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1. This course ended up pushing me in a very different way than I thought it would. I have written occasionally before so came into the course to write many short films but instead spent most of my time trying to improve on how to write and structure a 6 minute short film which is a form I found very tricky. I also felt that I spent lots of time learning about the different reasons stories work and don’t work and working out which theories work for me as well as finding my own path. I feel that I have really taken the time to explore a lot of this and have questioned a lot and I hope this is shown in my reflection.

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1. This course ended up pushing me in a very different way than I thought it would. I have written occasionally before so came into the course to write many short films but instead spent most of my time trying to improve on how to write and structure a 6 minute short film which is a form I found very tricky. I also felt that I spent lots of time learning about the different reasons stories work and don’t work and working out which theories work for me as well as finding my own path. I feel that I have really taken the time to explore a lot of this and have questioned a lot and I hope this is shown in my reflection.

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Over the course I read, watched and listened to a lot of ideas and theories on screenwriting. We were asked to start off by looking at two different excerpts from books on creativity and ideas. The first one I looked at was Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear a book by Elizabeth Gilbert. I loved how she reflected on her life with creativity and how she saw creativity in people not specifically doing “art” I think this was a nice set up to the course as it widened my idea of creativity inside myself and the points of “authenticity over originality” and “take it seriously but don’t take it seriously” stuck with me in my work. I also read the David Lynch excerpts and some of the book which is more useful just hearing about how his mind worked as he comes across as a very unique filmmaker.

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Something useful that I started reading was Into The Woods by John Yorke some of these ideas and questions that he posed weren't especially new to me, having read other similar books however what I really liked in this was the specificness to story rather than film and seeing stories as such a big part of everyday life really helped me frame them in a different way in my head.

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I also read Save The Cat which I actually found very helpful in it’s possibly over simplified although I think might have tried to follow the Save The Cat format a bit too much and it effected the way I was thinking about my story

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 I would not say I am incredibly proud of the work I have submitted but I know I have put a large amount of work into the module and learning about scriptwriting during this module and I think my understanding of screenwriting and the short form has  

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 I would not say I am incredibly proud of the work I have submitted but I know I have put a large amount of work into the module and learning about scriptwriting during this module and I think my understanding of screenwriting and the short form has  

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I When I spoke to Ed about scriptwriting he suggested that the best way to structure a short film is through character development so I think that’s what I want to focus on with that script. I originally planned out this script using the save the cat beat sheet

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I decided to rewrite it around him as a character giving him a starting point and an endpoint and then working the script around to put him on a journey to get to this point. I want for the start of the script for my main character to

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For the first task we had to come up with three film When it came to pitching my film after hearing the feedback on the ones before me I suspected that the feedback would be it’s too long. Something that was also clear to me was that my idea was too vague as it was more of an outline of a story and the story only comes when you add in the characters the way they clash and just generally the specifics of the story. I found the feedback very helpful and I think I’m going to go a different direction to all these ideas.

I also made sure to look over the development PDF which I think will be very helpful for me developing my idea into a full project.

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We then after doing this had a workshop session. For this session we had to prepare two ideas that we think better fit the 6 minute genre and then run them through with the group. I decided that the bitcoin idea wasn’t very good and the artist idea was too long so I thought i’d keep the uber idea and develop a new one. I’ve been looking at lots of shorts recently and feel like the best ones don’t take themselves too seriously but have serious underpinnings. This I think is the tone I want to go for so I thought it might be interesting to develop an idea in a genre that is slightly less serious like a comedy/horror. I thought an interesting idea would be about a guy who doesn’t take pollution or chemical dumping serious to get affected by it and turn into a fish. I really liked this idea as I think it had a good character development in which the character is forced to face the reality of the pollution issue through quite a comical and horror ending.

