A big part of the pre-production process for our recent project with De Montfort University was the casting process. The Healthy DMU Campaign was a large project from the outset and required the services of 14 actors over the 5 days of production. Casting can be a long and difficult process, especially when casting a large number of actors who will most likely be traveling from different parts of the country.
The first step in the casting process for this project was to create a shortlist of actors who we had previously worked with as well as those we knew from working within the Midlands filmmaking circuit. From this list, we managed to cast 6 of the required 14 actors. Working with people who you have already worked with and have built working relationships with makes the whole process easier as a Director, particularly when the project requires a quick turnaround on set.
For a project of this size, we were never going to be able to cast every role through actors we had worked with before. Once this was evident we turned to Mandy.com, one of the largest online creative communities for actors which we had used on multiple occasions in the past to cast our projects. We put out casting calls for all of the available roles and received 300 applications for the 8 roles we still had to cast. The next step was to go through each application and watch the actor’s showreel, from here we made shortlists of the leading candidates for each role.
Having multiple options for each role is key as you’ll find many actors not responding to the messages you have sent about the casting. This can really slow the process down and ideally, you want to nail casting down early which will allow you to finalise the shooting schedule earlier. Once our desired actors had accepted the roles the next step was to confirm their shoot dates and to organise their travel arrangements. For this particular shoot, each actor was only required for one day so accommodation wasn’t necessary. The last part of the process for us was to send the final drafts of the scripts over to the actors so they could prepare for their scenes.