Planning Characters - Miss Miller

The purpose of characters in a film is to allow the narrative to become more interesting and it also allows the audience to build a relationship with the characters keeping them more engaged into the film. We had planned the characters before hand because it gave us a brief idea about what we wanted our characters to look like and make them as conventional as possible, by doing this it has made it a lot easier for us because we do not have to think about what the characters will be wearing on the day of the shoot as we would most likely not make them conventional and include the symbolisation of colour.

Our first character that we have decided to include in our opening sequence is the female victim aged 17. The female will be wearing a white dress, we have decided to make her wear this because it allows the audience to symbolise the colour white of being pure and innocent, the audience can infer from this that the symbolisation of her white dress mirrors her personality. Our victim is in sixth form, whom is a straight A grade student and is well behaved in school. We decided to make her a smart and well mannered student because it makes it easier for the audience to build a relationship with the female character as she has a likeable personality. We will ensure that our female victim is a stereotypical victim as we will portray her to the audience as being young, innocent, weak and vulnerable. This will help the audience build a relationship with the female victim because they will sympathise for her as they know someone is after her, making them worry for her safety. This is conventional to the thriller genre because it builds up suspense about whether the female victim will live or be killed by the antagonist.

The second character that the group and I decided to include in our opening sequence is the Male antagonist aged 32. The antagonist will be wearing a black tracksuit with his hood up and also a clown mask. The reason the group and I chose to have the antagonist wear black is for the audience to realise that the colour black symbolises death, pain and sinister behaviour, this also mirrors the antagonists personality, thus allowing the audience to foreshadow death upon someone. We chose to make the antagonist wear the mask so that he is hidden from the audience, thus creating an enigma as the audience question who is under the mask. This then builds up suspense and tension because they audience are dying to see who the antagonist really is therefore engaging them. The antagonist has a background of being mentally unstable because he didn't have a good up bringing as he didn't have a fatherly figure whilst growing up. This is conventional because the antagonist is mentally unstable, which is common in most thriller genres because there is a reason behind the killing. His character is stereotypical because he uses a knife as his main weapon, which the audience see as the most common weapon to use in the thriller genre therefore making the audience easily build a negative relationship towards him as they fear what he might do to some of his victims.

To conclude, I think that the characters that the group and I have created are very conventional because they follow the generic conventions of the thriller genre, hopefully they will emphasise the thriller genre so that when the audience start to watch the film they instantly know what genre they're watching. This planning has helped the group and I a lot as it has saved us a lot of time thinking about what makes our characters conventional, this is useful because then we have more time to film, we are also going in already knowing that our characters are as conventional as possible, thus appealing and engaging the teenage audience it is aimed at.