Screen Test

When establishing whether to use people in music videos or any widely distributed media product you must carry out a screen test to ensure they look good and "work" behind the camera. This may sound silly but what can happen a lot is an actor wont work behind the camera, causing a huge amount and anxiety to the casting director.

When carrying out a screen test the casting director must think about many things. One of these things is accessibility, this may not be so essential for a big media product but for us is a key thing to think about. We will also need to think about whether the band would work well in an image that we would publish in our Digipak. We would also have to think about their personality and their amenability to being directed and whether they are accommodating enough to take instructions given by the director.

As we are using a real band who are based in Birmingham we felt there was no need to ask them to travel down for a screen test. Instead we looked on their website at their pictures, and some of their videos on http://www.youtube.com/. Whilst looking at these videos we looked at the comments on them, almost every comment was positive and some people had said they had seen them live and they had great stage presence. This gave us a good indication of their cohesiveness on stage. We needed to do this as the mixture of people and age groups could create a strange combination. When we did the camera test we noticed that the two female members of the band looked better on screen as they are more aesthetically pleasing and attractive, whereas the older male member of the band was less attractive. However, he did have a face which worked well behind the camera.But they did work very well on stage and all looked brilliant behind the camera.