Gayathri Smitha----International Womens' Day

Casting Coup—Gayathri Smitha

She is young and one of India's prominent casting directors, worked and contributed to a lot of ad films for various brands that you must have seen on TV such as Frooti, Incredible India and many more. Gayathri Smitha has been applauded and recognised for her work on various ads including the Frooti (the one with Shahrukh Khan and the kids). She has also casted for the Indian leg of AR Rahman's music video. 

Casting for ---ad films/ movies --- what is the criteria?

 Usually, in our country most casting directors including myself have assisted directors for years. This not only helps understand a director's way of thinking but also makes film sensibilities better. If a casting director understands what the film is about then half the job is done.

A casting director is a person that is constantly on the lookout for fresh interesting people and actors. Hence, I think it is very important to have good communication skills along with a keen eye to see somebody as potential cast for a film. 

 Most ad films use young children  --- this is a very calculated trend, are there any particular reasons  for this?

An ad film script is written basis many factors like market research, communication strategy, brand position, brand value, target audience, etc.

Kids in general are instantly likeable and they appeal to practically everybody. A complex subject can easily be put forward to the audience if it were to be represented by kids, for the cuteness factor and longer recall value. 

What are the factors one has to consider while casting?

  Once the director gives the brief of the story and the kind of actors he/she is looking at, we  have to look for actors/models that suit that brief. Every single time the key is to cast extremely interesting actors who are memorable, great performers and are not over -used on TV. They need to be extremely relatable and real. When the audience sees them it needs to pull a string somewhere in them. Another very important factor is the budget. To be able to cast really good actors within a given budget is the key.

What are the challenges that you encounter?

      Nowadays, due to expansion of digital media all the films run everywhere. In advertising specially, once an actor is liked by the audience a lot of other ads also want to cast them. This means that the actor is seen on every third ad you see. So, the challenge everyday is to find new actors to cast in order to make sure that the audience is never bored of seeing the same actors in all ads. This is the biggest challenge because it involves everything from looking for theatre groups to cast from or acting schools or colleges or personal friends to street casting. 

Which was the most challenging assignment & why?

 The most challenging film to cast for was "The Magic of Frooti". This film needed kids and older guys that looked alike. They were needed to be shown as the older counterparts. This meant that everything from the hair texture to face structure to mannerisms needed to be similiar. Another thing was to convince both the kids and the older guys to agree to create funky hair styles on them. This was extremely challenging but we pulled it off and the final product was loved by everybody.