Justification for Actor

When choosing our actor we wanted a boy looks about 17, but also still looks innocent, however, we didn't want him to look too angelic as his actions in the play break the law.
Looking at child and teenage actors in other thriller films, they look their age but don't look too cute. A perfect example of this is Damien from The Omen.

 

He is still obviously a young boy, but his dark features ensure that he doesn't look like a harmless character because he becomes posessed by the devil.

 

However, despite our character breaking the law, he is actually fighting for the greater good and so is represented as a positive character; because of this, we want him to appear kind and with good intentions. Similar to the boy in The Shining, our character should be kind looking.

The boy doesn't have bright blonde hair and blue eyes but doesn't have dark hair and piercing green eyes like Damien.

 

Nick, we think, is a mix of the two and he has quite a mature face so we can clearly see his age. This helps to communicate his Autism as the audience will realise there is something slightly strange about a boy in the top end of his teenage years wearing childish pyjamas.

Change of Actor

Unfortunately, our actor, Andrew, has an exam on our shoot day so we've had to re-cast our part. We've chosen an AS Student who we think suits the part well, Nick Lyasovsky. He's similar to Andrew in height and build and has dark hair, something which we wanted, to ensure he doesn't look too innocent (blonde hair may look slightly angelic)

 

This is a photo of Nick taken on shoot day. He's wearing his costume over the top of his clothes to try for size.



Layout of Set- Change

This is a photo of just over half of the set. As you can see, the main colours are blue, green and black. Cold, boyish colours which don't seem homely, but make his surroundings look like a workplace.

We've decided that by showing the boy, in his room, waking up, we're giving too much of a narrative and therefore giving too much of the story away. As it's a thriller, we feel we should withhold more information, such as; who is this boy? what is he doing? where is he? By removing the context of the situation, much more curiosity is created.
Here is a sketch of our final set design.

New Storyboard for our Thriller