Example of Invitation Letter / Pack for Outside Cast

1^st October 2012

Dear Mr Woollatt,

We would like to invite you to take part in our A2 practical coursework project for Media Studies on Friday 19th October 2012. We would like to cast you in one of the main roles for the film trailer we are producing.

We appreciate that this will be time-consuming so we have attached some materials to help you be as prepared as possible if you choose to accept the role. This will shorten the filming time. We would like you to play the teacher who was seen murdering someone by a small girl some years ago. He is shocked when she turns up in his class several years later. She does not recognise him, but is troubled by dreams that clearly relate to what she saw. Your character is determined to stop her sleeping so that she cannot reach the end of her dream.

We will be filming some of your scenes in a classroom and some just past the top field. Your normal work suit will be fine for classroom shots, but you will need old clothes for the murder scene as this is a drowning and you will be standing in the river to film it. We will be standing by with towels and hot chocolate!

We appreciate this is a big commitment. Please look at the film outline and the photographed storyboard to see if this is a role you owuld be willing to consider playing.

Yours sincerely

 Switch Media
(Oliver Jennings and Katherine Leonard: A2 Media Group)

PLOT OUTLINE

WAKING MEMORY

Lucy witnessed a murder as a small child, but did not really realise the significance of what she saw. However, she is troubled by disturbing dreams of the murder (a drowning)  on and off as she grows up.

As a teenager, she moves to a new school and the dreams begin again. This time, she sees more and more detail and the dreams begin to feel like a memory. The dreams seem to have been triggered by the move to the new school, and there are several adults taking an interest in Lucy. There is her English teacher, who seems kind and concerned, but Lucy often has her dreams after his lessons. The Head of the school seems to watch Lucy a lot, and there is also a suspicious caretaker who pays her more attention than seems normal. As Lucy begins to act more and more strangely, even her best friend becomes distant from her and she is sent to a counsellor, who prescribes her a sedative. Lucy tells the counsellor that she is sure that she is dreaming a memory, and that if she can get to the end of the dream, she will find out what happened.

Lucy’s medicine is stolen from her bag and replaced with a drug that keeps her awake. Clearly, someone is determined to stop her getting to the end of her dream. However, nobody will listen to her as she is acting strangely through lack of sleep and experiencing other hallucinations from her tiredness. One day, as the English teacher rolls up his sleeves in a lesson, she sees a large watch on his arm and remembers that she has seen this  before, on the arm of the man who is strangling a woman in her dream. The teacher realises that she has remembered who he is. Lucy makes an excuse to leave the lesson and starts to run home, but he follows her and tries to kill her. Luckily, the caretaker, who has been suspicious of the English teacher all along and has been investigating him, sees him following Lucy out of school, and together they manage to kill him at the end.