Selecting Actors

Our music feature required a lot of actors which we did not really pay much thought to when planning. To create a believable party atmosphere we would require at least 20 people to have full shots and the likelihood of finding 20 people who were free the same time as my group was very slim. So, we made some alterations of actors. The actors we used were:

Emily- The protagonist. Wearing a large fur coat, Emily was our passive bystander of the partner who shifted room to room observing the chaos.
Bella- The "Mean Girl"- inspired character
Natasha- The artist, inspired by the Chvrches lead singer Lauren Mayberry. This is the character featured in any shots that were in a completely different setting.
Sam- The preppy, nerdy character seen with his partner inspired by the stereotypical preppy fashion. I also played a second role as an athletic character as we had little actors. This character's costume was inspired by college jocks in America; adorning a bomber jacket to mimic the varsity jackets on College campuses.
Georgia- The scene character- initially our goth character, Georgia was cast as a scene kid to be more toned down but a distinctly different personality type.
Jake- Jock 2- Jake played a role of a jock who was in a relationship with the preppy character wearing a simple polo top.

We also had other characters who fulfilled small roles. These include : Megan, Rubi, Alec and Emily. These characters had some distinct styles, most notably Megan as she wore a bright red skirt to play an indie character as well as Rubi who wore double denim to appear indie.

We selected Emily as our main character as Emily already had an effective costume for the character, most notably tall boots. Emily also volunteered to be the protagonist as she was often free for shooting and she could be a most shoots. As she plays the most important character it is only fitting she be available most and Emily was.

Bella played the "Mean Girl" character because the costume was easy for Bella to get and the character was featured often so we could guarantee she would be at the shoot. Although the costume isn't hot pink as the "Mean Girl" outfits are the actual style of a short skirt and colour coherence is still present. The choice of full black was due to the song's dark undertone and black did not suit the theme. We used Bella as our primary negative representation of British youth by encompassing all bad representations of youth in her character. We gave her character a bottle to show she is drinking out of the bottle which is considered reckless and we showed her passed out on the bed. Bella's character is highly chaotic and is therefore our negative representation.

I played two characters as I was at every shoot and we could not find many male actors. I had both costume for the preppy character and the jock character so it was easy to be in the shots needed.

Jake's character was featured a few times playing the preppy character's boyfriend. Jake was the one of three males we could get hold of for the music video. He was a good selection as he was happy to do what ever we needed him to do and helped our shoot happen quicker.

The rest of the characters in our music video were given different styles and personalities but we did not give them their own scene like the main characters. This is because we wanted to have a diverse selection of characters but could not explicitly feature all of them due to time constraint. Also, during our shoot we encountered a few issues so we used some footage from one house and the rest from Natasha's house on a different day. We therefore had a different pool of actors .Rubi for example was only available one day, as was Alec, Jake, Georgia and Emily. Therefore, their characters could not all have their own scenes and were used as background characters. We originally had a large pool of actors however when we got close to shooting our actors dropped out and we were left with a day of shooting where we had to find whoever we could and luckily Emily and Alec were available to film.

Despite the many complications during filming the actors we used did fine and the music video's original ideas, concepts and themes were not altered and our message was conveyed all the same.