When beginning to create our character we began with brainstorming ideas to find what kind of person we could create that would have an interesting and intriguing life. Ideas were thrown around such as drug-addicted rockstars, a homeless person and many others. However as a group we all found them a bit cliché. While we were having a group meeting in the food court in town. There was a man sitting at the table next to us on his own feeding his newborn child. A couple of group members noticed this such as myself and it inspired us to come up with the idea of a single father. In society single mothers are a lot more common than single fathers and when watching him it made us ask ourselves all kinds of questions such as, why is he on his own? Where’s the babies mother? Is he happy with the life he’s got? All these questions began to create the format of our character as we found that we could come up with an interesting story for this person. We found all these ideas exciting, however we felt that something was missing. Could the father have given something up to take full time care of this new born baby? One group member suggested that he had some kind of sporting career that he had to give up, partly because he had to take care of his child, but partly he could associate the sport with something bad that happened in his life. Our group liked this idea and ideas were passed round about what kind of sport it was, we found that the obvious answers such as football and rugby were a bit obvious; we wanted to create someone unique. That’s when Matt came up with the idea of a golfer; we liked it, as it wasn’t an obvious idea. So then we came onto the topic of why did he give it up and we decided that unfortunately he needed some tragedy in his life so the people viewing our character can build an emotional connection with the character. Therefore we had decided he was a single father because his wife had sadly passed away during childbirth because there were complications with the baby and mother as it was premature.
When we got onto his relationship with the child we decided the child would be a baby girl. The reason for this was that a father and daughters relationship stereotypically is seen as a stronger emotional bond. However when working out the technicalities of what kinds of physical objects we would produce from his life, such as photos, we found that we didn’t have access to a baby girl, but in fact a baby boy. After discussing the issue we decided that in fact a baby boy would be more effective as we could show through the means of photos that the child at the age of three is playing with golf clubs, therefore he could possibly be going to follow in his fathers footsteps.
Originally we planned the audience to meet the character at the age of 45. However when we were working out the timeline in his life we found that the age of 45 didn’t really fit in, as he would have had his child at the age of 45. Although people do have children later in life, we wanted to illustrate a more conventional man and focus on the down points in his life, rather than his family life taking shape In his mid forties.
After creating and deciding on the back story of his life the group decided we should make and find many physical objects of his life to convince the audience that he is a real person.
. David Bird Media . 