Planning of characters - Miss Miller

In our film we have two main characters the victim, Cathryn and the antagonits, who is unnamed. The purpose of having characters in a film is so that the audience can build some relationships within it. These relationships emphasise on the emotions and situations making the narrative exciting they make it relatable and easier to follow.

Cathryn


The victim out of our two main characters is Cathryn. She is a sixteen year old student who lives and normal life with any major complications. She has blonde hair and pale skin with red rosy cheeks. We have chosen for her style to be like this so that she is a stereotypical thriller victim. In our opening sequence my group has decided to put her in a isolated situation so that she is portrayed even stronger as the target of an antagonist.
We made our victim as conventional as possible by making certain elements connote her as the antagonist focus, one of the connotations is the colour of her hair, she has blonde her which infers innocence, this is also shown through the lightness of her skin the lighting colour we have used on her display her vulnerability. All of this makes the audience create emotions about the character they become sensitive to her situation in the film and worry for her.
The audience can see that Cathryn is a normal teenage girl with an average life. They can see this because of her friends and her age, the age suggests she is a student and her friends look just and normal as her. This allows them to relate to her knowing she doesn't deserve for anything bad to happen, but the other connotations suggest that the opposite is going to happen to her making them feel sympathetic. They can build a relationship with Cathryn as they can relate her back to their lives and people they know.




Antagonists
Not a lot is known about our antagonist the audience don't know his name or anything about his background. Throughout the opening sequence he isn't clearly shown, only glimpses of him are visible. My group and I have also made the antagonist stereotypical because we thought is was important to make him as alarming as we could for the audience.
He is wearing a black hoodie and baggy trousers for all the opening sequence this is so that he is hard to catch an eye of in the low key lighting. The dark clothing connotes death and that the character has no conscience stating psychological issues. The audience automatically become aware of the antagonist being dangerous for the other people in the film and they can see his is unpredictable and that the characters need to be cautious of him.
Our antagonist is conventional because of the little amount known about him. The audience and characters don't have any information on him, they don't even see his face clearly. All they can tell from him is that he is dangerous, they can see this because of his slow movements and his darkness. It is also clear that he is clever and has planned what he was going to do in opening sequence, the audience see this because he places trick figures around his victim, Cathryn to scare her. Not knowing much about the antagonist it stereotypical in a thriller film because it builds tension and suspense as no one is aware about what they could do, because he is unpredictable it makes the other characters and audience apprehensive about him.

I think both characters in my groups opening sequence are extremely stereotypical and conventional. This is due to their image and backgrounds, we have portrayed our victim as innocent and vulnerable which is need in a thriller genre to make audience fell sympathetic and we have made our antagonist mysterious and unpredictable so that the audience are scary. These portrayals are important when creating and thriller genre film because they create shock suspense and surprise for the audience. The planning for our characters helped my group make them as effective as possible, we had a chance to make them conventional and we could think in depth about how we could make them relatable for the audience. This made our opening sequence characters as best as we could get them because we were allowed to discuss in detail about what worked vest within the thriller genre.