I wish I had a handful of actors in my circle of friends so that I could easily pluck them for the roles in my first feature film, The Ocean.

But at the same time, I’m glad I have to put effort into finding decent talent because I know, in the end, it will be worth it. Seeking talent from a pool of professional actors as made available on Starnow.ca will allow me to find the best possible fit for my characters.

SEE: THE OCEAN CASTING CALL

I’ve already received close to thirty applications for the roles of Bowman and Carter — by some highly qualified actors. I hope to meet with a bunch of them over the next few weeks to see who is most capable of investing time and energy into making these characters come to life.

The biggest challenge I see, for the actors and for myself, is ensuring the story is uniformly entertaining from start to finish. Really, it’s only about two characters — from beginning to end — spiraling into insanity. So the actors I choose will be burdened with an incredible amount of work. They must make the characters believable — through the entire story — leaving absolutely no room for compromise. Now, I’ve done my part with crafting the characters in a literal sense — my actors will have to take this, reshape it, and translate it into a living form, with quirks and nuances and emotions and fears. It’s a lengthy script with pages-long dialogue that can easily fall apart if the actor is unable to grasp the character.

However, as I continually examine applications from Starnow, my doubts are alleviated by how talented most of these applicants are; I no longer fear that whoever I choose to fill these roles will put less than 100% of their efforts into the project.