Sunday 22 April 2018

STUDIO PRODUCTION: PRESENTER AUDITIONS

One of my main roles as Director is to choose the Presenters for the programme. As the models will only be used for 1 or 2 sections and for the VTs, we left choosing those to Casting and VT team. However, since the Presenters will literally be our entire show, Myself and George took on the role of casting the main 2.

VT did update their ideas and told us that for the VTs we no longer need another presenter as they will use one of the main ones.

Applications
Jack Whitely sent out an application for the roles of Presenters, for the male we received 6 Applications. Female we only received 2. However, my friend Adeline Close has done both Modelling and Acting for over 6 years, she's even modelled for bug companies such as Vogue in Australia. While living in the UK she isn't currently working on anything so asked if she'd be interested and she agreed. We also had another female presenter gain interest and another male during the lead up.

I Skype Interviewed everyone who applied to save them traveling but went to meet Adeline with George Lock for a coffee and a short interview as she's based in Maidstone. Once I had interviewed everyone I narrowed it down to the best ones. One of our Female presenters which we had short listed dropped out due to work commitments so the only female applicant we had was Adeline. The finalised applicants are below:





Alfie has had previous experience in being a Presenter for Studio Productions. He's used talk back, auto-cue and cue cards before. He's confident and been acting and presenting for over 4 years. Alfie also said in his interview he loves working with Student Productions as it allows him and the students to both get something out of it. Alfie was very confident and easy to talk to in his interview and did clearly express that he didn't know a lot about Fashion but does focus on his own personal Fashion. Alfie's Showreel was also very well put together and clearly showed his experience as a Presenter.


Rob's showreel showed him as a Radio Presenter mostly. However, there were some shots of him at (what looked like) Awards ceremonies presenting them. After interviewing him, he's a very confident and easy to talk to person, he has a large amount of experience with Live including Radio, TV, Events and Awards ceremonies. He's very interested in the project and does follow and focus on fashion as well. 


Adeline is originally from Australia. While over there she did modelling both catwalks and magazines and worked with very high end companies such as Vogue. She's also worked in short films, theatre, radio and has done corporate presenting as well. Adeline hasn't had experience in Live Productions or in Studios but has said she feels up to the challenge and is a very quick learner.

Andrew has previously done work with UCA TV Production as a Presenter for George Locks News Production "Event Hop" which can be seen below:


Andrew was really easy to talk to in his interview and very keen on the project. He explained that he doesn't have a huge knowledge of Fashion but does keep up with current trends and new seasonal fashion. He's a very confident presenter as I've already witnessed and has worked with the course before.

Audition Day
We invited these 4 applicants to the Maidstone Studios for an Audition. This audition pack was sent to them in preparation (Document created by Jemma Cotterell):


We set up the auditions to find out both how the presenters are individually and then as a pair. As we only had 1 female contributor BUT we weren't against the idea of having 2 male presenters so we decided we would have all the men do an audition with Adeline and then have the men audition together in pairs. Since we had a workshop planned for this day, George Lock, Melissa Moore, Katie Joslin, Jemma Cotterell and Victoria Simmonds couldn't all be excused. But since we needed the Producers, Directors and P.A's to be at the rehearsals we decided to split to 2 teams. George, Katie and Jemma did the individual auditions and then we swapped and Myself, Melissa and Victoria did the paired up auditions.

George's feedback was that all the applicants are very good. Each having excellent improve and confidence. However, the main 2 who are standing out currently was Adeline and Alfie.

Paired Auditions:
Since Alfie and Adeline were the favourite for George and Katie, I auditioned them together first. I tried to throw them in the deep end by giving them 2 adlibs as well the script we had put together for them.  The first adlib was for the Presenter Challenge, I asked them to take it in turns to talk about their outfits they were wearing, as if the other presenter had bought it during the challenge. Their adlibs were really good and they seemed to bounce off each other. With the script as well they took it on themselves and even added in some little joke between each other. Lots of energy and I could see them coming forward together, almost like they'd known each other before the audition.
The final adlib I did was for the Fashion Fails section, as we won't be able to practice this since the audience aren't in till the actual day of the show so our presenters need to be able to think on their feet and they did just that, they worked through the "Fashion Fail" and it was fun, entertaining and worked with the theme.

Andrew and Rob were also excellent and they worked really well with Adeline, the guys didn't work so well together so we saw that we needed Adeline as one of our Presenters. We finally came to the choice of Adeline and Alfie as their chemistry as presenters was by far the best. They were both comfortable, confident and chilled with each other and worked really well together.

Our presenters are now Alfie Garston and Adeline Close.

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