Pre-Production: Change of Casting

Within my previous post, I mentioned that we decided to hire Estina Lauretta to play the character of Jenna Johnson, and Sakura Suzuki to play her mother, Rachel Johnson. However, unfortunately, due to some unforeseen circumstances, actress Sakura Suzuki no longer is able to partake within the production of our horror film. 

My group and I made sure that before we officially hired the actresses, we requested that they inform us as soon as possible if they for some reason are unable to film or no longer wish to be apart of our production. Sakura, therefore, informed us of her decision straight away which was helpful for our group as this gave us time to find a replacement before filming officially began. I previously mentioned within my contingency plan that if an issue like this occurred, we would be prepared as we already have two understudies who are ready to take the actress’ places. However, unfortunately, our understudy for the role of Jenna Johnson, also now is unavailable to film due to having a busy schedule. This, therefore, required my group to quickly find a suitable actress to play the part of Rachel Johnson, however, we found this extremely difficult to do and had no other choice but to use one of our group members, Bavleen Korana to take upon this role. 

During post-production, we initially set to hire two actresses of the same ethnicity to play the role the characters in order to make it obvious to the audience that they were related in some way. However, despite both being Asian, Bavleen and Estina do not share the same ethnicity as Bavleen is Indian and Estina is Philippine. This, therefore, forced my group to cut certain scenes from the trailer which would show Rachel’s face as this would ultimately confuse the audience and make our storyline unclear. Instead, we decided to feature Rachel in only one scene however within this scene, the audience will not be able to tell that Bavleen is playing the character as they will be unable to identify her due to her face being fully covered by her hair. 

Although this issue has resulted in my group and I to be forced to change certain parts of our trailer and essentially cut out the character of Rachel, we believe we still can make our trailer effective and clear if we correctly use the conventions the horror genre. 

Bavleen Korana as Rachel Johnson.