Pre-Production-Scene 3: Leap of Faith: The Andrea Ross Story

Well this isn’t the story of her life, this is not even about how she was cast. (You can read that here ) This story is about what happened AFTER she was cast.

As I said before it was quite a feat even auditioning Andrea (pictured left). When we finally offered her the role and she accepted there was a problem. She couldn’t come to rehearsals. We only cast her twenty days before our shoot date and she had a pre-planned vacation for the date of our rehearsals August 17th. This is a short film and I didn’t want to rehearse numerous times our even that far in advance of our shoot date. I needed the rehearsals fresh in my actor’s minds.

So even though I had my lead I could not even rehearse with her. That’s where my “leap of faith” comes into play. When I had everyone cast BUT my lead, I didn’t lose my cool. I knew that I would find her in time without having to reschedule the production. I had faith if it was meant to be that it would happen. When I saw Andrea’s audition I liked it, but I would still have liked to rehearse with her in person. My alternative was to have her rehearse with her “mother”. Kesha Afrika Oliver was cast as her mother, referred her, and they both lived in VA. I asked Kesha to rehearse with Andrea before they came to Baltimore. Even though this short story is all about the character of Aisha and she is in almost every scene I had to hope and pray that when Andrea got to the set she was everything I saw (on video) and heard (from Kesha) she was.

You can probably guess because I’m writing this that it was not a disaster. The result was everything I could have hoped and prayed for. The mother/daughter chemistry I had in mind when I wrote it was brought to fruition through their performances. Even my editor Gino who was not there on set during principal photography and has only seen their performances on film really likes their performances. I can’t wait until everyone can see what a FANTASTIC job they did.

Well that is the story I promised waaay back when I introduced Andrea as our lead. It was truly a testament to God and his power. God is good; let the church say “All the time”. :-) When you plan something like this you can’t anticipate every contingency, but you must pray, “roll with the punches” and go with what you have and sometime you just gotta do like a George Michael song and “have faith”.


Previous “scenes” of Pre-Production:
Pre-Production-Scene 1
Pre-Production-Scene 2: Proverbs 10:7