Digital Filmmaking For Kids For Dummies

PROJECT 15

Choosing Actors for Your Film

Your actors are the face of your film; they take the story and dialogue you created and bring it to life through their performances. This is why a good actor can make a film — and a bad actor can break one.

When looking for an actor, you are looking for someone who will take on a character in your film and perform the lines with feeling and realism. Your audiences need to believe everything your actors say, and they need to believe they’re real.

When you wrote your film, you may have had someone in mind to play the characters. Some writers base their characters on an actor they have in mind, and some directors prefer to work with certain actors regularly because they’re comfortable with those actors and understand how to work with them.

As I said before, many people will offer to act in your film, but it’s important that you choose your actors carefully. Your film is your creation, it’s important to you, and you don’t want to let it down with a poor cast. You may want to act in your film, which is fine, but you will need to choose someone to direct your film whom you trust and whom you know will work well with you.

In this chapter, I show you how to choose actors to play the characters in your film and how to get the best from them.

Running Auditions

Let’s say you have a queue of people fighting over the main part in your film, and ...