Casting - Our Characters

For our opening scene we have spent a lot of time researching into characters and creating individual characters for all those we had drafted onto our storyboards. Overall, we have two protagonists and 3 minor characters in our opening scene.

For our two protagonists we came up with a criteria to create an individual personality and gave this to our actors in order to make the characters as believable as possible. We spent time researching into the portrayal of homosexuals in different media texts such as Glee where we looked into how young homosexual teenagers are represented and Modern Family where we looked into how a serious homosexual couple were represented.

For the main protagonist Matt we decided he should be:
- Slightly Insecure
- Stereotypically Normal
- Friendly
- Excitable (around Sam)
- Confused

For Matt's love interest - our second protagonist Sam - we decided he should be:
- Excitable
- Hyper
- In Love
- Over-dramatic
- Stereo-typically Gay
- Funny

We found the actors for these two characters through Sian's mutual friends and both actors were homosexual which made them more comfortable when filming the scenes than if the actors were straight.
We cast the 3 friends based on mutual friends who were comfortable with acting and available during the allocated times on our production schedule.

The cast was as follows:
Matt - Matt Wallpole
Sam - Tom Higgins
Friend 1 - Tom Hendry
Friend 2 - Christopher Mcnulty
Friend 3 - Becky Harris

Before filming, we informed each of the cast members about their role and gave them an insight into each character to prepare them and make the beginning of filming more efficient and we also instructed them on the costumes. For Matt and Sam in the first scene, we asked the actors to wear warm clothing, portraying the idea that it was set in winter. For the scene in the school canteen, we asked all the actors to wear suits and to look smart to make the setting more credible and believable.