This past week, our cast was revealed to the rest of the crew and I am beyond happy with it. And massive shoutout to our casting director and director for, not only finding the talent, but also finding and creating a diverse cast.

Without getting too into it, but with all the Hollywood ‘white-washing’ that’s been happening over the past few years, it’s nice to know, that even though we’re just a bunch of university students making a web series, we’re keeping an open mind and even playing field and we’re focusing on a person’s ability to act rather than their appearances.

But back to the real topic, since we have the cast, now we have to focus on the scheduling. There was some confusion at first because the production schedule that was given out to the cast was one that wasn’t fully finalised yet. And with that, the response was that the actors were mainly available to film during the week anyway. So as a team, we decided that it would be best for us to work around the schedules of the actors. Though we all have other commitments, we were all willing to work around it since the plan was that one episode would take at least 2 days to shoot, and each day would only go for a few hours. It was also more convenient for us to film on weekdays since most of the crew worked weekends, and a couple of the actors were also unavailable on weekends.

After finally building a comprehensive table, or rather two – one for the crew and one for the cast, of everyone’s availabilities, we did hit another cross road.  We had a lot of difficulty in accommodating to the availability of one actor that was cast as one of the characters that had a fairly major role appearing in majority of the scenes and required a lot of interactions with the other characters. And from what we had heard from the casting team, this actor was perfect for the role and nailed their audition.

But unfortunately, we had to let them go due to limited availability and we were already working against time constraints to film and edit these two episodes (amongst other things we needed to do) within the next couple of weeks. Fortunately, one of the writers who played this same character in the pilot was willing to step in and so we were able to finally finalise the production schedule with rehearsal and filming dates included.

Seeing that finalised production schedule did bring me back to the pilot episode we had filmed earlier. I can’t even remember if we had a production schedule, but regardless, we didn’t even follow it and we were unorganised then. So it’s definitely very enlightening to see how much we’ve progressed from there and how much more tightly and somewhat professional we’re working.