Characters? I Hardly Know Them

Hey Blog!

Because we made our film opening so character-centered, it is now very important that we actually talk about these characters: who they are or will be during this film. Our story has two central characters, though one more so than the other, and Sofia and I have worked hard to develop both of these in depth so that we have complex characters whose feelings and attitudes towards life have reasonable logic behind them. Basically, there needs to be a reason why each character acts the way they do especially in the face of trouble.

Our first character is Lily. She is an optimistic young girl who is about to go to college. She is sweet, excitable, passionate—sunshine personified. Though Lily is not quite the main character in the story, she is central to the storyline as the major conflict in the "film" would revolve around her—and her friend's reaction to said conflict, obviously. Her name is, I think, my favorite part of this character because it just has an underlying meaning to it that we actually came across accidentally, though it ended up working out quite well. We found the name Lily while looking for cool or fun names that were rather typical from the 90's or early 2000's and, actually, Lily isn't overly common for the era, but it was seen quite often nonetheless; and the name means "innocence," but the flower, specifically the yellow or orange variants, represent joy, warmth and optimism. What's more, Lilies bloom from late spring/early summer to late fall, which we thought was unfortunately fitting for the character that will die before beginning college in the fall.

Sofia and I also made a mood board for Lily's character so that we could ensure that we were both visualizing somewhat the same person and so that we actually had a visual representation of what she is like over just the vibes in our head. We made her out to be this bright and lively person that loves outdoor activities, flowers, all things yellow, etc. We included some books as well because her major in college would have been elementary education since she is very animated and dedicated, if she hadn't, well, died.

Our other character is named Jackie, short for Jacqueline, which was also a relatively common name for the ‘90s. Unfortunately, the reasons behind this name are not as in-depth as Lily’s because we wanted to find a name that we thought matched her personality, fit during the time era, was to our liking, and worked well with Lily’s since we had already established her name, and these were just too many requirements to have only to also have her name be something meaningful. So we used Jackie as a sort of placeholder name that we ended up liking fine for the character. As a small upside, however, when searching to see if we found some sort of hidden meaning for this name that worked in our favor, we found a flower that was named as such, the Jackie Plumeria, which we thought would fit into a flower theme with Lily's name. However, it turns out that the flower is only named as such as it is a variant of the Plumeria flower that is sold at a nursery called Jungle Jack's in California, so it ultimately didn't feel important enough for that to be a meaning we considered for the name in the context of our character.

Like with Lily, we made a mood board that represents who Jackie is. Turns out, we had very different ideas of who she was in our heads—I thought her to be a very physical art kind of person, as in mainly draws and paints, but Sofia thought of her more as an art person in every art field—so we made the mood board by mixing both of our ideas into a person we both liked and agreed on. We decided she'd be a very creative person with interests in both music and art, majoring in art in the college, with a very "black cat" personality that slightly opposed Lily's bright and sunny personality.

We wanted both of our characters to have a strong and individual person on their own, but that could complement each other's personalities very well as they will have been friends for years in our story. However, we didn't want them to be total opposites of each other because that would be too drastic and we didn't want to play with an "opposites attract" type of relationship because they can be quite intricate to develop. They had to have some things in common or similar enough that they could be their own person but that it was clear that they could be good friends together. I'm very excited to see how this will work once we actually put them on the screen with out actors, props, and whatnot. I think it'll be very fun.