Wednesday, 22 November 2017

PLANNING: CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Hot seating your characters (like this) can help you develop how you represent them. 
It also gets everyone on board by delving into the backstory of the character. 
Pick a realistic interview situation and write the script outline.
Video your interview (make it brief) and post it on your blog together with the following information (in your own words).

PLANNING: CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
Open source HERE


For my character in my film opening entitled *********,  we decided to interview our protagonist in order to develop his character further.
We were inspired by an article written by Charlie Sierra about building the back story to film characters in which he quoted from Riding the Alligator, a book written by Pen Densham, an Academy Award nominated filmmaker.
In one of the chapters in the book, he provides a check list of questions every writer and director should ask of themselves when they are developing their characters. The purpose of this is to outline a deep understanding of your characters for both the actors and director, and for motivating a character’s choices or actions.

My Character Interview

(Example) As my film opening features only one character in a world without anyone else, we decided that rather than a questionnaire interview, we would use a video diary of our character asking himself and answering the questions as if he is communicating through the camera to anyone who might find it, which is a creative way to handle the questionnaire whilst still keeping with the solitary theme of the opening...(video interview + script follows)
(Example) One of my central characters is a young girl, we have decided to compose a series of exchanges that she made using What's App with her friend in which she confides her worries about her sister. Her friend asks her a series of questions about her state of mind... (screenshots of What's App exchanges follow)
(Example) Our protagonist is a senior police officer who is struggling with his job (meeting targets; pleasing a critical boss) and his family (his daughter challenges him and he questions his ability to relate to her). He is interviewed by a police psychiatrist after the incident when he knocks down a teenager on his bike.



Tuesday, 21 November 2017

PLANNING: CREATING PROPS

  • We set up shots to create our fictional company ROBOTICA.
The plan was to create props to dress the set of our office, such as publicity material, newspaper articles, press releases for the robot product.

  • We dressed our three principal actors in office wear: smart suits, ties and asked them to look smart and clean-shaven.
  • Stance (posture) was key in showing their assertiveness and sense of ambition. 
  • We took about 20 shots and selected the ones that best represented their sense of ruthlessness and business drive. 
  • They need to look super confident, arrogant, cocky and therefore unaware that their robot could actually be a liability that gets out of control.
We used Airdrop to send our photos to our computers.

Luca created a YouTube channel to upload the MP4 file.

We used the collage tool Fuzel to present this planning exercise.
Fuzel Collage  allows the creation of animated and still collages.


It led to the creation of authentic-looking publicity material and news reports that I present in my next post.