Anna's Diary - Drowning

With time running out before casting the film, I realized that there would not be much prep time for the actors. I needed to find a way to build a character study into an easy-to-read format for an actor who may only have a week of prep on a complex character, so I decided to write a diary for the lead character of Anna in the film Drowning. Ever since my 2010 film Measuring Tape Girl, which was basically a video diary, I’ve been using character diaries as a way to build characters for the stories I’ve been writing. Usually no one ever sees the diaries and it’s an just an exercise in character development. With the film Drowning’s compressed casting-to-shooting time it seemed like the only solution to creating a character bible in a short time span. The sixty-page diary was created over about two months and then handed off to the actor once the film was cast. The plan is that this will help create a short hand between the actor and I on set, where we can directly refer to page numbers in diary for different scenes. Directly putting us into the head of the character when we won’t always have time to have long discussions on character creation. Hopefully this allows us to create a character in the short time provided, without losing any depth and background required to build a back story that the actor can build on.

Link to Measuring Tape Girl: