Major Pre-Production Development and Research: Naming Main Characters

   The names of our characters are very important. They have to be believable names and relative to the film. One of the pieces of advice in Olga Litowinsky’s Writing and Publishing Books for Children in the 1990s was to name your characters after your friends’ children, and to use popular names from that generation. Mark and I looked at baby naming websites to research names by popularity in decades and name meanings. The names we decided to pick for this research were the names of the mother, father and daughter in the story. We decided to focus on these three names as they were the main and most important characters in the story. We could also use their name to reflect the personality of the characters and to possibly foreshadow things to come within the story. The three names we have chosen are:

Father - Douglas Reed
Mother - Delaney Reed
Daughter - Abigail Reed

   The reason we have chosen these names are because of the meanings behind them. The name Douglas is a Gaelic name which means 'Dark Waters', Delaney is also derived from Gaelic roots with the meaning 'From the Black River' and Abigail which is a hebrew which has the meaning of 'Her Fathers Daughter'. These meanings attracted us to having them as the names of the characters because the fact that Douglas and Delaney's names both relate to water, it signifies their relationship and how they are together. This can also be construed as foreshadowing as well as the reference of dark and black which could be highlighting the fact of bad things that will be happening in the story.  The name Abigail and its meaning of 'Her Fathers Daughter' is ideal for the story as it highlights mainly her and her fathers relationship, which is a key factor to the story.

   The surname 'Reed' is simply an old English word for 'Red'. The fact 'Reed' relates to the word 'Red' is needed in our opinion as the colour 'Red' can symbolise blood and danger which suits the theme of the story. The fact the majority of these names we have chosen relate to dark, black, water and red is making me think and plan ideas for the cinematography for the film. For example we could have a predominant use of dark shades of red with black through the film or we could have water and liquid itself be shown visually a lot, which would go perfectly in my opinion as the film is called 'Inoculum' and inoculum is a substance that is in the form of a liquid. I need to do some detailed research into cinematography more to get a grasp on what I can do visually and how I can use these themes and elements we have gathered from our choice of names to create a suitable interesting style for our film.