Major Project-Casting

Casting for Grit was achieved via team work, within the production Lex knows his characters and therefore I thought that I would make sure he would know who I have auditioning for what role. With this Lex was there for all auditions and received all the audition tapes that came in.

We put up the adverts on Casting Call Pro and Star Now, these adverts mentioned the character traits the film and what dates would be required from the cast. We received many applicants for each role, Casting Call Pro had 24 applicants and Star Now had 15. From these application we had to narrow down to the people that not only looked like the characters but also people who we thought would be interested in a student role.

From these people we asked if they would like to come in and audition or send us an audition video. We received these over a period of time in which I also talked to the applicants about how we could get them on board (pay, travel and food). The two main roles were offered more than those that would only be needed for a few days, such roles as Archie and Sean would require the actor to be available a lot longer than those actor who is paying the role of Perry.

We encountered issues with a lot of the actors as we were not offering them enough money, this was at least 60% of our applicants decided we were not offering them enough and decided to not be part of the project. Other issues were encountered when the dates were further discussed, some of the actors could commit to some days but not all, this could not be worked out in the schedule, this meant we had to part ways with these actors. From this we had a very small number of applicants, this lead to Lex and I searching on the sites for actors that fit our criteria, from this we got more audition tapes and had more of a choice of people that we had already picked. Some of the people auditioned for one role but then was chosen for a different role, at first we were concerned that they would pull out of the project as they would not want the other role but thankfully all the actors were happy with given roles.

Once we had chosen our actors, terms were agreed and contracts were signed we went a head and sent them the current script. The feedback from the actors lead us to believe they were right from the roles, each of them engaged with the script and found that they loved the characters they were cast as.

Our cast is as follows:

Jennie Hillard as Zoe

Daniel Shelley as Perry

Zed Josef as Sean 

James Percy Smith as Archie 

These cast members were happy with the dates and if not they were negotiated, each person has signed and sent the contract back to me. They are all excited for filming and we are excited to work with them.