Envisioning Our Characters

 For the past two days, we have been focusing on the characters of our story. Trying to come up with names, background stories, personalities, the dynamics between them, etc. Inspiration is everywhere as they say, so we decided to name our characters Betty, James, and August. One of the members of my group is a really big fan of Taylor Swift and she was able to create this storyline with her songs. Her songs and projects always have a hidden message, so this time she created this love triangle story with the names and messages she used throughout her album. The group loved the idea of having hidden messages and how she was able to convey this plot that only those who understood the message and were able to figure it out. 

From the start, we talked about having three main characters and their ages would be between 15-17. Since the name August is more of a neutral gender name, we have talked about having a non-binary factory portray it. In today's media, representation for non-binary people is not common, it's extremely hard to see non-binary characters be portrayed by non-binary people, especially for main character roles. Since we don't know anyone that is non-binary, we are trying to see if we know someone that does because we want the representation to be real and true to the character's role. These are just some ideas for the characters August, but if anything happens and we are not able to find someone to portray them then we are going to change the character because if we are to do this, we want to make sure we do it right. 

The three main characters would be friends, and a possible relationship between two of them is being talked about. We want James to be a more immature, not fully developed young adult because usually in films the teenager characters are portrayed by older people that don't look like the typical real-life teenagers and this often leads to expectations that don't come true when one goes through life growing up. A main focus of ours is making the film and story as real and authentic as possible so that the audience is actually able to relate to the characters physically and emotionally.