Auditions Recap

Erik Schark and Kevin Koch.

Auditions for Season Four of STBD went very well this past Saturday. The Open Stage Theatre in the Strip District rented us the use of their stage for 3 hours, which gave us time to audition a dozen of Pittsburgh's finest actors and aspiring newcomers. Lacey Fleming (aka Dierdre), Will Guffey (aka Leo) and Kevin Koch (aka Dex) all came down to assist with the auditions, which involved the reading of a prepared side opposite one of our existing cast members, followed by an improvised scenario among 2 or 3 people.

Michael Moats and Will Guffey

The results were quite impressive. This was the best talent pool we've seen yet in our three years of casting; Open Stage Managing Director Michael Moats even took the time to audition for us, providing an eerie parallel to the manic side of Leo. All of this talent actually makes my job unintentionally more difficult: deciding who best fits our current cast openings.

With memories of the auditions still fresh in my mind and the cast's immediate feedback to consider, I spent the evening (and most of the morning) poring over my notes and envisioning different actors in various roles and scenarios -- even including actors we've seen in the past, who are still in the ongoing STBD mix. As I remind everyone who auditions for us: "Just because we haven't called you yet doesn't mean we won't call you soon."

Jennifer Koegler and Lacey Fleming

I have a few more days to deliberate before I need to announce a decision. Hopefully some clarity manifests during tonight's brainstorming session, in which ideas will be bounced off more than just the insides of my own head. Regardless of the eventual decisions, the future looks very bright for the cast of STBD.

Note: the images displayed here are not indicative of any actors who are favored over any others for available roles on STBD. They were simply three of the few screen captures from the taped auditions that were lit well and therefore useful.

Grant Application Recharge

This space has been a little quiet lately because I've been almost exclusively focused on meeting the application deadline for the Sprout Fund's Seed Award grant. Sprout is a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that supplies funding to local arts initiatives that stand to improve the city's image, culture or general creative resources. Considering we're Pittsburgh's ongoing comedy web series, filmed all around town and featuring local businesses, restaurants, actors and (next season) bands, we figured we'd be eligible.

The deadline is the first Friday of every month.

Like, today.

How long have I known about this? Months. Almost a year. I even had an informal meeting with one of Sprout's principals back in September to discuss how STBD factored into their lens of local artists.

When did I start completing the application? Monday.

Ann and I took a first draft pass at it back in August / September of 2005, and then it sat untouched until last week, when I started revising the ideas, making notes and gathering related budget-oriented resources. For some reason, considering the application is relatively short, I figured it would be easy to improve what we'd initially written and polish it off well in advance.

The catch is, the suggested word limit for the descriptive elements of the application is 2,000. My draft from mid-week was at 3,600, and I hadn't even assembled the budget, timeline or references yet. Those didn't count toward the word count, but they did count toward my dwindling hours.

So I spent the past couple days editing the final word count down to 2,400, creating additional Appendixes to hold some of the information that couldn't be fully excised, and figuring out what the official budget would be if I actually had more capital than what I usually have in my pocket.

Man, business planning is an eye-opening experience. It really clarifies a lot of presumptions about funding, expenses, expected revenues and likely growth -- all the things you're supposed to think about when you start a business, but which I never really paid attention to when I first started STBD as an experiment. Now that we're making the move from pastime to business, I don't want to lose the DIY "guerrilla" approach when it works in some cases (like marketing and honest discussions of the show), but I do need to improve a lot of our scheduling and structure so I don't go insane while trying to grow.

I'll know how the grant application review goes sometime next in the next two weeks. I'll post any updates here. Hopefully they're positive.