After the first week I felt like I had a good idea of where I was going and after getting Sam on board as an editor I was confident of getting that project off with the ground. Sadly though Alex was starting to come up with his own ideas and he decided he wanted to work on a solo project which I completely understand as solo project are good for expressing your abilities as a film maker. This to start with led me to start feeling at a bit of a loss when it came to what I was going to do. After showing Sam my script however she decided she liked my style of screenwriting and asked if I would write the screenplay to her short film idea. I have been screenwriting a lot over the summer and it is an area in which I have wanted to challenge myself in. She explained her idea to me and how she wanted to create a horror where two best friends Jaz and Annie meet up and have a night in for Halloween but then when they turn on the TV they hear about these murders that have taken place in their local area which causes them to have a conversation about the murders that in turn leads Jaz to become scared. Although Sam didn't really know what she wanted to do with the ending she knew she wanted a twist at the end where it turns out that Annie is the murderer. I originally thought the idea was quite generic but I did like the twist idea, I asked Sam to build character profiles to really flesh out the characters because as a screenwriter I needed to know the characters really well in order to write dialogue that felt natural and realistic.
Character profiles I was given:
Jaz: Trendy/popular girl, also in her late teens, scared of the paranormal
Annie: Goth, late teens, no job, loves the weird and paranormal
After receiving the character profiles I felt like the whole film was becoming quite generic with these polar opposite characters that just happen to be best friends and as a goth myself I did find the film becoming slightly predictable and annoy and starting to get to the point where I wasn't sure if I wanted to write it. I discussed my feelings with Sam and mentioned how I thought that actually having Jaz as the murderer would actually subvert audience expectation and in turn use the gothic stereotype to the films advantage but Sam was very set on her idea. I got to work on a first draft (see belowe) in which I changed a few things from Sam's original idea as I felt the film could do with being a bit more gritty. I established the two characters as friends straight away by showing this relationship they have where they constantly have this playful banter between each other as it is the only way I could see these two character types actually getting along. Sam liked the way I built the characters up like that but she didn't really like the rest of the draft. I did in fairness make it more dramatic and tried to add reasoning to why Annie committed these murders where as Sam wanted the film to be very much a horror and thought that it would be more scary for the viewer not to know why Annie has committed these murders. I left Sam to write me a shot list and I said I would just build a second draft from that list but when she came back to me she was struggling with how to end her film still. I tried to look at the idea from a different point of view as I have recently spent a lot of time watching one location based short films and finding them really effective (of course the dialogue has to be perfect). I showed Sam a couple of short films (see below) and recommended that she watch some more to hopefully inspire her. I am now waiting on a revised shot list from Sam before I start work on a second draft.
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