Casting Call for actor

One of the biggest challenges that we faced as a group was finding an actor, and knowing the right way to go about doing this. After reading through the script several times, we all imagined our actor to be older than a student and preferably in between the ages of 30 and 40. This was partially due to the nature of our script; we have given the character quite an extensive back story in order to present the actor with this but also to fully understand our character ourselves, which will come in useful when thinking about other features of the film, such as the background set design features, costume and also the way in which we will choose to direct our actor. Because of this, we all felt that to reflect the nature and history of the character's backstory , ideally a non student actor would seem more realistic to our viewers which is important as we want to keep the film feeling as real as possible, as it is dealing with quite a sensitive issue.

We decided to post a number of adverts in a few different places, with the aim to get 2 or 3 actors interested, so that we always had a contingency plan. One of these was the Sheffield Hallam Drama society, who I agreed to approach and got one response a few days later. The actor was around 22, which wasn't ideal but it was positive to have someone interested and gain such an early response, so we kept this in mind as a contingency. The other way that we chose to contact potentially interested actors was through a website called StarNow. Louise (Producer) set up an advert on here, and thankfully a few days later we had two responses from. The first was from an actor who hadn't had too much experience, but was keen to get involved, and the second was an actor who had a lot of experience, in both student films as well as larger scale productions, who also openly shared his own past experience surrounding having panic attacks, part of which related to going outdoors.

We held a group meeting in the library to discuss the situation and all have a look at both the responses, before reaching a decision and organising where to go from here. Although we were pleased to get two early responses, we all felt like Jonathon - the second actor - seemed like an interesting choice of actor, and we felt like having his own experiences and using these as a reason to want to become involved with our film could be really advantageous to our film. We sent him a message back thanking him for his interest and asking if we could meet up later this week , and within a few hours had arranged a meeting for Friday at the university.