Main Task - Cast

Cast

In our film, we have two main actresses which are Katie who is the girl that has a shadow stalking her and Dr Macbeth who tries to help Katie getting rid of her fears. However, in our two minute opening scene, none of these actresses are in the clip. This is because we decided to use some creativity and wanted to begin with a mystery and so the audience will feel the need to watch further on. The scene involves Katie’s mother and her murderer who are shown during the film but near the end of the film where they are revealed in front of the audience.

We had to change our actors/actresses many times before we actually shot the whole scene with the actor and actress shown in the scene making it our final and finished piece. This is due to various reasons which affected our production badly. Our original actors who were going to play the part were Sabah Sarwar and Furhaad Ahmed. After Furhaad was unable to do the acting part, we asked several other male actors who would be willing to be in our film but some were unable to take part due to their and our filming schedule clashing. Others said they have tried acting in the past and were not able do without having to laugh and making strange faces. One of the main reason was that many of them were to shy and didn’t want to be on camera. By then, we had to think of other ideas to get a male actor as no one would help us and so we had idea of dressing a girl up as a boy as the boys face in the film is going to covered anyway. However, we chose not to use this idea as there were many drawbacks to this and that it might not work as the audience may figure out that it is a girl rather than a boy acting. In the end we picked someone who was capable of acting with a straight face and who could film on our time that we needed him. Even though our original female actor backed out on us, we were easily able to replace her as we already had a another actress who would do it as she told us beforehand at the start of our production that she would be willing to do the acting for us and so it didn’t take us long to replace the female actress.

Actor/Actress in the finished piece

Katie’s mother is played by Nadia Hafiz. We chose Nadia in the end as she has past experience in acting which made it easier on us and her aswell. Her acting benefited us and our production in many ways. This is because when we tried filming with the actors we had before her, they were unable to keep a straight face and we had to take individual shots many times. This was very time consuming and made it harder on us as they were unable to do the acting without having to laugh. However, when we did our shots with Nadia, she was able to get into the flow and kept a straight face and do the acting perfectly and in the way we wanted her to do. The only problem that we were facing with Nadia was her facial expressions. For the scene, the actress had to be scared, terrified and tired. For some of the early shots, Nadia’s facial expressions did not show this and didn’t fit in into the atmosphere we were trying to create but once trying some shots without recording, she was able to understand the emotion that we were trying to capture and show this on her face. Nadia is an hardworking and excellent actress who was able to complete our filming task within 2 hours, even though we had to retake some shots a few times before getting it right.

Even though the boy shown in the scene doesn’t play a long role and is only seen after half of the scene has gone, he plays a very significant role not only in that scene but also in the film as a whole. This role was played by Memz Karakus who in the past has no experience in the acting field. However he completed our task with patience and focusing directly on the acting. In the opening scene, we don’t actually see his face but only his eyes. This is because we don’t want to reveal his identity to the audience yet as it creates suspense and urges the audience to watch further. Memz easily understood what he had to do and we only had to retake some shots couple of times. Overall we were satisfied with Memz acting as it was first time that he has tried to do something like this in the acting field.

Actor/Actress that were picked originally

Sabah Sarwar was supposed to be playing Katie’s mother when we first started our production. We had already done most of Sabah’s shots which did take a lot of time to do. Although Sabah hasn’t done any acting before, her acting was very good and believable. Her facial expressions were the best part as she showed to the audience what we looking for as she looked scared and tired. This would have been a great effect in the movie if we had put her in. However we were not able to complete her shots due to her not wearing the same clothes as when she wore them in the shots we had done and this was the case every time we were going to do some filming. Another reason that we couldn’t complete the filming with her was that the male actor in our film was done free when Sabah was which made it hard for both us and Sabah. In the end, she backed out of the film for reasons unknown. However we already had a back-up actress who was willing to be in our film which benefited us in many ways.

Furhaad Ahmed was going to be our mystery character in the original cast. We had not done any filming with Furhaad and so we didn’t lose any work with him however it was very stressful for us when he did leave as it was harder for us to replace him. We had not seen any of Furhaad’s acting in the past so we don’t know whether he fitted the role or not but personality wise he was perfect for the role. Due to mainly scheduling problems and other small issues, Furhaad decided to back out of the film. It took us a long period of time to find Furhaad to do the acting for us and so when he dropped out it was difficult to find someone to replace but in the end we did find someone else suitable and free to do this for us.

Overall I am glad the way things turned out and am completely satisfied with the cast who play a role in our production. They worked well together and individually and were also very understanding and patient towards us as they knew that we did not have much experience in the filming field.