Hi there! My name is Jack Rizzo, and I normally go under Jam Pot Studios or some other condiment-related moniker. Thanks for clicking onto this casting call; I hope, after having a read, you might be interested in auditioning for this project. It's one I've wanted to get stuck into for a while, and the first episode (which I used to test the water with my usual audience) went down much better than I had expected. This is an amateur, unpaid project, and - like many of my animations have been - a bit of an uphill struggle, but one that I'm hoping will take your fancy nonetheless.
Prerequisites for VAs
Before I get stuck into what the series is about, I'd just like to cover a few minor points that are prerequisites for anyone wanting to submit an audition. Sorry if this seems fairly basic, but it's just a bit of housekeeping to prevent any misunderstandings further down the line.
1) Good mic quality is really important, with little to no background noise, and a minimal amount of peaking. I strive to make sure every character's audio quality is as consistent with each other as possible, and I believe bad audio brings the viewer out of the story quite easily.
2) If I cast you, please be committed to getting your recordings to me relatively speedily, and to continuing to fill the role for as long as is humanly possible. I understand that this is an unpaid project, and we all have lives and other, more pressing commitments (I am in full-time employment so my own time is very limited). If you get to a stage where you think you might not be able to continue the role, please also let me know as early as you can so I can recast without it putting me too far behind.
3) Please be patient. As I said before, I'm currently employed full-time, and a long commute means my animations now take a lot longer to make. Stop-motion is already a pretty lengthy process, but I'm now more limited, so if you don't hear from me for a few weeks or even a few months, please don't assume the project is over and that the role is finished; just shoot me an email and I'll give you an update.
4) This project is part of the
Marvel Brickfilm Universe (click here to find out more) a shared continuity of LEGO Marvel animations run by me and a large group of friends. The full saga currently comes in at 63 videos, and we're still powering ahead. Please be open to voicing for the other animators in the MBU if your role recurs in one of their series' or films. They're all nice people, and I'm happy to either put you in touch or mediate scripts and lines between you, but please be ready to voice for them should the time come. For roles like Ahkenaten this is less likely, but for Johnny Storm and Bobby Drake in particular, they're likely to appear in other peoples' projects in the next six months. Please please please bear this in mind when you audition.
5) My content is as family friendly as a PG-13 movie, like Marvel Studios' current saga of films. I know that most of my audience is within a certain age bracket so I'm careful not to include anything inappropriate. However, some VAs in the past have been troubled by the use of words like "damn" and "hell", and by some ideological themes that I deal with. This series will skirt the edges of ideas like slavery and eugenics, like the comics does, without going into too much detail. Some characters may be LGBTQ, as I believe in social equality. If you are not comfortable with that language or those themes being present, please don't audition. Sorry if this seems a silly point, I know PG-13 content is itself pretty tame to most, but I've had some people be fairly nasty to me in saying I "tricked" them into something they didn't believe in.
The Series
LEGO Marvel's Inhumans is a stop-motion fan series, following the Inhuman royal family at the dawn of a new age for their kind. It is 2012, and while humanity sees the Avengers rise for the first time, inhumanity stands on the brink of civil war. With the royal family separated, Queen Medusa must mediate dangerous politics and decide whether her peoples' futures lie on Earth, or in the stars. Meanwhile, sensing blood in the water, some of the King's enemies begin crawling out of the woodwork. If the royal family are not reunited, Attilan may have no future at all.
Tonally, despite being made out of LEGO,
Inhumans is meant to be quite a naturalistic series, and perhaps a little bit dark too. I'm not looking for overly comic-book portrayals, ironically. While some characters might be more animated (e.g. the Thing), for most, it's important to stay grounded, and to emote as real people do, as opposed to a 60s Marvel story (as much as I love those too). Think of dramas like
The Returned,
Jessica Jones or
Broadchurch - those are essentially the kinds of performances I'm looking, unless the role calls for some campier or more fantastical.
The series is intended to run for a minimum of seven episodes (the length of the first story arc), each episode between 3 and 8 minutes long. Because of how little free time I have, and the nature of a lot of the VFX in this series, Inhumans will likely last until the end of 2018, but I will have written it long before then and hope to also collect each episode's lines in well in advance of that. Still, things could draw on, or I could do a second season if the first is received well and I'm not burnt out on the subject matter.
Episode 2 is currently in production and will hopefully be released before Christmas 2017.
Episode 3 will begin after I have completed the third episode of my concurrent series,
LEGO Marvel Universe At War, as well as a couple of other, smaller projects. Hopefully, that will be January/February 2018. It's also possible I may shoot it back-to-back with
Episode 4, but that depends largely on the next redraft of both scripts.
Beyond that, I'm playing my schedule by ear. I'm hoping to update my animation equipment, which will speed things along a little bit, but equally my job means I sometimes work on weekends, so it could balance out again.
Contact
If you have any questions at all, or concerns about the project, or want to learn a little bit more about it or about the Marvel Brickfilm Universe, please don't hesitate to send me a message or leave a comment here. I'm happy to answer, and I check the page very regularly.
If you're interested in the inspiration for the series, here's a quick reading list. None of this is essential reading - in fact, no knowledge of Inhumans is required to take part - but I hope anyone who's familiar with the characters might find it interesting seeing which comics or series most gripped me when formulating my own story.
- - Black Bolt #1-5 (2017) - writer Saladin Ahmed and artist Christian Ward have both seen and tweeted about episode 1 of the series, which honestly made me a little giddy.
- - Inhumans: Once and Future Kings #1 (2017)
- - The Inhumans, Graphic Novel (1988)
- - Realm of Kings: Inhumans (2010)
