The girl: Sophie JacksonWe picked Sophie because we know that not only is she a good actress and would approach the role well but also because she looks the right age and would comply well with our narrative.
Policemen: Phil (media teacher)
Adam (media teacher)
Chris (theatre teacher
We knew that we wouldn't be able to use students for these roles because they would look far to young. In the industry, they almost always use people far older than the character to play the characters because its more practical financially and in terms of hours. Because of this, it's become the norm to see actors older than the characters in nearly all media text. This is why we simply wouldn't get away with using students. So we knew the easiest option would be to use teachers. However, the problem presented with this was that our shoot would be on location and would likely take most of the day and it would be hard to get 6 teachers out all day. We decided to try and narrow this down and be think more practically as to how many teachers we'd realistically be able to get out of school. Phil and Adam are also media teachers and as they've been used in previous thrillers, it's likely that they'll be available. Chris is more of a gamble in terms of his availability but if he can we would definitely want to use him.
Detective: Mike Niland
Initially we wanted Mike to be one of our Policemen but when discussing the characters we realised that it may not be suitable to have him playing a policeman because he has rather long hair which simply wouldn't comply with stereotypical policemen. He suggested that he may play a detective, giving us more variety within the cast as well as then being able to have a larger cast, getting us closer to our original aim of having 6 officers.