Day: February 20, 2019

Since our film features a female detective, we have chosen Rebecca Wolff to be our candidate.

We chose Rebecca because she is also a student in this class, so she would understand our artistic vision for the film. She also has a intuitive vibe to her person, and as a detective you kinda need that. She’s also taller than the supporting actor we cast for the male detective, which shows a shift in power in the blocking between the two. She’s also shooting her film that same weekend, so we would need to shoot quickly, but efficiently as well. Other detective leads have shown to naturally have power over others, like Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock, so having a tall female detective will give us that subtle power over others easily.

For the male detective, we cast Thomas Mitchell.

We cast Tommy because he has a good voice of a “sexist” detective. Having it raspy and bratty makes him seem overly cocky and not really moving with the times. He’s also significantly shorter than Rebecca, so having that height difference would show the difference of power between the two of them. A good example is also from Sherlock with the difference between Benedict and Martin Freeman. They have a height difference to show that Sherlock is the head detective with the more power/ability to find out things easier.

For our victim, we cast Victoria Conn.

We mostly cast Victoria because she wanted to be the dead person, so we couldn’t say no if we had a volunteer. She also works in our film as we’re already challenging genre conventions with our lead female detective, so having a female victim is more normal for what we’re going for. Challenging too many things at one time and changing the norms for movies like this would be a bit much and a stretch for our movie to deal with at the moment.

Sources

I linked various TV shows and actors within this post where they are mentioned.

The main goal of our brand is to get our audience thinking. It’s a murder mystery after all, so with the mysterious vibe and twists and turns within the mystery, we would want our advertising and marketing to draw people in to know the answer to the mystery, or to try and solve it themselves. Other movies in our genre have been marketed and portrayed in this way, so following suit and just using a female lead instead will give us a good leeway into the distribution and exhibition of our film.

Since our film stars a female lead, our film could be aimed towards female empowerment. It’s not our main goal, but with the idea of a female detective solving a difficult mystery, that sort of ideal comes along with it. With the very few and sparce mystery movies with a female lead detective, our film could be considered “groundbreaking” or out of the box.

We pitched our film to Next Wave Films to produce it for that exact reason. Being an indie film would allow us the creative freedom we need rather than having constraints from such a big studio like Fox. We also don’t need a huge budget to work with, and Next Wave Films has worked with many low budget films in the past that have gained tons of popularity, like Pi by Aronofsky.