First team meeting today! Whoo! I feel like we need a motto or something. Maybe we can make one up this Friday in class. But for now, we were all very, very concentrated on choosing the right script for our group.
It's not easy you know. When you have four very different minds who all have their own individual styles, likes and desires, the type of script that can be chosen by one person can be something completely different to one chosen by someone else. To combat this, we all set out a few guidelines to help us narrow down the scripts:
1. You should know within the first 30 seconds of the film (i.e half way down the first page), who and what the main character, setting and conflict is.
2. Shootability: we need to aim to produce something that is not going to be too hard to make so that we can really focus on the basics - i.e, nothing with moving car scenes or extravagant set designs.
3. Don't just pick your friends. Try to look at the script selection as a professional who wouldn't just pick their friend's script because they know them.
With this in mind, all four of us came up with the scripts we thought could work for our short film. Some were interesting but had a dissapointing ending (this was quite common unfortunately which was sad); some had exciting characters but not a very interesting plotline; some were a bit too complicated; and the rest were so badly formatted we didn't even give them a chance. When there are thousands of websites dedicated to scriptwriting and even a section on ScreenAustralia about the correct script format, there really is no excuse for a badly formatted script even if you are a first time writer.
After an hour of deliberating and ums and ahs, one of my crew asked whether I had read the last final 3 scripts that were submitted just two nights ago. I admitted I didn't even know they existed as did two other of the crew and so we all read the last three together (was a cute moment which I shall put in the scrapbook in my mind). What was great was that we actually chose our script from one of the last three that were handed in - Megan Kiantos' "The Milkbar".
I had actually completely forgotten that this script was in circulation but having read it from front to back, I thought about our one-liner revision 3 weeks back and remembered how even then, I was really interested in Megan's story. I can't quite put my finger on what it was exactly but I think if anything, it was just that she had created these two characters who weren't particularly beautiful and you weren't necessarily going to like either one of them by the end of the film but you did become engrossed in their behaviour and I personally was able to suspend disbelief for the entire script. Looking over the script though, we could tell there were a few holes that needed patching up which we thought could easily happen in our script revision session this Friday coming. I'm really looking forward to see what our group comes up with and I can't wait to start visualising the material.
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