R&P post 16: Casting

Casting our actors for the characters was important as the actors needed to convey the character's personality effectively.

I created a cast list with a picture of the actors and descriptions of the characters that they would play.

We casted Reuben Woolley as the lead role, Craig. Reuben is a very capable actor who currently does A-level drama. He is very close friends with Alex and was willing to come to all the filming days. We chose him because he looks and dresses similar to our idea of Craig and we thought that he would best depict the characteristics of the main character in our film.

For the character, David, we appointed the role to Alex Brock who is another close friend of the Alex in our group. Our main reason for picking Alex was because he has a specific style that we envisioned for the character David. As a group, we agreed that Alex Brock was perfect for the character and we even based some of David's traits and style off Alex. I used Alex's peculiar taste in fashion and his appearance as a base for David's costume and hair.

We had originally planned to have two male characters to bully David's character but we were aware that we did not have gender representation of females at all throughout the opening sequence of our film. Therefore, we established that Georgina would play one of the bullies. She does A-level drama and is really confident in acting. The character that we created would be called Shay and was based off the chav stereotype. Since Georgina is a very versatile actor, we had no doubt that she would do well.

For the second character, our initial idea was that he would be black so that we could have some ethnic diversity within our characters. We faced the issue that the bully would have negative connotations which might reflect negatively on his ethnicity as he would have been the only character of ethnic background amongst the actors. Rather than having negative ethnic representation, we decided to have our group member, Alex, play the character.

In the end, our cast worked well as it was easier to rely on our team members to act rather than face the possibility of being cancelled on by actors outside of the group. It also worked well for transportation as Georgina's and Alex's parents' cars could only fit a maximum of seven people.