Furthermore, the prompt my group and I had been assigned was a football player who was also a poet. We all worked together to create a character that was easily understood and well represented. Our character was 18-year-old Brady Beckham, He was number 28 on the football field and a secret poet. To get himself in the zone, Brady has two different playlists that he keeps on Spotify, filled with songs from his favorite plays and music artists. He had found his love for poetry through his girlfriend Gia, who he had met in the 7th grade. Brady’s wardrobe consists of his football gear and a handful of various clothes, all consisting of a neutral or cool toned color palette. Brady often wears t-shirts, hoodies, athletic wear, and sweatpants. While most of his clothes come from name brands like Hollister and Essentials, he usually prefers his clothes not to have a logo. Brady may be a jock, but he is rather smart considering that he had been accepted to both Yale and Stanford!
Moreover, to communicate to the viewers who Brady Beckham was, my group and I created interactive PowerPoints that showed his mood board, costume design, room design, and playlists. Each presentation had been programmed to make the viewers feel engaged with the media and interact with the slides. For our tactile representation, we created a journal that was made to look like it belonged to our character. The outside of the journal was covered in leather and had a quill pen slid into the cover; this was meant to be a representation of Brady by combining two different aspects of his character. Each page was different and had important information regarding Brady’s personality and life. The pages included football plays that had been written over with poetry and sticky notes with reminders of poetry readings and practice dates. The book itself also served as a tool to better immerse the reader into Brady’s world and to view things from his perspective.
When organizing our station, we wanted the viewers to talk amongst themselves and discuss Brady and what he was like. To accomplish that, we put a different presentation on each of the screens. However, because we didn’t think that digital screens would be enough to capture our character fully, we left the journal and Brady’s jersey on the desk for them to interact with. The journal enabled them to read through the letters stuffed between the pages, see what he looked like, and observe what he had written inside while comparing it to the screens.
The construction of Brady’s character used a mix of visual, auditory, and tactile techniques that helped to establish and illustrate the character. While developing Brady, the main goal of our group was to encourage our audience to actively think about the media they were consuming and what the meaning behind it could be. That being said, to begin this project we gathered together and discussed how we should present this character, who they are, what our creations mean, and how they would all work together to represent our character. The group wanted to incorporate many different aspects of his character, such as color theory. When we created Brady's appearance and costume design, we imagined him as a nonchalant and calm type of person, so to communicate that we used many neutral and cool toned colors in his costume and character design. Similarly, when we added the sound aspect, we didn’t want to just lump everything into one group but rather create different playlists to further emphasize the different sides of him. We also knew that we didn’t just want to portray Brady from an outside perspective, but also from an internal viewpoint. Another thing we leaned into when creating our character was stereotypes. Things we included like protein shakes, Gatorade bottles, Essentials hoodies, New Balance shoes, etc. are all stereotypes of teens and football players which we included to create a familiar and recognizable character.
Overall, I think I can speak for everyone in the group when I say that our project did a great job capturing who we thought Brady Beckham was while keeping the material informative, engaging, and immersive. My group was very efficient during this process, so I felt as if we were able to create a high-quality project that displayed our character’s personality, appearance, character, and much more. We split up the work evenly and lended a helping hand when we weren’t busy. The actual assembly of the journal was a bit difficult, but the product was so worth it. The only thing I would’ve changed from this would be that I would’ve added a backstory to the presentation so that the viewers could come into this with more context and could have an even better understanding of the character. Nonetheless, this project was a lot of fun and helped me to better understand how much thought and preparation goes into the development of mise-en-scene.
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