Casting - My ideas for the characters

  Hello and welcome back to my blog! I've been thinking a lot about how many characters I want in my short film, and how to structure the cast so that it makes sense. Originally I was thinking of making one main character and any other characters that appear would just be background characters, or people that the main character only briefly interacts with throughout the short film. I'm still holding onto this idea, but then my teacher gave me another cool idea on how to go about this.

  Since I am personifying the symptoms and effects of a complicated mood disorder, it isn't going to be particularly easy. These symptoms aren't tangible objects you can describe, they are a set of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that deviate from the norm and drive certain behaviors that also deviate from the norm. So you can probably imagine that this is nothing like Disney's Inside Out, and my target audience isn't children. Not only that, but every individual with bipolar disorder experiences it differently, not to mention that there is more than one type of bipolar as it exists on a spectrum of sorts. Therefore it is important that I maintain as much accuracy as possible, but understand that while one may relate entirely, another might not relate much at all. My goal though is to mainly personify the basics about the disorder in a way that no matter how much somebody relates to it, they feel seen. This is where it might be hard to personify the disorder through just one person. This is where my teacher's idea comes into play.

  Instead of using one person for the one disorder, she suggested that I  could have different actors represent different parts of the disorder by having them all interact with the same events in the short film, but obviously their interactions would be different. This idea really inspired me with a multitude of ideas of how to go about this. I would have two, maybe three characters represent the different aspects of the disorder. Those main aspects being depression and mania, however the third may represent a mixed episode, a stable period, or a transitioning period between the episodes of depression and mania (I still haven't figured out which of those options the potential third person might represent, they may represent more than one.)

  One of the ways I could represent this ties directly to one of my previous blogs about color theory where I explain the colors I would use to convey the different episodes. I would achieve this through LED lighting as well as filters through the editing process. Another way is definitely through costume and makeup, which I will make an entirely separate blog posting about dedicated strictly to that topic in an upcoming blog posting!