Big Tree

The story is about two boys, an older brother and a younger brother, both of whom have resorted to playing in the backyard in an attempt to fight the boredom they were experiencing inside. After a short game of footy that ends after one of the boys kicks the football into their house tree, the boys attempt to throw one piece of paraphenalia after another up the tree to uproot their ball. With no success, the film ends with one brother slyly suggesting, through the script's big print, that the cat is the next item to gain liftoff.

There are a couple of things that disturb me about this script. First of all, there seemed to be a genuine lack of explanation about the tree's ability to swallow up everything thrown towards it. I feel that it would have been much more realistic not to have the tree "eating" all the backyard toys, but to instead have shots of each individual item firmly wedged in the tree's branches. This I feel is a more plausible explanation for the items not returning to earth (we've all had that frisbee or basketball that gets stuck in the tree) and one that I would have explored had this been my script.

Another note I made was the obvious laziness of the writer's at the end of the script. Whilst Act 1 and 2 were moving along quite nicely, particularly in the way the writer's managed to build up the relationship between the two brothers, I feel it fell completely short of its mark when it just ended with a suggestion of what the boys would do next. In film, I find it extremely frustrating when only a suggestion is made in regards to the resolution. In the original script, we never find out why the tree was retaining everything thrown towards it, nor are we provided with the satisfaction that the boys will get their football back, the original motivation for their actions which I feel the writers should have returned to.

A few suggestions I would make would be 1. To change the function of the tree not so that it is a mysterious, creepy character that has some supernatural ability to make toys disappear but is instead like every other tree I know which has "sticky branches" (sticky fingers, get it?) and therefore is able to grab onto the items as each one is thrown up. 2. I would completely change the ending - for me, the cat is a kick in the guts for my animal activist side and I would rather like it to be left alone, thank you very much. Instead, I would use that beautiful set-up they had going at the beginning of the film where the boys mother told them to clean up the yard so that at the end when their father comes home, he thinks they have done just that when really, everything that was on the ground has merely been relocated to the tree.

All in all, I really liked the film's overall tone and the direction the writers took it at the beginning. I feel however, that with a few short changes, this could have been made much more intelligently and with a little more feeling. Over the next coming week's, I want to challenge myself to produce a storyboard for my alternative ending to the script to illustrate the idea I proposed above. Stay tuned.