My writing process with Lilie Ferrari

Our first session with Lilie involved us doing some exercises to break the ice and help develop characters. We started off by looking at the credentials of our actors. We first of all created our main character 'Joel' as a group, distinguishing what his main character traits would be and what the whole basis of his story would be revolved around. Because we were attempting to make a 'bible' for the production we needed to create an entire life and back story to the characters, for example; when were creating the character of Joel we created his entire back story whether it was relevant to the story or not but this was merely to understand who the character was like we were creating a person. After creating our main character, we were split into groups of two to then create other characters and go through the exact same process but with different people. After we created the outlines of our characters (personality, friends, family, occupation, etc) we then had decide what our characters bereavement would be and how it has affected them as people, in order to do this Lilie split us up into other groups of two and we created the bereavement stories for these characters we had created. By the end of this session we had created 5 characters; Rosemary, Joel, Melinda, Jess and Harvey. After our session we had been asked to research into bereavement cancelling and other platforms which would allow us to understand representations and facts about bereavement and loss. After looking into various bereavement services such as 'cruise' I had gathered some information about how bereavement counselling works, how patients are treated and what type of role the councillor has to provide. After I had done this research I wanted to find some inspirations for my writing in order to understand loss from other artists aspects and thoughts. I started researching into some current artists who largely talk about Suicide, depression and bereavement and after researching into some artists I had taken 1 album and 3 songs that I had researched into in order to help me understand a bit better what loss is like for other people besides myself. The album I looked into was called '17' a album created by Rapper 'XXXTentacion' the albums themes mainly talk about depression and loss mostly, most apparently in his song 'Jocelyn Flores' which talks about a friend who he had lost to suicide, it talks deeply about how the loss of this person makes him feel like he can no longer go on with his life and thats the type of inspiration I was looking for when conducting research into how loss effects the human mind.