Recruiting Actors

After having completed the Script and shot list for our film we needed to start actually bringing the planning together to actually create the trailer and begin shooting. Obviously for this we would need actors, and as the producer it is my job to ensure we have all necessary actors and props and costume needed to produce the trailer on the days of the shoots. Luckily I am a drama student so I set about the task of recruiting willing actors.

At first I found this a struggle, I asked around in my drama class for girls who fitted the roles well but unfortunately I only found one willing volunteer to play the part of Cassandra. This is Kaitlyn Knight, she has short brown/copper hair which is the perfect description of Cassandra.

I then had to brainstorm, I was under pressure to find us some actors as I had volunteered for the job but I suddenly remembered that my solo acting LAMDA teacher teaches many other group classes besides just solo acting. So I got in touch with her and she has enabled me to find actors through her.

On Wednesday 12th November I joined her GCSE drama class and held auditions for the actors. This was a really fun experience for both myself and the actors. To begin with I explained to the guys a summary of our trailer and what roles would be involved, they all seemed really keen to get involved which was brilliant.

For the actual audition I asked them to produce a group drama set in the 1940's where a young girl is getting bullied for being an evacuee from London. I gave them about 15 minutes to come up with the scene and then they showed it to me, I was really impressed with what they had come up with and after asking them to swap roles I got a really good idea about who would fit which roles.

I did notice however that some of the boys in this class were exceptional actors and I really believed that having them in out trailer would benefit us greatly and overall improve the whole production. The only issue is that we had not written any male parts so I went back and explained my production team about the benefits these boys would have in our production fortunately they were both really happy with the choice of actors and to add some male character into the film.

The job of finding actors was a lot more difficult than I had imagined, especially when we cannot pay the actors. It made me realise that a lot more work goes into creating a movie ect. than you would first expect.