Casting

Casting is always one of the most difficult aspects of pre-production.  Finding people that match your mental image of the character is difficult enough, but you'd be surprised by how hard it is to find talented actors in a school with over 5,000 students on top of that.  Thankfully for us, we got lucky.

A few weeks ago, I worked on a project for this class with a randomly assigned group.  At first, I was a little doubtful, considering that I didn't know these two kids before, and I also don't like group projects, lol.  To my pleasant surprise, however, I ended up loving the entire creation process.  Amidst filming, I realized that Jack (one of my groupmates) was actually a really talented actor.  This surprised me solely because Scarlet and I are not, and we were the only other people acting in our movie trailer (featuring a cameo from Virginia of course, to no one's surprise).  Looking back though, I really should've seen it coming, considering that Jack's been in AMT since middle school and stars as the protagonist in essentially every school theatre production.  But then again, I've never really been one for musicals.

While filming the trailer, the group of us sat down for a second and just started chatting.  We talked to Jack a little about his acting and where he hopes to take his talents when he goes to college, and that conversation got my gears turning.  Earlier, Virginia and I had been talking about a potential idea for our Media Studies final short film - yeah, we were drafting the monkey-f***ing one.  While brainstorming, Vir and I were incredibly indecisive about who to cast.  We knew that she would play the role of the ex-girlfriend, but we were unsure about who to cast as the protagonist.  We ran through a few options, but immediately crossed them off the list either because they didn't look the part, or because we knew they wouldn't really be able to act the part.  Yet, while talking to Jack, we realized that he was absolutely perfect for the role.

We wasted no time asking him if he'd like to star, and he immediately said yes.  We've discussed the role in detail since, and I'm excited to start filming.  Here's the teaser for the project we worked on together, where he plays the serial killer: