The Star of the Show

My main character is probably my favorite part of my film. My main character is going to be a female around the age of 17 in high school. I have not yet decided on name for her but I promise to update when I find the perfect one.

She is quirky and extremely intelligent. Her intelligence is her greatest strength, her IQ is beyond that of Einstein. Despite her intelligence she doesn't do well in school. Not because she doesn't know the material, but because it is so rudimentary that she doesn't bother to try. She is bored with life bored of school.

The way she dresses also differs from the norm. Instead of wearing the traditional khaki pants or pleated skirt and plain polo top, she dresses more ostentatiously. She loves bright colors and fun patterns and the occasional tulle skirt. She is the black sheep of her community.

The community around her is very plain and uniform. Everyone dresses in a similar way and acts as their society has told them to. The reason the community allows her to dress this way and act this way is because they believe she is mentally handicapped. They see her failing grades and sense of fashion as side effects of her disability. What they don't know is how incredibly wrong they are.

I had two main film inspirations for this choice: Rain Man and The Imitation Game.

The film Rain Man stars Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. The film is about Charlie Babbitt, who discover that he has an estranged older brother after his father dies. He learns that his father left his $3 million dollar fortune to his other son Raymond. Raymond lives in a mental institution because he is an autistic savant. This means that although he is autistic, he is extremely intelligent when it comes to a specific skill, in this cause math and spatial ability. In one particular scene Charlie and Raymond are in a diner. The waitress then drops a container of toothpicks on the floor. As she picks them up Raymond shouts out a number, that number being how many toothpick were in the container.

The Imitation Game is about Alan Turing, a revolutionary mathematician who helped break the Nazi code, Enigma, during World War II. There is a specific part in the film where it shows Turing when he was in school. The scene involves him and his friend Christopher who get caught passing notes in class, but they wrote their notes in code. The teacher saw the note and thought that Turing was stupid because he was writing gibberish. He automatically assumed that he was stupid when in reality he had a far superior intelligence.

Alan is shown on the left, his friend Christopher on the right.

Sources: 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677584/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqbXPfaN_VM

The Imitation Game. Dir. Moten Tyldum. Perf. Benedict Cumberbatch and Kiera Knightley. Black Bear Pictures, 2014.

Rain Man. Dir. Barry Levinson. Perf. Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. United Artists, 1988.