The Continuing Saga of Samuel – A Journey of Discovery

When I decided to film the Samuel series in summer 2009 I though it would be a fairly simple matter of casting and shooting…of course anyone who has ever made a film or shot a commercial or done anything beyond shooting home movies realizes no project is simple. There are always glitches and while a total of 30-40 minutes is certainly not epic…not even feature length, that is a lot of film to shot a lot of time invested and even on a shoesting more than a little cash required.

First step securing my location. No problem, the Yoder’s are lovely people ad were more than generous in allowing us unlimited access to the property, inside and out both on the shoot and reshoot.

Casting presented a bit more of a challenge…top it off with the fact that I was searching for a theatrical company concurrent with the Samuel auditions. We auditioned in Goshen, IN. A small local community near the location of the film. The first audition yielded, Bridget Eileen, mom on Samuel I and Sergio Cervantes, Samuel II. Sergio’s Mom played his Aunt in Samuel II and their friend, Augustina Perez played his Mom. Numerous extras were located though various sources. We also first met Rog Victor, Sergio’s uncle at that first audition, who later played the role of Sied, Samuel III’s father.

The director of photography for the first film helped us arrange to use office space in at an Actor Training center in Indianapolis. From that audition which included both students of the school and respondees to our Online Casting notices, we found Sara Beth Lewis and Akasha Jade Lane two of Samuel II’s sisters, We also found Lance Ellington who plays Samuel I’s brother and Michael Rey, who was a tremendous help in rounding up additional gang members for Samuel II, playing a gang member himself and crewing. 

The leads for Samuel I and III, Cole Hendricks and Nawaf Gasem were located through personal auditions.

As an actor I never thought I would find myself in a position of casting someone based on their looks. However, in the course of casting it seemed to me that Samuel I needed to blond to offset the darker colored appearances of Sergio and Nawaf. While there was a boy from Ohio that I wanted for the part he was unavailable due to commitments to much bigger fish than I. Ultimately I decided to cast another young Ohio native Klint Tomlinson…from our first meeting we hit it off. He seemed to read me well and was a funny likable kid…but brunette…never-the-less, he was talented and seemed to be the logical choice. I was ready to cast him despite my concern for coloration when someone introduced me to Cole. Cole is a good-looking all-American boy and very blond. I arranged an audition, but was not as impressed with his acting skills as with Klint’s…dilemma Published 11-15-09