Character Representation

Hey! Coming on here again while the story in my mind keeps progressing. Today I am really excited to talk about something I find very important in film, character representation. In the past I wrote a bit about positive and negative representation of groups in a few different commercials, but now I want to relate it to my film opening. Since the film is ideally going to follow the coming-of-age and romance genres, my plan is to create a main character that is going to appeal to many of the people in this age group, which of course is teenagers. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I would like to incorporate some themes from Japanese anime, and now this will come to play in developing part of my story and my main character. The main inspiration for my film opening is the movie “A Silent Voice”.

This movie is a Romance/Drama that follows the main character (Shoya Ishida) and his struggle to make amends with a Deaf girl (Shouko Nishimiya) after bullying her in elementary school. 

During the story, many imporatnt topics are discussed including bullying and suicide.

I really enjoyed this movie and I think it did a great job in telling a heartfelt story without negative representation of the Deaf community. Although my idea is kind of different, I still want to include some aspects from this movie, such as the experiences of being mainstreamed as a Deaf student and not being accepted by many ignorant people. I also enjoy the growth of the characters throughout this film, which may be hard to mirror in my own piece, since it is only an opening, however, the implication of growth will be there. 

I have definitely rambled on and on about this for way too long and of course I still have not revealed my plan for my story. I don’t want to say too much about my plans because they are still subject to change, but in simple terms, I have decided to make my movie about a gay deaf girl. Considering positive representation of characters that you usually don’t see in films could create a more positive outlook towards groups that are different than yourself. At first glance, it may feel like I am just throwing out random minority groups and wrapping them up into a character, but I feel like I am avoiding doing that by straying away from negative or cliche stereotypes of these groups. I plan to discuss more plans for my character in later posts.