Finding Cast!

When creating a short film good cast are essential otherwise the emotion and message of the film may not be portrayed to the audience properly.

What makes good cast:

- People who are reliable.
- People who are willing.
- People who believe in the project.
- People who fit the criteria with in the character profile.

As we are reconstructing a classroom scene we needed several extras, persuading people to extras is not easy, we were looking for roughly eight extras of which we could separate out in our classroom to make it look like a full one. We also needed our main character Lilly, her two friends and a classroom teacher.

Where should we start looking?

As we wanted cast who were good at acting as well as looking like they were 11 – 13 years old we issued letters out to the drama teachers and attached character profiles to them see whether they would recommend any students for the parts and also done this so drama students could volunteer. Here is the letter we sent out:

Dear Drama Teachers, and students,

Notice to all year nine / ten students who are interested in participating in a some a – level media filming. We are looking for around 12 students who could act as year seven pupils in a class room scene; these can be girls and boys to make up a fair majority in the classroom. We are looking for three other main characters unfortunately they all need to be girls. The character profiles are attached behind. Please can you email any students full names forward to amyjoancharles-x@live.co.uk who are interested in these roles as we will need to audition these students and arrange rehearsal schedules through email.

Many Thanks for Your Time and Consideration,

Amy,
Klaudia,
Paul.


We also decided to ask any students in year nine and ten media classes as they would understand the importance of our project as also they are media students. We placed posters asked year thirteen students as we needed to show the difference in age between students and teacher, to come and audition for the teacher role; we were looking for someone who was a female according to our character profile however also auditioned males in case we couldn’t find a suitable female lead they also needed to be reliable. Finally we collected a list of names which wanted to be in our A2 Media Film, all we had to do now was narrow them down to main characters and extras.

Cast1

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Cast Auditions

Here are the three girls that auditioned for Lilly’s character:

Audition:


Grace




Through Graces audition we noticed huge potentional, she was very open, talkative and confident which was very positive for someone we wanted as committed for our main character.

However did she suit our characters criteria?

Considering our main character is very timid and vulnerable we agreed that grace was unsuitable for the role, she did not match our character looks described in our character profile as we wanted a brunette girl with pale skin and her attitude seemed to be more suited to a more popular, attention seeking role. We questioned whether she would be obedient and hard to handle being on set for a number of hours, would grace get easily distracted? We agreed that from the characteristics shown she would nicely play the character of Emily who in the characters profile is stressed as talkative and attention seeking. With grace's character sorted knowing that she would not play Lilly we still had two more girls to audition.

Who will play Lilly? Annabeth vs. Taylor

Taylor




We next auditioned Taylor Cook, her appearance was cute and sweet her stature looked very vulnerable and fragile. She nicely fit in with our character description. When reading the script provided she seemed timid however we liked this. She seemed shy however comfortable at the same time this edged us on even more towards her. Although we had fallen in love with Taylor for our main character it would not be fair to rule out Annabeth's audition.

Could Annabeth top Taylor's audition?

Anabeth




Through out Annabeth’s audition she seemed very shy and not in the way we wanted, she was not believable and looked uncomfortable in with the audition setting. Off camera she seemed confident about receiving the main part and this made her seem cocky rather than professional. Her looks suited the character of Lilly most out of all the characters however her personality did not. We decided that again by searching for the main character we had found our actress for the character of Zoe.

Again please!

Finally before casting the characters we wanted to make sure we had got the correct girls matched with the correct characters so we asked the girls to deliver the script again this time in a slower tone whilst this time recording some notes.

Deliberation!

It was now time to deliberate and we left the classroom to discuss how the girl did in there audition. To make the process fair with in the groups we noticed that majority would rule in the event of an uneven result. Two of us insisted that Taylor was the obvious choice for the character and one ruled against liking Annabeth’s persona however as majority rules Taylor was picked and we headed back to the classroom to tell the girls.

Cast 2

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