Pre-Production on The Wyatt Diversion

Pre-production seems to have been largely successful, with the crew ready to shoot during our designated filming week. My two main jobs in the run up to filming have been to find our major location (Victor Blake's house) and to find a cast.

Location
When developing the script I recognised the need to find Victor's house as an opportunity to find an exciting location that would look impressive on screen, and would be somewhere that Victor would be proud (and smug) to call home. After some extensive research into what grand houses there were in the county, I emailed about twenty different places, from museums to hotels, colleges to conference venues. I was sure to keep these emails polite and flattering, as well as hinting that we didn't have a budget as such!
I ended up receiving four or five replies from venues that were both available during our filming week, and willing to hire. A couple of locations were even kind enough to offer a discount on their usual hire rate in understanding of our financial restraints. All in all I am really happy with our final location of Hanbury Manor.

Casting
I posted a casting call on StarNow as well as researching and emailing quite a few actors I thought would be suitable for the roles needed. The important aspect of this task was to be able to sell our film idea and characters in an engaging and brief way. Although we started out getting a good number of applications, the number of actors who then both responded and confirmed their availability soon declined, and I was relieved that I had asked so many people as filming week got closer. There was also one instance when a potential actor had been injured and could no longer take part in the project, at which point luckily we had some alternatives.
In retrospect I would have liked to have started looking for actors a week or two earlier than I did in the end, as it would have increased the chances of an actor being available, and not having already taken another job.

From these experiences I have learned to always have back up plans backed up, even if everything seems to be sorted. I have found that it is useful to always anticipate something to go wrong and to have a solution to that problem if it arises.