Session 5/6/7 – Developing our script

Session 5:

For the first session of our script development, we all sat around a table and begun pitching ideas to each other. We aimed to create a space that enabled everyone to share ideas without judgement. Whilst we were going around, a common theme in our ideas became apparent: an apocalyptic situation of the end of the world. Once we established this, we came up with 3 alternative ideas for pairs to write up the first page to give us a sense of what would work best.

These were: (1) the boardroom of 3 political leaders debating what to do in the end of the world, (2) a struggling scriptwriter starts to dream his awful scripts and (3) a dark comedy of people revealing their truths at the end of the world, whilst commenting on how brands sponsor disastrous events for more views.

Session 6:

We begun the session by sharing our first page of the scripts and the proposed storyline. After we had heard each proposal, we decided to combine elements of them to make a comedy short film about 8 different people reactions to the end of the world, thus ‘8 minutes’ (to live) was born. This is when we started to create different characters and situations.

These were (1) two youths are robbing a house, one decides to become a priest to redeem himself in the last few minutes of his life, (2) a middle class couple are watching the news on TV and the man reveals he never loved his wife, (3) a worker screams at her boss about not being able to achieve her actual career dreams, (4) a stoner reveals their want for collectivism over individualism and (5) the news presenter gets drunk and reveals he hates his family on live television. These are all interconnected and joined together by each character watching a screen with the news showing on it.

We realised early on this was a complex idea for a short film and had a lot of various locations and actors to deal with. However, we decided we all felt passionate enough about the project to work hard on it.

Session 7:

In the final sessions of script development, the scriptwriters and directors primarily worked on the script while the rest of the crew focused on logistical issues – locations, actors etc. We decided to use several of our actors in multi roles, just in different costumes and begun to brain storm where each location could be held.

(See the development of pre-production in my shoot diary!)