PreProduction Unit- Preparing for Today's Auditions.

Today we were to have several applicants for various roles in Inoculum visiting us at the studios to audition for their roles. However, late last night I received an email from Chris Winters, who applied for the position of Dr. Hughes, stating that due to personal problems, he wouldn't be in the Maidstone area today, and therefore wouldn't be able to attend his audition.

I also still have no received any confirmation from Nadia Ford whether or not she would be attending the audition time I had given her today. We will still be attending the Maidstone Television Studios in case she arrives, but if not, we are down one Dr. Hughes and one Abigail Reed audition today. This means the only auditions we will be holding today are for Hannah Webb and Kevin Stones, who are also auditioning for the roles of Abigail Reed and Dr. Hughes respectively.

"Script Segments"

In preparation for the auditions, I have created condensed "script segments"- much smaller versions of a certain part of what I hope will be the final script, which the people auditioning will be reading from for us today.

I sent these scripts via email to our auditioners several days ago, so that they could practice their lines and get a bit of a feel about their character and how their character reacts to the other characters in the story.

Audition Script 3- Abigail

Audition Script 2- Doctor Hughes

Audition Script 1- Delaney and Douglas

I tried to select areas of the script where each particular character had the most dialogue, and opportunity to showcase their characters. During this process however, I learnt something- Abigail doesn't have much dialogue.
I never noticed during the creation of my initial first draft, but Abigail has little to no dialogue. She makes certain exclamations at various points, but never really adds any in-depth analysis of anything, or contributes to the story in any way, making her less of a character, and more of a plot device.
I feel there are a couple of things I can do to improve the presentation of Abigail as a character. I can either-

1. Give Abigail more influential lines, which will in turn make her a more important character in the film.
2. Keep Abigail's lines the way they are, and focus on having her physical portrayal tell the story, through her emotions and actions rather than dialogue.

I believe either one of these options will benefit my story. I am pushing more towards keeping Abigail as a relatively silent character though, and having her tell the story through her emotions and actions for a couple of reasons. The first being that my script for Inoculum already has a lot of expositional dialogue (which I am working on improving for the second draft of the script), and secondly that I am a firm believer in the idea of "showing- not telling", and so any opportunity for the story to be told without words is something I want to take.