With spring break coming to a close, my friends and I managed to write a script this week, and we’re going to try to shoot it in the coming weeks. If all goes well, it will be shot tomorrow.
The premise for this idea is based off of the recently trending “selfie olympics”, where, as I’m told, people take increasingly ridiculous selfies in an effort to outdo their competitors. That’s about all I know so far, and we used that as a starting idea for the script.
Instead of posting the script here, I thought I would try this thing where I give brief snippets of what it’s about, then talk about something related to it in a more topical manner.
Story: Sam and Tom fight over getting the attention of Heather in a battle of epic selfie proportions. Things get a little out of hand.
Hopefully that doesn’t give away too much or too little, but what I really wanted to talk about was the process of brainstorming this idea.
It was definitely different coming up with this idea than it was coming up with the idea that was used for the script I wrote with Wong Fu Productions back in August and September. Back then, I had a very basic idea and kind of went with it, not really knowing where it was going to go. Although the final product was much better than what it started off as, I learned a lot about story development and character development that changed the way I approached it this time. Back then, nothing was fleshed out and I hoped that things would fall into place as time went on which, to my surprise, did.
However, I had the feeling that coming up with a “good” script was much more than flow of dialogue and background. Since most of the things I want to shoot are in the form of sketch comedy, skits, or short films, there’s only so much you can develop a character before the product becomes too convoluted with unnecessary storyline. Instead, it was important for me to see that a character can be very developed on paper without it translating to something tangential on screen. Giving characters backgrounds, even if the viewer never sees it, really fleshes out how dialogue would work more naturally into the setting.
That aside, I found that the initial brainstorming for this short was littered with random ideas. Now, understand that we started brainstorming around 1AM, so things were already a little loopy. However, I think it kind of made us OK with things we usually wouldn’t be OK with, and that allowed us to be more “crazy” with our ideas. Luckily, the final idea isn’t something that can’t be understood, but there were a few ideas along the way that were just plain outrageous.
So I guess this is all to say that I think I learned a very good lesson from the last time I wrote a script. That lesson is that there is as much storyline development behind the script as there is in the script.
Peace.
The Nobody Project 