When I started my own company at 26, JVC had just introduced a tiny MiniDV camera that would change the way I cast. It fit in the palm of my hand and was so new that almost no one recognized it as a video camera. I had always interviewed everyone I cast, whether for a print campaign or a commercial, and I loved my Polaroid camera. But now I could preserve what happened beyond the still image: how someone spoke, how they moved and the moment they came alive. This is Gisele at 16. She was, even then, pure sunshine. What I’m sharing here is only a very small excerpt from the first of a few early casting interviews with Gisele held at my studio in NY. I believe this was for a Ralph Lauren casting. Many of these tapes were badly damaged in the flood at my storage facility, and for years I believed they were lost. Then Neil Matthews devoted an extraordinary amount of time, patience and care to bringing as much of them back to life as possible. Having these moments back has been an incredible gift to me. I hope sharing them feels like a gift to the people in them too, a moment from 30 years ago returned to them. What survived captures a time that no longer exists: casting before social media, before everyone carried a camera, and before we all became so accustomed to presenting versions of ourselves to the world. I’ll be sharing more… This is where it begins. | Jennifer Starr Casting