Actor Age in FanFilms

Who cares if your cast is the right age or not. As long as you liked the result then it's fine. If people don't find it believable, it doesn't matter. What does matter is actually making the film and learning from it.

 

Well, that's true.

But if someone is touting their FanFilm as "one of the greatest" and/or wants his FanFilm to be taken seriously, then the "look" of the actors most certainly does have a lot to do with it.

If he is making the film for pure enjoyment, without expectations of people praising it as "one of the best," then you're right - it doesn't matter what his actors look like.

 

there's another side to this as well that I don't think anyone has mentioned.

some of the appeal of "the fanfilm" is just showing what we can do and seeing that anyone with time, equipment, and energy can pull off some pretty convincing special effects. it's fun to see what technology has done to make my childhood dreams real.

when I was 15, we made movies, but doing convincing lightsaber effects on your PC just wasn't possible for the average star wars fan.(not that anyone here is average!)

my point is, I am pretty impressed when I see some of the younger members of this board do effects I just recently figured out. It almost makes me jealous!!

so, use your age to your advantage. do it just to say, "look at what we can do, at our age." get some attention, and then when you are old enough to look the parts, everyone is already awaiting your next film.

of course, the key IMO to an awesome fanfilm is still good dialogue and an interesting story.

have fun!

 

Ive been atTACked...
Well I do see where you guys are comming from and yea I guess it is kind of hard for high school age students to pull off middle aged adults. However, for most people who are mainly making a movie for fun, it probably doesn't really matter that much. So I guess its really up for grabs.

 

Ideally if you can use older people (for the older parts) then obviously do. But personally I would go with the people that are most reliable, and you are comfortable working with. The biggest hurdle in making fanfilms is actually finishing them, so do everything you can to increase your chances of success. If that means enlisting your 15 years old friends to play 24 year olds, then so be it.

One thing you could do is write a story around the people you have (Padawans here we come) and take it from there. You'll always get a few people sweating that the person looks ten years to young, just as you will get people sweating about the sabre auras, the canon storyline ( ) and the acting. You just have to do the best you can, with what you have around you. If you actually finish a film you're doing well already though, and you can always improve upon those problem areas for the next film.

Just don't have 18 years olds trying to play 60 year olds.

Having said that Ryan W did exactly that in ALD and it seemed to work out fine

 

Well, since we've already got the main casting down, the script is being written around the actors. It wasn't hard to tell why we have young people for the Jedi and smuggler (proving himself as a Knight and inherited business from late father, respectively).

Interesting on that canon storyline bit. I do everything I can to do that, and actually (with Lord Rive's permission) am including a bit of Duality in it (Sith Terminator, Korriban [from trailer], names here and there). I've PM'd him (or was it E-mail?)... haven't checked it yet.

On the topic of a next film, we won't have as much of a problem, now, will we? First, we'll look older, and more time could pass for our characters, depending upon just how much we can stetch our ages here. But that's for a couple years from now...