Developing Our Hero

Who is Who?

Developing our characters.

After looking at a few generators online, we found one that gave a lot of options. The website "Behind the Name" gave a lot of customization options to work with, from name origin to name origin. 

We rolled the generator a few times to land on names we liked. There were a lot of random names that were ridiculous, such as the last name "Pickle" came up a few times. But ultimately, we agreed on a name, Carine Sylvain. 

We agreed for the character to be from Germany who moved to the United States to attend university. Her decision to move that far from home was due to her complicated relationship with her mother, which caused her to want to distance herself from her family. By studying in Florida, she has a physical barrier between her and her mother.

From the mistreatment she faced at home, she developed anxiety which takes a toll on her relationships. Even though she is separated from her problems, she still faces social isolation. While having a roommate, she is not close with them. I want to include this in the opening to reveal how this will effect her later on, especially when being tracked down by a killer.

 Her mental health is a large part of our overall project, as our antagonist is a reflection of her insecurities, hunting her down and becoming a constant fear. 

Our backstory for her most likely won't be shown in the whole opening, but it will help us become more familiar with who she is, which will help with our character design. 

As for her outfit and aesthetic, we took a look at Pinterest. There are hundreds of ideas and mood boards that can be used for our character. I personally think darker colors could be used for her at the beginning of the film, mostly the opening, to represent how overwhelmed she feels with her mental health. If the film were to progress, her clothing would get lighter to represent how she is persevering through her anxiety and mental illness. 

We realized how some of the ideas on Pinterest were way too warm for our location. Not only would it not fit with the setting for our film, but it could cause a hazard for our actor wearing something that hot. A cropped white shirt would provide contrast to the solid black jeans. It will display the internal conflict she faces. We want her and the killer to have predominantly dark clothing in order to show their connection. If other characters were to be shown, they'd wear lighter and colorful pieces of clothing, separating themselves from the conflict of Carine and the killer.

As for our killer, I suggested a masked character. As mentioned in my research post, masks are very common in slashers. We want to use this in order to have a mystery for our character to solve. We originally considered the killer to be male presenting, that typical slashers are. A majority of well-known horror characters are male. However, we thought a female character would be very interesting.

 

Our female killer was created because we thought the crazy boyfriend character would not be as intriguing and possibly to obvious to the viewer, as this trope is seen a lot in slashers. For example, in Scream (1996) and in the rebooted Scream (2022), the boyfriend of the protagonist is the one of the main killers. We did not want to fall into this trope by instead using the idea. We want to display how women can display that aggressiveness and evil, as it is not typically shown in slasher films. 

The killer is the girlfriend of a male friend that Carine has, showing her insecurity. It is that jealousy that drives her to go after her and others. We have not decided on a costume design for her, however I want to design a mask idea on Adobe Fresco or Ibis Paint to draw out a few ideas. 

The costume while in disguise may be rather simple, possibly a solid black hoodie and black jeans to blend in with the darkness. The hoodie will conceal the rest of the character's head, leaving the audience without clues for any identifying factors.