Casting
This year we ended up needing around the same amount of actors as we did for last year's project. Being a film with a lot of action incorporated, we needed actors that would be happy to do a bit of running and that would be fine with doing a bit less talking. Fortunately, a lot of people were very happy to do the less talking bit! It was a bit harder to find people who were happy with getting a sprint on though, eventually we settled on Luke himself acting along with a good friend of ours.
Protagonist (Played by David Rozental-Devis):
Our protagonist is a man that needed to be fairly mysterious to our audience for the most part but we didn't want him to seem too sinister in appearance because he is supposed to be fairly neutral. The idea for this character was that he'll be a drug runner of some kind that is hired to steal a bag of drug money in order to bring it elsewhere. His intentions, though, aren't as crucial to the plot as the surprise of the contents of the bag. Essentially, our protagonist takes a bag and is chased throughout the film until he loses his pursuer and finally gets alone where he reveals the contents of the bag to the audience with a wry smile, indicating that he got what he wanted from this mysterious organisation. Thus, we didn't necessarily an actor with a massively intimidating appearance nor any specific kind of other appearance type really; we just wanted a good actor that was comfortable with portraying a few different emotions and to do some running for us!
Luckily, our friend from Poole Grammar offered his services for us not long after we started looking around for actors. He did Drama at GCSE and was/is doing Theatrical Studies for one of his A-Levels. We really couldn't have asked for better qualifications really! Not only this but he has a mature appearance which helps for the tone of our film and he was fine with performing our action sequences. Not only was he a great help acting-wise, but he offered us ideas in terms of what different kind of shots he thought we could add in where we were lacking as well as offering us potential locations with which we could film when we were struggling to come up with places! Overall he ended up being a great choice for our main actor and helped improve our productivity AND film immeasurably.
Antagonist (Played by Luke Barcock):
Our antagonist was a lot harder to find for a few different reasons. Despite him not being in the whole film, we still needed him for the majority of scenes and that meant having him at the majority of filming days too. Plus we needed more of a character type for him. He had to be a bit more intimidating and have a mobster-type of look. Fortunately Luke already has those attributes, was always available and was happy to act as well as direct certain scenes! Not only that but he was able to get a hold of his step dad to assist us with getting one of the cars ready to film whenever.
He also ended up helping my group a lot with our project last year and so I looked forward a lot to working with him anyway but the fact that he could act in our film again as well as now direct certain scenes and tell us what he thought would look good in correspondence to his acting was a massive bonus. He could pull off a convincing Russian accent if we needed it and he was perfectly fine with performing in chase scenes and looking angry. Without his expressions, the film perhaps would have lost some of it's edge or meaning.