Tuesday 24 September 2013
Task
Today Simon set us a
task to team up with another pupil from our lecture group and create a 25-word
pitch and a short story for a feature film called ‘The meet’.
Here is a picture of
the task conditions we had to work under
The member of my group
whom I teamed up with was CK.
The set location we
were given was a container yard. The characters we were given were, an office
clearer and an unemployed teenager.
Once we had gone
through that thought process and jotted down a few ideas, we narrowed down our
selections into a character table to insert our final decisions into each
characters section
When we had given our
characters an identity and a personality, it made it easier for us to create a
reason for why they would be at the container yard and include a plot into this
reason with minor adjustments.
Using our table to build off of, we then
put together a 26-word pitch, what would besides letting our audience know what our
feature film is about, would also remind us what we are writing about as we
then expanded that pitch into a short story.
Here is our final draft story.......
Here is our final draft story.......
Container Terminal 18
Theme: Action
thriller
Pitch
Unemployed during his 6thform Christmas break; Luke is
sent to work as an office cleaner with his granddad Harry at London’s notorious
Container Terminal18
Story
An
unemployed 18 year old teenager named Luke whom is on his school Christmas break is
currently helping his granddad out with his office cleaning job at the
container yard working night shifts.
One
night as he is waiting for his granddad to turn up to work. He lit a cigarette,
as he was 10 minutes early. Whilst smoking, he over hears multiple voices
coming from a part of the container yard he though was suppose to be empty.
As
he goes over to explore what is happening, he notices people loading bags into
a container where the noise was coming from. Suddenly a filthy child in
tattered clothing runs out of the container, this startles Luke making him jump
in disbelief that then notices the antagonist that someone is observing them.
Meanwhile
Grandpa
Harry (as referred to by Luke) has now turned up to the closed office, let himself
in and walked towards his cleaning cupboard. While preparing for the shift, he
becomes concerned for his grandson because he is now 20 minutes late. He tries
to contact him on his mobile but is getting bad reception inside the office, so
he makes the call outside. Once outside manages to get good with reception and
tries to contact his grandson, but his phone line is just ringing out. As he
continues to phone his grandson, Harry too hears a noise coming from the
distance, to which he then follows, as he gets closer, the sound becomes more
prominent and he recognizes the noise as his grandsons ring tone, until
eventually he was standing looking down at Lukes phone.
Feed back
At the end of the workshop
we pitched our short story to our whole class and tutor, our class and tutor
liked our story and we got some positive feedback on how we could improve it. Simon advised us that sometimes instead of giving a scenario a
professional from that background i.e. a builder building a house, make it
something that the audience would not expect to add more suspense and interest
to the plot i.e. a monkey building a house, the reason he told us that was because of the character profile we originally given Harry, a retired special ops mercenary
How
this helped me?
Well… it definitely has opened up my mind
to a more structural thought process when trying to think of an idea for a
short story, helping me to quickly establish logical explanations for my story
idea i.e. Who? What? When? Where? How? and also to keep the viewer guessing whilst establishing what they're seeing not making my screenplay too predictable
