In which I look at the winter blues, burglaries and
not having enough idle time in the script development process.
This blog post was originally written as a reflection of the process of developing an outline for a script for the Planning and Making a Film module I undertook in the penultimate year of my BA (Hons). The module's practice was undertaken between October 2011 to June 2012 and it provided me with a hugely enriching experience. For a more detailed over of the module and the projects I undertook as a part of it, see Planning and Making a Film: The student filmmaking experience.
In addition to producing two short films, as part of the Planning
and Making a Film module, we also have to submit a short film script. The
scripts that meet the criteria, as set out in the assessment brief, are then
made available to all the members of the module and from these, in our smaller
production groups, we select one that we produce as our second short film.
In this post, and two more that will follow, I am going to explore
the multiple development processes and script Ideas I went through that, eventually,
lead to my final script Busybody. The script assignment counted for
three separate deadlines and was split into three separate parts: an outline, a
rough draft and a final submission draft; each of the posts will examine one of
these parts and the work that went into each of them.
Gathering and Working Over
When first starting the module in September 2011, I had been very
aware that eventually I would have to write and submit a script for a 5-8
minute film. Therefore, I’d kept my mind on the alert looking for ideas that
might make for a good short film throughout the whole production process of Where
will it all stop.
The Winter Blues was
the first potential script Idea I explored and my starting point for this was a
protagonist who suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder, a disorder that can
bring about severe mental illness during the winter months, hence the title.
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| Some notes for The Winter Blues |
My initial thinking was that the protagonist’s
struggle with his illness could be the story of the script. The problem with
that idea, though, is it was one that I had seen done so many times before. Therefore,
I started to look for other ideas either to combine with this first idea or to
give birth to a better idea.
I began to think that perhaps another way to do it would be to
have the protagonist struggling with the initial SAD problem and then around
this introduce a bigger, external problem. Then I could have the protagonist’s
struggle with the illness or the nature of the illness itself, at first come
into conflict with the bigger external problem and then provide the resolution
to that bigger, external problem.
Finding something that could be that bigger problem was relatively
easy as there had recently been a spate of burglaries in Oldfield Park, the
area of Bath that I live in. Therefore, I began to think about combining the
idea of a burglary with The
Winter Blues idea and I came
up with a couple of things: maybe the protagonist gets burgled and has to deal
with It, or the protagonist witnesses a burglary, or is a part of a burglary,
or inadvertently becomes a part of a burglary. However, while I was presented
with many new paths to explore I was still having trouble moulding the ideas
into a coherent linear whole.
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| Some more notes for The Winter Blues |
I then tried adjusting the idea from burglary to a
tension that existed between the student and non-student residents of Oldfield
Park, which is something that does exist and gets no end of coverage in the
local press! In this instance the protagonist who suffers from SAD could be a
non-student resident and his condition spurs him on to fight back against the
student residents. I also looked at the flip side of this where the protagonist
was a student who suffered from SAD and because of this fought back against a
band of residents. These band of residents were fanatics and had come together
to perpetrate a number of robberies against the students and eventually
murders. This idea did get a bit out of hand!
However, I was still finding the ideas to be too abstract; nothing
was convoluting together into something that would fulfil a coherent, linear
structure ideal for a 5 – 8 minute film. Therefore, I decided to start
developing an alternative script idea from scratch. Although, this just ended
up being another off-shoot of the ideas I had explored in The Winter Blues.
Float My Boat/It’s a Student Life was a script idea in which a group of students
assemble a plan to steal money from their landlord. Once they break into his
house they discover that he has a network of hidden cameras in all of his
properties; with this knowledge of his hidden cameras the students decide to
blackmail the landlord.
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| Some notes for Float My Boat |
It became apparent, fairly quickly, that this idea was
becoming far too big for a story that had to be told in a maximum of eight
minutes, so I abandoned it!
Idle Time was an idea I came up with out of necessity. I needed
to submit an outline for a script because it counted as one of my deadlines so
I came up with a cop out idea. I had recently re-watched Groundhog Day, a film in which
the protagonist relives the same day over and over again, and Ideal Time was just a variation of that idea.
Luckily, as it was just an outline that was required, all I had to submit was a
sheet identifying the characters, the scene structure and the beats: beats
being changes of motivation that occurred in each of those scenes.
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| Some notes for Idle Time |
The outline that I wrote down was concerned with a work shy youth
who discovers he has the ability to stop time. He is then able to use this
power to steal money from banks and unsuspecting victims, who don’t fight back
because everyone is frozen in time. After messing about in some very vague
sketches of him abusing his power, the script eventually concludes with him
unable to restart time. When he does manage to restart it the effort required
kills him.
As is apparent, Idle
Time had a very basic premise
that lacked any real substance for a full-fledged script and not for one second
did I consider developing it further for my final script. It was copout idea
that I was hugely ashamed of and which I made very clear on the outline sheet
that I submitted!
During a scriptwriting session Mike Johnston
encouraged us to read: A Technique
for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young,
which is a book that demonstrates the process the human mind, goes through in
its construction of an idea. The technique is broken down to its most
fundamental components and because of this, as the author encourages, it is a
technique that can be applied to any creative field, not just writing! The book
breaks the technique down into five steps.
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| The five steps for producing Ideas |
Certainly, looking at this structure, I can see why I
was unable to create a successfully structured script idea. I had not given
enough time for the ideas to be worked over by my subconscious; I only got as
far as the first two steps!
But this hadn’t been down to laziness, more so it had
been down to the fact that I had been developing two other script ideas in
addition to this one. As I already detailed I had been developing two scripts Xbox Junkie and The
Gaming Complex for my
housemate Michael Kelly, who is a Creative Media Practice student who had been
in need of a script for his final year project. As getting these two scripts
done before Christmas had been a priority for me the script I had been
developing for Planning and Making a Film got put to end of the queue and,
ultimately, didn’t get enough mental attention as it needed for the full Producing Ideas process.
Not having a full-fledged script idea before Christmas
wasn’t a complete disaster, though, as the rough draft and final script were
not due until after Christmas. Therefore, I had the whole Christmas break to
devote to acquiring new data and developing a new script Idea.
Want to read the very short outline I submitted?
