PreProduction Unit- The Results of Day 1s Auditions.

Today myself and Charlie had our first set of auditions- which didn't turn out the way we expected.
Firstly, today we were supposed to have four auditions, two for the role of Abigail, and two for the role of Doctor Hughes. Unfortunately, we only managed to audition Kevin Stones, who was applying for the role of Doctor Hughes.
The reasons we could only audition 1/4 people was due to the fact that one of our applicants had a personal family issue that hand to be taken care of, one of our applicants cars broke down, and the last applicant didn't turn up and we haven't heard from them since.
The girl whose car broke down has instead asked if she is able to audition via a video, and we have agreed to this. It is important that we continue to search for alternative actors though so that we have a variety of actors to choose from.

I found that auditioning Kevin Stones was a very useful experience. Kevin had a wealth of knowledge and experience to share, and even knew Geoff Miles, of the Maidstone Television Studios who he had met over the course of his career. We spent a lot of the audition's beginning speaking about Kevin's previous work and interests, which I felt was a good way for us to get to know each other better so that we would be more comfortable working together on the project. We then moved onto the actual audition, and Charlie and I both agreed that Kevin did an excellent job portraying the character of Doctor Hughes. He managed to portray the kind of concerned professional character you would expect of a doctor, and we were very happy with his performance.

Something we were not expecting was how helpful Kevin would be in other areas of our production. Kevin has a wealth of contacts that could be useful to us, and offered to help us gather props and find possible locations (namely the doctors office we require and the laboratory) using his contacts.
kevin has contacts in the medical trade, and has told us there is an opportunity for him to get us access to film in an actual Docto's practice, something that we were previously denied due to confidentiality issues in NHS doctor's offices.
Of course, it would not be too wise to rely solely on Kevin to find our locations, as that is my job as a producer, but it was still reassuring to know that there was another person offering a degree of expertise and knowledge of the area and locations in Kent, an area I am unfamiliar with.