAS and Stuff Productions" quite redundant.

So, that's where we are as of the late Tuesday night on which I'm writing this -- Choices auditions begin this weekend and will have begun by the time I publish this post. Figure that's a thing I'll do, write the blog all week and then post it on Monday.

As far as doing plays... in addition to TAPAS projects, I want to take part in the local community theatre, both the official Quincy Community Theatre and the local indie troupe, Square Peg. Of course, the sort of gatherings where one puts on live stage performances aren't exactly in vogue right now on account of the coronavirus... but I won't give up on the arts if the arts won't give up on me, and at least so far, the arts seem determined to... still be a thing. God willing, this virus situation will have blown over by the time I hit Quincy in June... I do hope so.

Okay, I opened the auditions a few days ago, it is now Sunday... turns out, when trying to reach out to people to audition for an all-female cast, I know like five people who definitely perform and three people who, like, might. Buuut, one of those people just invited an additional 50 people to the event, so... that's some pretty good numbers. That's awesome.

I also opened auditions on BTVA - that's behindthevoiceactors.com, it's mostly about cataloguing pro voice actors but it also has a new little feature where one can cast one's own voice-over projects. I figure I'll get the voice for the scratch track there -- just so that I'm not the guy you have to listen to through the story reel (I am a voice actor, but what I'm not is eight women) -- and then record the final version locally.

And it's already Monday... really crept up on me, as I've been doing nothing but sit here and wait for somebody to audition. Been up all week and I haven't gotten one... Guess I'd better try to catch up on the podcast so it can be released tomorrow like it's supposed to... it's a gloomy time in the world today.