Q&A with Emiliana De Blasio: Casting for Webseries, New Media and Beyond

Q&A with Emiliana De Blasio: Casting for Webseries, New Media and Beyond

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STUCK, the Chronicles of David Rea is an Italian web series winning much acclaim and award nominations. Web Series are going to be one of the primary ways actors, especially new actors, build their reels and get discovered in the future and STUCK has no end of acting talent to back that up. Screen Test Star USA™ asked Mrs. Emiliana De Blasio, the producer of this phenomenal series how they found her talent and what she thinks about the future of screen acting. Here is what she had to say:

STS USA: How do you currently fulfill your casting needs? Are you doing casting calls, do you search for specific talent? Where do you currently find the majority of your talent?

Emiliana: STUCK was born around the director Ivan Silvestrini’s will to work with actor Riccardo Sardonè, on whose fisic du role his character David Rea was designed. Then we started searching for the rest of the cast.

Actress and actors were chosen in different ways, there were some actors that we admired a lot and got the chance to cast because of the great depression Italian Cinema and Tv is going through, like Ivana Lotito, Valentina Izumi and Vincenzo Alfieri. While Gaia Scodellaro’s discovery came out of a brainstorming, Vincenzo had worked with her on a commercial and had an instinct on her, so we invited her to Rome (she lives in Naples) to know her better. Ivan didn’t make a lot of performing during the casting process, we tried to spend some time together with the actors to see if we all would have found it nice to go through this long journey (it took 9 months to shoot STUCK season 1, I was even pregnant at that time so we had to finish before my time was over) . So we became quite a family.

STUCK has an international cast, we looked very carefully at what Rome surrounding had to offer in terms of English- speaking talents. We found a wonderful British actor (Mark Lawrence) who was working in a restaurant near Rome. We immediately casted him and expanded his role.

Then we went looking for actors to participate as guest stars. We had our Prologue and our first episode online so the people knew (or could imagine) what STUCK was… at least they thought they knew ! That was when we found surprising actors like Stefano Masciolini and Giulio Pampiglione (mostly known in Italy for their work on tv) and wonderful Carla Cassola.

STS USA: Screen acting has come a long way since the dawn of the silent film era. As content is increasingly produced for mobile and web platforms, how in your opinion is the craft of screen acting evolving?

Emiliana: Acting is fundamental, it gives credibility through quality. But I don’t know if web-acting differs a lot from other media’s. There are a lot of video bloggers who seem to be the stand-up comedians’ web evolution, but as fiction is concerned skills are quite the same. Actors must be good, no debate about it, the real challenge is the change in the writing process, directing and editing. You’re not allowed to get your viewers bored, not even a second of boredom is allowed, at least until you have a big fandom who just loves your characters so much… but that’s a second step, and you shouldn’t abuse their patience either. I like it though, ‘cause it will make the best teams emerge because of their pure talent.

STS USA:  Let’s say you are casting for a supporting role in San Antonio, TX. Would you cast talent from Los Angeles or New York, or would you focus your talent search locally?

Emiliana: As we did for STUCK, I’d go locally as much as I can, I guess our case is interesting for that: we’re the first Italian Web Series to use English language, but we had no resources to make castings in England (for example) so we looked locally for actors who could do the job. We’re very happy with our ensamble cast. What we couldn’t find in Rome we went looking a little farther as for Gaia who lived in Naples or Mark who lives in London (but we met him in Frascati).

Riccardo lived in Milan at that time, so I can say what we did was to build the most local cast we could make around a talent who was determinant for the series with some additional castings for roles we couldn’t find in Rome.

STS USA: When casting a role, how do the following factors play into your decision making process: looks, social media Klout of the actor, acting talent, relationship?

Emiliana: Look is important, Italian cinema renounced to Star system decades ago and that turned out to be not good at all, our little battle is to try to recreate a little webstar system! It may take a while, but we’re doing our part.

Social media Klout is even more important, but we can’t force our actors to become Twitter-addicted (I mean, not that we didn’t try) but we didn’t choose our actors because they were already webstars, not at all, some of them barely used Facebook. We casted them for they were the best actors, that’s what ultimately will make a difference.

So yes, acting talent was the main reason of course.

We had a good relationship with some of the actors before, others we knew during the casting process, but keeping a good, professional relationship among the team was the reason we managed to make STUCK, and the reason we want to make season 2 as soon as possible!

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You can watch STUCK, the Chronicles of David Rea on Youtube! Connect with the series on Twitter@stuckwebseries or ask Emiliana your own questions through @emilianadb.

Stay tuned for more interviews from casting directors, agents and other industry experts on Screen Test Star USA™, the latest social media platform for actors to improve their craft, build a portfolio and get discovered! Follow us @screenteststar for updates!