Drama Project- Actors and Rehearsal

When in the pre-production stages of this project I have found myself needing to mention the actors and how we pulled in the actors that suited the part. Firstly we needed two actors and a mother for the photos, this was I think the most difficult part in the whole production stages of this project simply due to the lack of time we had available to us. We had to make the actors fit their week around us as well as find an actor that would be right for the image of the film. Firstly I emailed around the university seeing what actors they had, I found plenty of female actresses suitable for the daughter role within the film but there were no  middle aged male or female actors that could play the part of the father or as the mother in the pictures. Therefore I used a website provided by the university called casting call pro. This is where I found an actor who when I got in contact wanted to do it but later found out he could not stick to our schedule. Therefore we had to look for another. Finally, after contacting many actors around the area I found James who was available during our schedule. The daughter role was a lot easier as I sent a note over to the performing arts courses and got a lot of interest which lead to me doing auditions for the part of the daughter which after a lot of debate the group decided that Fiona was perfect within the image of the daughter part.

The female we used for the mother ended up being Jess's cousin that we 'photoshoped' onto the photos we took of Fiona and James in a rehearsal. We were lucky with this as we couldn't find anyone who was available to do the pictures therefore we relied on digital media to save us which we are lucky that it did.

Finally we had a rehearsal with the two actors running through the script to get an idea of how the actors responded to the lines as well as each other when acting. This was very useful as we found what needed to be changed and had enough time to really give the actors an image of what we were looking for before the actual shooting day. We also used the rehearsal as a time to get pictures of the actors to try and show there relationship as a family which we used to dress the set with on the day. Furthermore we used the rehearsal as a technical rehearsal as well where Natalie as the cinematographer was able to practice with the Shoulder rig and the DSLR to get a hang of its functions and how it works and Jess the sound recordist was able to grasp the positioning of the boompole throughout the scenes to give the maximum quality of sound on the day and know where she needed to be straight away when shooting.