Planning or: How I Created Characters from My Own Experiences

Before I can direct, I must write. Before I can write, I must plan. This is about writing and planning.

Now I knew for my film I would want to make a short film about the people behind the face of the music industry. Rather than showing the musicians and producers, I wanted to show the people who made concerts possible. I wanted to show the bartenders. I wanted to show the managers. I wanted to show the bouncers. Now I needed to make these ideas into actual characters.

Bartender:
I love weirdos. If you look like someone who sticks out like a sore thumb, we'll probably get along. I wanted to make my bartender a weirdo. So I started compiling a list of attributes for my weirdo bartender: lanky, mismatched clothes, gay, somber, sarcastic. All of these things came together to form the character of Dom, the funky, lanky, sarcastic, gay, somber, twenty-something bartender.

This is how I imagined Dom

Manager:
I knew from the beginning that the manager character would be inspired by an old boss of mine. She was someone who lived, ate, and slept her job, but still managed to keep a personal relationship with her employees. She loves her employees, but at the end of the day getting her job done is her first priority. I visualized her as "punk-rock professional," showing both her past and her future through her style.So this came to form Rosemarie, the punk-rock professional

This is how I imagined Rosemarie

Bouncer:

I wanted to go in a completely different direction with the bouncer character, and inspiration came from (of all places) a rave I'd attended a week ago. At this rave, I noticed one of the girls in skin tich shorts and bra had a large black walkie talkie clipped to her raver boots. After asking one of the employees of the venue, it turned out she was a plant hired by the venue to spot trouble makers on the dance floor. I knew my bouncer character had to have this job. It was then that I started building a backstory for her. I chose to make  her a grad student, a black sheep, and an empathetic soul looking for an adventure. With this in mind I breathed life into Jen, the genius, odd, overly trusting plain-clothes bouncer.

This is how I imagined Jen

Now that I've made my characters, I need to weave them into a story worth telling.