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After planning this out in the workshop I pitched this to the rest of my group to mixed reactions. People liked the first idea but thought it might be slightly too long. Some of the feedback that was also helpful was that maybe I should tell it backwards maybe starting as the fish and then going back to tell about how he became it. I thought this was actually a really interesting idea and definitely want to look into it. The uber driver idea again they said that it would be longer than 6 minutes however they suggested that to shorten it if the uber driver wasn’t already in this situation and was instead in a accidental situation or something that forced him to have to work for this drug dealer to pay it off.

After this meeting I kinda feel like I am a bit back to the drawing board in terms of ideas as although I feel like I’ve got interesting ways to develop these ones I think that I still haven’t settled on an idea yet.

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We had workshops this week where I decided to show a very early draft of the project I was working on. The reactions were not great but it is at a very early stage and I got some very helpful feedback. It was suggested not to do an arthouse style piece and more of a classic story structure.

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I also read the script Rarely, Never, Sometimes, Always. I thought it was really intresting to read the script before watching the film as it forced me to see the screenplay as my own film and in doing so I affected the way I wrote from then onwards.

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Over the time of the course I developed a couple of different scripts to different degrees of completeness but every one that I worked on and planned I learnt a lot.

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we had to have a first draft. I started this week writing out a draft of the fish idea and got about half way through and got stuck. I felt like I could see where the plot was going but while writing it it felt like a series of events happening and although I felt like they were related to each other I felt like there wasn’t anything that the character could overcome as it was just him going through something rather than getting himself through something. I wrote half the script but for me having this block made it a lot harder to finish it.

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For this week in the session we also had a mixture of exercises and lectures. The first exercise we had to do was pick three images to tell your story. This was mine. I thought the imagery was good but if I was to carry on with this script I would have to find something for the character to overcome. We then had a lecture on perspective which I thought was useful to look at if we side with my character or not. I also think having the audience seeing the world from the characters POV means that you relate more with them.

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During this week I was in a big rut and decided to again completely change my idea. Inspired by the short film Yearbook I decided to change my idea again to something more similar to something I had seen and enjoyed watching. I loved the tone of Yearbook as well as Rian Johnstons The Psychology of Dream Analysis. I want my film to be set out with the same narration over the top. What I really liked about Yearbook was the reflection on the history of life but I thought it would be interesting just having one person reflect on their own life. I also didn’t want this to be too serious so I thought that if the idea of why she was reflecting was comical in inself it could be quite good. I settled on the idea: a hypochondriac is forced to to reflect over her life after becoming convinced she will die after eating an out of date pizza.

I think that if I can get the tone right it could be a mix of funny and touching look at what a 17 year old girl would think is the important part of her life before she dies.

Thinking about the perspective lecture in context to this it would be from her POV however the audience can see that she’s incorrect due to what she says. Small bit of dramatic irony.

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I started this week finishing off the fish script which I had stopped working on because I wasn’t happy with it. I am now feeling a lot more happy with it and I actually used ideas and feedback that my group had given that I think improved it a lot. One of the feedback was to maybe start it when he’s already a fish which I tried and it actually improved the script a lot by starting it after the process. I also thought I would add some ideas about dramatic irony and perspective that I learnt from the lecture last week Dramatic irony is good for creating suspense but I also think could be used quite well to create a humorous situation.

I also thought the lecture on action was intresting because it made me breakdown how much extra stuff there was in my screenplay that wasn’t needed. The most important thing I took out of this was that in a screenplay you’re only describing change.
We then had a lecture on perspective which I thought was useful to look at if we side with my character or not. I also think having the audience seeing the world from the characters POV means that you relate more with them.

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I also started to look over my fish horror script after leaving it for a couple weeks. It was nice to look back on it with fresh eyes. I decided that I wanted to have another go at it as I had some ideas that I thought would be fun where the story could go.

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We also had our one on ones with our tutors. Mine was with Ed which I found incredibly helpful just to go over some of the problems that I was facing with my script there is definitely still a lot that I’ve got to learn but.