Casting Notice: Student Short Film
By: Peyton Wild, Contributor
Slate your name, height, weight, body count, favorite position, and longitudinal coordinates.
DO NOT include latitudinal. The production team has included context that they have deemed important for the audition process. Film will be shot on site and taken to Mercy Health after.
SOPHIE is a prospective dance major suffering from a rare type of rabies she contracted from the barn owl her brother used to date. At this point, she is sitting outside of Warner, crying, because she just found out her ex was diagnosed with scurvy, the sexually transmittable kind. She feels lost, mostly because she also has amnesia. Last Tuesday, she was a bowling pin in a game of human bowling and committed too hard. Her friends and family are concerned for her wellbeing, but mainly about the fact that she still lost the game of human bowling. Her great-uncle was a champion human bowler, and the main plotline centers around SOPHIE’s relationship with him, and how she channels generational trauma through Merce Cunningham technique fused with traditional Latin jazz. It should be noted that at this point, MERCE CUNNINGHAM has already influenced arts at Oberlin through his direction of the fall opera, which was an interpretation of Shawshank Redemption written for the German audience. We are also just about to pan to the SECOND GHOST OF CHRISTMAS, who waits across Wilder Bowl with the hidden immunity idol, ready to bestow it onto the eagle that frequently impersonates SOPHIE. This eagle is non-binary.
Use the description to help inform your tape. Please do 5 takes, with at least one in American Sign Language or Spanish. All takes should be under 30 seconds.
(SOPHIE runs out of Warner sobbing. She wears the biggest liberal arts scarf you’ve ever seen. So big it keeps getting caught in her mouth when she talks. Tons of students are also gathered on the stairs, and they frequently stop their conversations to glance at each other and SOPHIE, who continues to monologue.)
SOPHIE: Damned barn owl…(laughs in disbelief) If only there was some way out. Someone who could hear me (unties shoelaces). When I learn to drive, I swear, you won’t haunt me anymore. You won’t stand there and laugh at me because I am a woman. You’ll stand there and laugh at me because I don’t have ticks (reties shoelaces). Merce Cunningham was right. There is no action without an equal and opposite reaction. There is only The Void (lights cigarette, throws it on the ground and stomps on it in frustration. Lights another cigarette).
So he has scurvy. Don’t we all? Here’s a thought–(wiping away Taki dust from mouth) be yourself (smirks with satisfaction). Be enough (lights two more cigarettes). Cause when the reckoning day comes . . . it’s gonna come. And it's gonna come hard. Inside all of us. (addressing the others on the stairs, who are moved by her monologue and nod in solidarity)
