Post 7: Creating your own script

At the beginning of the lesson, we were told to talk about yesterday evening in one minute. Most the people in my class, including myself, chose to tell the story in chronological order in first person narrative. What we told was a story, we chose to talk about the exact events that went on in our evening. when we asked our teacher to do the same, her story was a narrative. She chose to talk about her events in detail, as though she was telling us a story from a narrative point of view, rather than a series of events.

In class, we were shown a picture of this yellow fish

We were told to write a story around this picture, in 2 minutes. This is my story:

"A man called Fred had recently moved from his home in Shropshire to a faraway place called Yemen. He missed his family dearly, so he decided that he needed something that reminded him of his home. Back at home he had a fish called Steven, so he bought a fish and called it Steven. In every way it was the same, it was yellow and it swam about and it was all lovely. He shared many fun times with his fish, him and his fish went to the cinema, and even went bowling. One day when Fred came home, the fish had gone, someone had robbed him. Fred was distraught as he grew attached to the fish, and therefore moved back home with his family and his previous fish love Steven. Eventually, Fred stopped having these strange delusions about the fish called Steven and he lived happily ever after."

We were shown this powerpoint in class to help us develop our ideas on Narrative.

http://klsmediadepartment.blogspot.com/2010/10/narrative-theory-powerpoint.html

To have a 'good' short film, you must start off with the basics. A world, a character and a problem.

Then you must consider what is driving the character. They must have a want, a need and an obligation.

Signs

In class we watched a short film called Signs. The film starts off with a man, at this point I created an analytical spider diagram.

MAN:

Quiet/shy
Desperate
Intelligent
Unfulfilled
Lonely
Socially inept

The world in this short film is a life based around work. The man has moved from the countryside in Austrailia to an ambitious job promotion in the city. The character is a man who is living an unfulfilled life without friends and family. The problem is his lack of confidence to talk to new people.

The want that is driving the character is a relationship, he feels he wants to be close to someone, this is proven in the scene where he smiles at a girl, but doesn't find the confidence to talk to her. This is his need, his need is the confidence he wishes to find. The obligation is to fulfil his parents desires, we can tell this from the phonecall he gets from his parents in the country telling him how proud they are of him.

These targets that are set for a 'good' short film are all fulfilled in this short film, as he overcomes his conifdence issues, and eventually plucks up the courage to talk to the girl he has been comunicating with through notes.

Part ways through the film, it was stopped so the class could guess what might happen next. There are a few times where we got it spot on, but there were a few where we were completely wrong. We are conditioned to think what the most typical response would be. But the film successfully keeps the audience interested in the film, by putting in little twists that we weren't to expect.