Morning Session:
In the morning my group was with Simon, we began by watching "Soft" a short film by director Simon Ellis.
"Soft" on Vimeo by Simon Ellis After the viewing as a class group we made a pitch for the film.
Genre:
Drama/Suspense/Short film
Setting:
Modern day, Urban
Characters:
Protagonists= Father+Son (the son is the one who goes through the biggest change)
Subsidiary characters= Threat (gang of boys in hoody)
Conflict:
The father has the biggest emotional conflict, internally he is torn between protecting his son and house but, he is also fearful of the threat and possibly wants to set an example for his son not to rise to the antagonisation from the threat.
Change:
Son: change in his moral compass, goes through a role reversal with his father and in the process loses respect for his father.
Theme:
Coming of age, Father and son relationship, Karma, Masculinity
Tone:
Gritty/real
25 Word pitch (elevator pitch)
After the group pitch we were then told to come up with a 25 word or under pitch for the film. Myself and a classmate came up with two.
Our original: Son reaches breaking point after father fails to protect him from violent gang
Our final: After his demorsalizing run in with a hostile gang a father fails to protect his son pushing events to breaking point.
We choose that last one because it wasn't as vague and we felt would be more interesting for a audience to read.
We also watched another Simon Ellis film "Stew and Punch", I personally enjoyed the comedic value of this film but preferred "Soft" as I like the way its ending was a flip on what I personally expected to happen. (I expected the father to defend his son in the end).
From the morning session I learnt the proper structure of a long pitch and what was needed, I learnt you don't have to be 100% honest in a pitch because you still want there to be an element of mystery that intrigues who ever you're pitching to.
Afternoon session:
In the afternoon my group had a session with Steve Coombes.
He gave us an analogy that the writer is like the CIA and the audience is the President and the writer (CIA) only tells the audience (President) things on a need to know basis.
A screenplay is a series of information and how/when it's told to the audience is the art of story telling, therefore you need to use time effectively and jump straight into the interesting parts of a story otherwise the audience can become bored.
We were also given general guidelines of how many words certain lengths of television have: 1hour is around 12,000 words and 30 minuets of TV is around 6,000 words. Therefore our screenplay should be around 2,000 for the finale draft, as well as this Steve suggested we stick to using verbs and doing words over adjectives as verbs are the most interesting for the audience.
He taught us the 6 rules of Screenplay (a screenplay is any visual narrative that isn't improvised) structure:
1. A screenplay doesn't tell a story at the audience's pace, the audience finds your pace.
2. What cannot be said should not be said. In other words show don't tell, seeing is believing for the audience. The most interesting parts of a character is the stuff you can't see eg. their personality, so it needs to be shown through the way they act not said in general conversation.
3. A screenplay is like a joke with it's structure= setup, distract, punchline. This goes for scenes character arches etc.
4. Know your ending.
5. Count your moments. (The points of a show or film that the audience finds memorable)
6. Use actors that can actually act, a screenplay can survive a bad director and producer but not a bad actor.
After our break we looked at two versions of a screenplay (The first 5 pages of "American Beauty"), one was a first draft the other was the actual shoot script. Start of "American Beauty"
We looked at the shots and the characters, as well as looking at how Alan Ball (Writer) went to using a voice over in the shooting script.
From the afternoon session I learnt a lot about structure and how a screenplay should look as well as what it should contain, there should be no wasted words everything in it needs to go towards creating characters (how they speak, walk etc.)
The analogy helped me to understand what should actually be shown to the audience and when.
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