Unit 2, Part A

13 January 2017

My leadership role within this project (creating a short film in collaboration with other BFI Academy students), was to write and edit a screenplay/script that we could film.

My aim in writing the script for this short film was to improve my writing skills through fulfilling the advice given to us from the speakers and instructions and edits given to us. Before, I've always just written scripts for school or my friends and I've been able to be quite free in how I write and wouldn't even plan -I would just go for it. This was a different experience for me because of the planning, and the fact that a film would actually be produced from the script I wrote. My aim was to make sure that it was a professional script because BFI is a program where we, as students, are learning to work in a professional environment.

This role required lots of pre-planning before writing the script. Besides coming up with the actual ideas for the story, I had to make sure that my whole group was on board with the ideas and that they felt like they had a part in the production of the script. It seemed important for my group to feel that they had some ownership of the story, as I certainly felt I did at the end of the script writing process. So before I even wrote the script, I made sure that I had the full support of my team members in making some of the decisions. Here are some earlier screenshots of our conversations:

On the first Saturday of BFI, we were very lucky to have a speaker called Rebecca Mark-Lawson come and talk to us about creating scripts specific to short films. I took extensive notes during this class in order to better prepare for the task ahead of me. Although I have written scripts before, I wanted to make sure that I did this one the right way. The biggest thing that I took away from this "master class", as she called it, is that simplicity is key; when writing my script, I tried as hard as possible to implement this idea and keep in mind the format of the film. The fact that this is a short film, not a feature film, really affected the tone of the story and kept any elaboration I desired to touch on to a minimum. Here are the notes I took during this talk:

This talk also inspired me to create complete project plans and to do some further research on stories before wrote one. Here are some pictures of these plans and some notes that I made from a YouTube clip:

Also, I decided to make a PowerPoint based off the notes that I took, so that I could have something to reference every time that I write a script in the future. I really wanted to make sure that in doing this course, I didn't forget what I learnt. Hence why I've taken so many notes and created this PowerPoint:

Another mentor who had a huge role in helping me develop the script was Caroline Cooper-Charles. She asked me how I could make the main character, Lewis, more personal to the audience and talked about how his actions could portray him as a more likable guy. Her feedback really helped me to develop the second draft of my script.