Initial Planning of our Thriller

When we were set the task of making the introduction to a thriller, we first decided in our group to discuss which sub-genre of thriller we wanted to produce. I wanted to pursue a mafia/gangster thriller set in the 20's, as it seemed like the type of film which you could get lots of atmosphere and emotion into. However it became apparant that things such as costume and finding somewhere that wasn't obviously filmed in modern day would be too difficult. Other sub-genres we decided against, for reasons such as costume and special effects, were the horror and action thrillers.
In the end we have decided on doing a crime thriller. This allows us to create a 'case' that can absorb the viewer, and use locations available to us. Thinking about locations, we decided there were rooms in school that could be made to look like police rooms, but we didn't have a solid idea that we were definately going to go ahead with, and so can't decide on locations at this point.
Thinking of actors we could get to star in our production, the only people we could think that would be available to film at similar times to us that would be willing to be in are film were our friends. We decided on a few friends who we thought would look more fitting for the part that we could ask to be in it.