Let's Talk About Representation

 Good Morning Blog! 

A couple days ago I was brainstorming some ideas on what to do for Clara and I's film introduction and I believe we definitely furthered our ideas after settling upon a specific genre. We're aiming for a style most similar to a film such as Knives Out or a television show such as The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window. Our goal is to deal with a semi-serious topic, some sort of mystery, with a great inclusion of comedic factors. Although this is obviously common with films within this genre, I feel that for this project specifically our introduction will definitely stand out among other submissions which is exactly what we want. 

Let's Talk Characters

I know in my previous post, I briefly introduced a vague idea surrounding the vision I have for our film introduction's characters. Within this post, I would like to go greatly in depth surrounding the reasoning behind my decisions. For starters, I want the majority (if not all) actors to be women. I feel that female representation is so beyond important and often overlooked within the industry. I praise female writers, directors, producers, and actors such as Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Elizabeth Banks, Gal Gadot, Aubrey Plaza, etc; the list could go on forever. Not only do I want to, but I believe it is a duty of mine to make my idols proud! Despite women inclusivity both on and off camera growing, it is still far too low so this is my start at furthering our progress! For starters, our film introduction will be written, directed, produced, shot, and edited by Clara and I so YAY REPRESENTATION because we need women behind the cameras just as much as we need them on. 

Now for our character ideas. These descriptions will make a lot more sense in my next post where I discuss the vision of our plot but for now, this is what we have. If we were to stick with our current idea, our film introduction will consist of two or three actors; and as we stated earlier, preferably women. We really want the concept of our film to be a crime-thriller/comedy so our characters would consist of at least one cop or detective (max would be two) and our criminal. If there are two cops, we want their energy to work really well together, giving this thriller a great comedy concept like movies such as The Heat or Hot Pursuit. One of the FBI agents (or police officer or detective) would have much of a deadpan sense of humor while other one would be more friendly and gullible, both being unintentionally funny. The criminal of the opening scene would have more energy similar to an Ocean's 8 character or much like Deadpool himself; saying things as they are, with no mercy, and being very straightforward. I feel like more realistically, we would just have one FBI agent so we are able to portray this "good cop, bad cop" concept between the agent and criminal where the agent would be the goof cop and and criminal would be the bad cop to make for some hilarious, unpredictable banter. As our idea is not finalized yet, all of our vision are still up in the air and may be subject to change. So as time goes on, the details of our concept and specificity of our characters will increase. 

For our criminal, some ideas we have style/personality wise: 

And for our agent(s), our vision for their personality currently consists of: 

 

We really want to aim for lovable characters were people will watch themselves rooting for both sides at different points of our "film". But in our intro, we want to be sure to establish their traits and motives along with how they interact with one another. 

Here is a photo of the lovey Tina Fey and Amy Poehler with their lovely Golden Globe Awards for inspiration as they continue to make strides for women representation within the film industry.  

Just give me a few more years... I promise... I'll get there.

Important Links From Representation Research: 

Female Representation in Filmmaking Inches Upward

Status of Women in the Industry

More Women Than Ever Working in Film but Men Still Dominate Key Roles

How Women Finally Have Input in Their Comedic Representation

Why Crime Thrillers Need to Show Women More Respect

Liv

(Week 2: 2/14-2/20, post 3)