Week 6 Thursday Class Reflection
This week in class we were introduced to STARNOW, the casting call website set up for us to choose cast members for our group projects. We were asked to select one of the eligible cast members and write about them and a situation they were in. I selected Mackenzie:
I first wrote out a couple dot points about who I thought she was, and where I thought she came from:
- Mackenzie, 19
- Australian
- Attends La Trobe Uni and is studying Literature
- Long red hair, blue eyes, pale complexion
- Interested in reading, hiking, watercolours, fine art, scrapbooking
This is my “situation” that I wrote for her. I didn’t go too in-depth as we were pushed for time and I didn’t want to sort of go into the plot but not get to finish it:
She hated identifying herself as a “social outcast” but that’s exactly what she was. For as long as Mackenzie could remember, she was a long red-headed girl with skin like porcelain and eyes that would stare you down from a mile away. There was something incredibly misunderstood about her. She had a gaze that would haunt you as soon as you locked eyes with her, and nobody knew why this was the case. It was almost as if you had just seen a ghost, but instead seen the face of a girl standing right in front of you. Mackenzie knew that people looked at her like this, but she, like the rest of us, never knew why.
It was three weeks into her first semester of university. As expected, Mackenzie found herself at a distance from most of her classmates who all seemed to have formed small friendship groups. She looked at the other girls in her class, and wondered what made them so special. She never dressed any differently to them, always following the trends in the hopes of finding herself friends.
Then we were asked to fill out a sheet talking about our character:
I found this process interesting. I had briefly outlined for myself who I thought Mackenzie was, but it was fun to work backwards because you sort of have to build a profile for them without actually knowing the person in real life. Kerri-Anne made this point in class, which I think most of us would agree that working on knowing our character’s situations instead of their outline can lead to a very different kind of story.