Choosing the actors

When choosing the actors that were going to be appearing in my short film I had to think about all elements of the characters and how I want them to be portrayed to my target audience.

Here is my choice of actors:

Oliver Bacon, 17

Chloe Hill, 18

Amber Smith, 17

Phoebe Winter, 17

The reason I selected these people is because I felt like they would be correct for the roles of each character I had in mind for my short film. Some have acting experience through Drama GCSE, A Level, and school productions but none are professional actors. I feel this is better for the performance because it is an independent film and the use of professional actors would be unnecessary. Also, they are the perfect age range to be relatable for my target audience. The four of them are close friends outside of acting which is another factor I think is useful because they have natural on/off screen chemistry which eliminates the chance of the action looking too constructed. I decided that 4 characters would be much more effective than a large group of people because you can have more focus and screen time for each of them, which is significant in short films. This way it will not be too chaotic on screen too. I subverted the stereotype of short films using the same amount of male and female characters because I thought it would be more effective for my plot. Another thing to add is that they are all British so I will not have to edit any of their accents as I intended for my short film to be British with the common British habits seen throughout. Assessing the mise en scene I wanted the actors to be wearing their day to day wear as it is based upon characters similar to their own personalities.