R & P Post 16: Casting

When casting for the role of Grace, we had two main criteria in mind for our chosen actress:

-The first and main objective was to choose someone who would be a confident and experienced actress capable of portraying a villainous figure who could give the audience a real sense of unease and powerful emotion.

-The second was to introduce a feel of racial diversity into our production, and also to give our opening a USP against other similar films of the stalker genre such as Single White Female.

For these reasons, we chose our friend Celine as our main actress, as we felt that she would be a perfect fit due to her contribution to the film's racial diversity and especially the fact that, as an A-Level Drama student, she had proven acting credibility which would keep our end product plausible and professional. With regards to the other actors & actresses within the production, we felt that as a group it would be far more practical and easier logistically if we kept smaller roles to within the group, mainly because this would save time and effort for people possibly giving up their free time to play a small part. As a result, Josh played Grace's brother Anthony and Ella & Alex (another Media student) played "Ella Smith" and "Daniel Cooper" – the victim and her boyfriend. We then created a cast list to compare our chosen cast with the characters they were assigned and to help them get in role.

In order to plan exactly who we wanted to play the roles, and how we wanted their
characters to come across, we created a cast list. This included actor/actress details as well as a
 small character backstory to enable them to gain some knowledge of their character and get in role.

On the whole, I feel that casting was a task that as a group we performed very well, and we kept a clear mind-set throughout the project as to what kind of personality and skills the actress and her character had to possess. I believe that this was a factor in what, in my opinion, resulted in a convincing acting performance. If I were to improve on casting I would perhaps make more of an effort to ask others about minor roles, as though there was no problem with our crew's acting itself, it added an extra role which meant slightly less time in production and planning than originally planned. This was, however, an extremely small issue and I still feel that our casting and acting were strong points of the project.