Planning: Actors

Tomorrow we plan to begin shooting our music video, having finally been able to find two suitable actors who were free. As the basic idea for our video revolves around a relationship between a boy and a girl, we required both a male and female to act in our video. We wanted to keep them relatively young, in the late teens bracket, in order to capture some of the youthful innocence in line with Gabrielle Aplin's music and the lyrical value of our chosen song.

These were the two original actors that we had chosen to be in our video. We selected them as we felt that their image was pretty much perfect for the style that we wanted to convey. In terms of representation, we felt that it would be best to stick to the idea of youth and naivety in order to best represent the genre of music and the artist herself. We felt that to go down the more glamorous and sexualised route associated with the Pop genre would not be fitting for the song, and could potentially have a detrimental effect on the artist. Instead, we felt the style more fitting for Gabrielle Aplin and her sound would be that of the more conventional young, pretty girl. When researching the artist and the genre, we found that a lot of the focus in the images fell on the face and the hair of the female, so evidently these were key attributes we took into consideration when finding a lead female actor. Additionally, we felt that it was important a certain amount of chemistry existed between the two, in order to make the visuals flow more comfortably. We felt these actors fitted this role almost perfectly, in both image and style - they dressed in a typically indie fashion, which would immediately be recognized by the target audience of the video. Unfortunately, due to work and family commitments it became impossible to use these two actors in our video.

We arranged to reschedule on numerous occasions, but we could not afford to waste any more time so instead have arranged two alternative actors. While both are very different in image and style from our original idea, we felt that they are still suitable for the representations we want to portray. Our female actor, Beth, has pretty much all of the key attributes we were hoping for - i.e. the long flowing hair, pretty face, and typically indie kind of style. Our male actor, Oscar, is very different in appearance from our original intention - at first we had planned on using a typical 'indie' boy with longer hair, who was relatively aesthetically pleasing in light of the intended target audience of younger girls - it is a common feature of audience gratification in this sort of genre to include typically attractive actors, in order to appeal to the younger, female audience that is it's predominant fan base. However, we feel that this could work to our advantage, portraying the male character in less of a stereotypical and conventional light, perhaps heightening the sense that the two are not on the same level, and imposing more of a divide between them.