Casting Choices

Within the lyrics for our chosen song ‘Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked’, there are four characters depicted. As we are taking a narrative style of a music video (with elements of disjuncture) we therefore have decided to cast people to be featured within our music video as these roles.

We initially had a meeting to plan on paper our casting ideas, or at least ideas of what the people we will cast should be like for the part.

The four characters which we will include within our music video are as follows:

• The Protagonist – The main character depicted within the lyrics as “I”
• The Harlot – “Pretty Little Thing” – The character who approaches the Protagonist within verse 1 of the song

The lyrics hint towards the idea of this character being a prostitute “If you pay the right price your evening would be nice”

• The  Mugger – “Man crept out of sight… Put a gun up to my head” – The character who approaches the Protagonist within verse 2 of the song
• The Priest – “Preacher man in cuffs”

The image below shows the ideas from our initial casting meeting:

An image showing the notes made within our initial ‘casting’ meeting

The notes from the meeting give our ideas to what we believe each of the characters should be like for our interpretation of the lyrics. Below is a summary of each character and how as a group we wish for the character to be portrayed, along with our final casting choices of each individual character.

The Protagonist – as a group we decided to cast, myself (Rob Anthony) as the protagonist for our music video, due to my interest in theatre meaning that I shall be able to use my acting skills for the character, especially whilst lip syncing. As we have made the creative decision to only have the protagonist lip syncing. Meaning for the role I must learn the entirety of the song and practice lip syncing. We made the decision that I would be playing this character as a group almost immediately, due to my previous acting within our opening sequence in our year 12 coursework.

Our interpretation of the protagonist is that he is an ‘average guy’, aged 17/18 and throughout the music video we wish to show the character degrading due to the play on the words “wicked” featured and repeated within the song. Therefore our interpretation is that the protagonist is degraded morally and changed by the actions which are narrated through the lyrics of the song. (e.g. being approached by a prostitute, being mugged and witnessing a priest steal money from a church)

This means that by the end of the song we aim to show the protagonist committing violent/disapproved actions which the character refused at the beginning of the song. For example in verse 1 the protagonist refuses the Harlot, however we are contemplating the idea that towards the end of the video the character will return to her, showing his degrading morals as a character.

The Harlot – The “Pretty Little Thing” as described within the lyrics of verse 1 was a difficult role to cast in terms of practicality of asking someone to play the role and also having them appear flirty on camera. Meaning that we needed to cast someone who had prior experience in acting. For this role we cast a girl who is able to act in front of a camera, adding authenticity to the piece. The actress’ name is Kelly Barnett and she will be portraying the ‘Harlot’ within our video. Thus meaning she must appear flirty towards the protagonist.

Significantly Kelly is older than myself, this means that she looks more believable in role as we needed the character to within a similar age range so that she could appear attractive to our target audience, however we felt that casting someone a year older helps create the authenticity of the character. This is important to us as a group as we are aware that the themes within the song are more mature meaning that it would be inappropriate to cast a girl who is younger than our protagonist.

The Mugger – “Man crept out of sight” These lyrics depicting the mugger within the second verse of the song, seem to describe (in our interpretation of the character) a man dressed in dark clothing, who has an aggressive nature. This idea can be further seen through the lyrics  “he put a gun up to my head”. Therefore showing to us that there are themes of violence within this character.

For this character we also cast another member of our group (Joseph Giggs), due to his similar experience acting. Reassuring our group that he will hopefully be able to play the part convincingly. Additionally casting two of the main characters as people within our group limits the number of people who we will have to arrange for filming dates, meaning that we can be more organised due to these casting choices.

With both prior mentioned parts of the Harlot and Mugger we have planned to use framing, obscure camera angles and possibly editing effects in post production to avoid showing fully each actor, which we hope will help with the authenticity of the piece. However these are only initial ideas as we have yet to film. Although once filming is finished we shall experiment with these ideas and possible after effects which could help disguise the actors in their roles and increase the music videos authenticity.

The final character the Priest, has been mentioned within a previous post. We have decided not to cast a person for this part, due to the impracticalities and issues which we would face when hiring an older actor to convincingly play the part, whilst also identifying the potential issues which could come through organising filming sessions, as casting members outside out group could lead to difficulties when attempting to schedule filming sessions due to peoples availability.

Therefore we have made the choice (as mentioned in a previous post) to use found footage of the older man, however we plan to edit this footage to ensure that we only use 20 seconds at the most of footage, and also to ensure the personalisation of this footage, through the effects we apply in editing. Although as mentioned, editing decisions have not yet been fully confirmed as we are yet to film and therefore can not begin to fully consider editing choices until we have our footage to hand.

In conclusion the casting of the four characters presented difficulties, although I believe that the decisions we have made as a group will help towards the authenticity and ultimately the success of our music video. As for a moderately narrative music video, the descriptions given by the lyrics are key to creating the narrative story arc within our video, meaning it was imperative that these choices be made and considered closely if we are to create a successful music video.

As an additional feature to this post I have linked a video below, which features our chosen song ‘Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked’ by Cage The Elephant, with the lyrics on screen showing visually the narrative story told through the lyrics, which includes within each of the 3 verses, the characters which we have made casting decisions for:

Although this video is not perfect I have sourced it from YouTube in order to show fully the lyrics that describe the characters presented alongside our chosen song.