Promoting your product or service might require interaction and empathy – especially if the context is emotive or ergonomic – and the best way of doing that is by building the narrative around humans!
Here’s an example: The Manor Collection are a boutique chain of hotels in Surrey and Kent. Our approach to their 2019 Christmas Campaign was a compelling and emotive series of three mini edits.
We focused on marketing the hotel’s Christmas Lunch by inspiring feelings of satisfaction, indulgence, comfort and warmth in the viewing audience. The visuals to support this are set around a table, set for a Christmas dinner and filled with joy. There are shots of the sumptuous food and drink, smiling faces, pulling crackers, warmth and family love. To paint this picture of Christmas bliss, we needed to hire actors for the roles of Grandma, Grandad, Mum, Dad and 3 children!
So, your video might need actors, and that’s easy right? Well, we are experienced in casting and hiring actors to work within our productions, but it does require a bit more consideration and planning.
So what are the things you should consider?
Budget
This may be obvious, but talent costs money. You need to be prepared to spend a bit more on your video to reap the rewards of having actors.
Whilst you can stipulate a day rate in a job advert it’s important to consider what is a fair wage and whether you’ll be covering expenses like transport and lunch. It’s also worth considering whilst you could set a very low day rate, you’ll not likely get the best talent applying for your role.
There are other costs associated with having actors in your production too and they come in the form of additional planning time and needing more personnel on shoot, but we’ll cover more on those later.
Character Profiles and Representation
When putting together a job advert it’s useful to have a really clear idea of the person you want to represent your brand. What demographic is the target audience for your product? This will help focus the range of applicants so there is less volume to sort through to find that perfect match.
If it is important to the role, you can request particular attributes such as age range, gender, ethnicity, hair colour, regional accent. However, this is also a great opportunity to consider representation and diversity. Could you have a blind casting? This is the practice of casting without considering the actor’s ethnicity, skin colour, body shape, sex and/or gender.
For example, if your product is coffee – and it’s the coffee that is important – it doesn’t matter who is experiencing the coffee. But if your product is aimed specifically at parents of newborns you are appealing to a very specific demographic, and you might want to think about representation.
In this example from our portfolio, we specifically needed to hire for the role of an elderly man and a middle aged woman. The product is a monitoring system for senior people living alone that uses discrete motion sensors and artificial intelligence to learn individual behaviour and activity patterns, sending notifications directly to a family member’s paired phone app. The production was greatly enhanced by the use of actors, creating a narrative that resonates with busy people with elderly loved-ones.
Now that you’ve got your job advert together, it’s time to make it public
We use a casting platform called Mandy to find and hire acting talent. It’s incredibly powerful, posting your advert directly to anyone who fits the key words in your ad to see if they are interested in applying. Whilst this is very effective, it does return A LOT of candidates, and to get even to a ‘long list’ it takes time to sort and review applications. You might get upward of 100 applicants per role!
The next question is do you have time and or budget for a casting day? This may really help to find out if the actors are a good fit for the role and if they can deliver what is required for the shoot. However, this is full day of pre-production and will require a location, staff and time to organise it.
Wardrobe
As soon as you bring actors into the mix, you generate a lot of questions! What will they wear? Will they provide their costume? If they do bring their own clothes, would you be prepared to compromise on your wardrobe items if they don’t own the garments you’ve requested?
If you want to control the wardrobe by providing costumes, how much money will you allocate to this? Who will source the clothes? We’ll need to gather clothing sizes from the actors and be prepared with back-ups if the first choice doesn’t fit or if they don’t look as expected on camera.
On this project for Plastfree, our client felt it was important to embrace individuality and wanted the actor’s own personality to come through in their outfit choices. This turned out to be a great idea creatively and practically with 6 actors on set each with 3 costume changes!
Make-up
Make-up isn’t just about beauty, it could encompass anything from screen-readiness to full prosthetics. What kind makeup do you want the actor to have? Will you have a makeup artist on set? If not, and the actors are doing their own make-up are they any good at it?
Crew
Having talent on a location shoot adds a whole other dimension to the day – it’s no longer just a client and service provider dynamic. It also increases the amount of management required on the shoot. A producer runs the shoot, and they are crucial for getting people in the right place at the right time. They manage everything that is happening away from set so that the creative team can focus. A director is primarily concerned with what’s happening in the scene and works with the talent, and the film crew to produce the best possible output. Essentially, you can’t run a shoot with just actors and a camera guy – there needs to be some go-betweens!
Seems like a lot? Don’t worry, we are professionals.
It does add some extra work and additional production time to your project, but it is very much achievable to include actors in your project. We have worked with professionals across several projects in varying degrees of complexity and scale, from 2 actors on location to 6 models in a professional studio set up! We love getting our teeth into an ambitious creative project, so get in touch with us for your next video project.
