For my piece I chose to write about the development of our photo story exercise into prose form prior to scripting.
On the Run
The sun hits her hand harshly, splaying its image against the wall. The shadow gives her a sense of freedom, as though she isn’t there right now. She’s on the other side of that wall, waving hello at a stranger. Looking at her hand, she notices her wedding band and the illusion of freedom dissipates. She knows where she is and why she’s here. She clenches her fist and begins to move.
The need to get away consumes her every fiber as she runs for the nearest staircase. A glimmer of hope.
But the stairs, and everywhere else she goes, prove to be endless, leading her through the labyrinth to no end, only a wall. A wall she cannot enter, or at least as far as the CONSTRUCTION IN PROGRESS sign tells her.
Once through she finds herself in the same predicament, she tries every route she can. An inconspicuos ladder, a potted plant. But the cameras seem to follow her whereever she goes. His agents seem to be at every corner, blocking her path to freedom. She can see the exit is just down the end of this alley. Before the agents notice her, she quickly ducks into a crevice in the wall, just big enough to be cloaked in shadow. The coast is very nearly clear, so she decides to make her move. After all, her path will never be crystal clear.
Guards and agents litter the path ahead. She creeps past the first one, her evasive actions almost alerting the second one to her presence. She cinches along the wall, barely touching shadow, hoping they all remain unaware. She tries desperately not to make a sound, but the ridiculousness of what she’s trying to achieve comes back to bite her, and the alarm is raised. She sprints for her life towards the exit as her husband’s men, chase after her shouting,
“he just wants to talk!”
“sure he does…” she replies under her breath.
She makes it to the door and runs through to find her son, happy she made the right decision to leave him.
I really think that the mood and tone work well in this piece. The description, or what would effectively be the big text of a script, works well through its style and specific word description to convey the atmosphere of the piece.
However, certain details confuse the mood and tone, as they go against the very generic, thematic and genre convention based aesthetics of the writing. The writing conveys a very sensationalist tone, I’ll be it in a semi-sarcastic way, but it still resembles the written style of something like James Bond, as opposed to a story centred around domestic abuse. Mixing the spectacular and fantastical with a very serious concept creates a strange mix that doesn’t seem to belong together.
There are, however, versions of this kind of spectacle genre mixed with serious issues, such as Kill Bill (volume 1 particularly), so the serious issues, if further developed, could be portrayed believably and with justice to larger issues at hand.
Another issue with this piece is spatial reasoning. Often, while reading this piece I can’t seem to place myself visually within the world. I can understand the characters and their perspectives or actions, but there seem to be jumps in time and space as the prose moves through the character descriptions and into descriptions of the world around them. As this is the precursor to the script, jumps in logic, especially when it comes to the visual nature of spatial reasoning, hinder the smoothness and flow of the story.
As we proceeded to the next phase of this exercise and wrote a screenplay of our chosen photo story, I found that the spacial reasoning improved, as I was thinking more visually, especially in terms of how the script would translate to the screen.
Over all this exercise was really interesting and provided a sort of foundation for where scripts come from and where they sit in the creative world. The big text of the script is essentially a more concise version of the prose above, emphasising a script’s ability to tell a story, while also being placed in a more visual, conventional and technical sphere.
I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.