My plan to cast actors

Within my short-film, the story of "A Lost Soul" has 3 character that I must cast actors for project. The name of the characters are Max,Kevin and Jennifer.

How I intend on approaching my plan of casting the actors is to firstly find actors that I believe can embody the character in the way I have envisioned them; but in interesting factor I will address throughout the casting process is my intentions to challenge the generic conventions of casting by having actors who audience may not necessarily expect to them to play.

Within the film industry, most film-makers and producers have tend to use a majority of white actors to play lead roles within most media products; where as other raced actors are used as supporting characters. I have found that there is no real justification as to why some major film character are intended to be a white character but the creative team felt the need to have it portrayed by a white actor for more appeal from the audience. Only in rare circumstances have other raced actors are given the lead roles, due to the requirement of the character or the film's topic being address. An example is the topic of slavery or general racism; media products dealing with these ideas forcefully cast a diverse range of actors.

"12 Years a slave" and "Mission Impossible 4" are two examples of films that justify by opinion as they are products that utilise diverse casting to different extents. 

"12 Years a slave" has a obligation to cast a significant amount of black actors with a few white actors in order to help fit the story of slavery. However "Mission Impossible 4" had almost an entire white cast with a hand full of minor side characters that were played by black and asian actors. MI4 had no real justification as to why the lead character had to be played by white actors other than as a way to add bankable names to the project such as Tom Cruise.

( Article on racial casting in Hollywood ) This is an example of an article that evidently explains numerous examples of films within Hollywood where the film-makers have chosen to cast white actors to play roles of that are intended for asians; films such as "Aloha" and the upcoming superhero film "Doctor Strange" have characters that are asian or other ethnical background being played by white actors. Something that suffers from a lot of irony when film-makers intend to represent a state of reality when in fact they're further stepping away from that goal by casting actors to embody character out of the racial backgrounds. This is becoming too frequent, all of this is duty to the audience's fixation which the conventions of white actors; this is something that must be broken. 

This trend in the film/television industry is something I plan to challenge by looking for a diverse range of actors to play roles in my short-film.