The task was to create characters and then create a story based on some preconceived scenarios. This is what I came up with:
Character
Kevin
Kevin is a tall, lanky man in his late thirties. Kevin used to be a woman, Sandra but he has long forgotten those days. Kevin is from a working class family is Newcastle, New South Wales and moved to Melbourne shortly after he changed his name, legally. He now works as a bar tender in a classy Fitzroy bar, frequented by all of those trendy hispters he wants so much to be like. He imitates their clothing and wears checked shirts and wears a beard. He likes the buzz of the city and hates remembering his small claustrophobic home town, and the frequent name callings and foreboding looks that he used to endure. He lost his friends after he “came out” as transgender. No one seemed to understand him. He now treasures the life he has built in a new city, his trendy friends and his pet dog, Humpy. You can guess how he got his name… He has always been a he. His parents never understood, and now he tries to forget he even had any.
Emily
Emily is in her late twenties and thought that she could change the world, but now see just changes the clothes of the manikins in the window of the shop she works at. Her mother is Persian and her father is Indian. She always dreads the question that people always ask, “So where are you from”. She sometimes feels like she is from another planet, there is no one on the earth that really gets her so she feels she belongs to another world in another galaxy somewhere. Her parents are well off, however they had always been strict. They were always pushing for her to do better in school and study medicine or engineering in university. It almost broke her mother’s heart when she failed her first degree. Her father was the one to encourage her to do something that she actually enjoyed, after a struggle, no she studies fashion. She can’t talk about it with her family though, all of those snide remarks, it is obvious they think it is a waste of time. She loves colours and is always searching for new bright fabrics to make her designs from. When she was little she has a kaleidoscope and used to love watching the colours and patterns melt into one another. She wanted to live in a glass castle with different coloured stained-glass windows. She has never found someone that she truly likes, there have been flings in the past, but no one that she could bring home to meet the parents.
Scenario
A cruise ship gets caught in a storm, veers of course, and then sinks far from the mainland, but many of the passengers survive and make it to a deserted island.
Premises
- After clawing their way out of debris and dead bodies Kevin and Emily make it to a deserted island. They are both still alive, however hunger almost consumes them both. They are forced to eat the dead that wash up on shore, and when all of the bodies are finished, a battle for survival begins. (Possible title: Cannibal Games)
- Emily is narcoleptic and when she wakes up on a beautiful deserted island, she thinks her husband Kevin has prepared a surprise getaway for her. Kevin doesn’t have the heart to tell her that the cruise ship they were on sunk and he dragged her to safety while she slept and ended up on the desert island.
- Emily and Kevin were on their honeymoon, however they never expected that their cruise ship would sink and they would be stranded on a deserted island. Mysteriously the survivors start disappearing only to discover that the island is not an island at all, it is a massive dome in space, where aliens kidnap people and perform experiments on them.
Scenario
A man and woman are sitting across from each other at a small table in a dimly lit restaurant
Premises
- Kevin and Emily are forced into a difficult situation when the restaurant they are eating at is taken over by a crime syndicate, holding everybody hostage in order to get their boss released from prison.
- Kevin and Emily are on a blind date at a restaurant when they both break out with food poisoning, the waiter refuses to let them go, claiming that the food is not making them sick, and tires to ease the tension by claiming that an ambulance is on the way. This worst date ever becomes even more awkward when they realise they are related
- Kevin and Emily are on a blind date, literally, they are both blind. The waiter attempts to assist the couple as best he can, however the night ends up a disaster
Synopsis
Kevin and Emily are celebrating their first anniversary at their favourite restaurant. Kevin has been working late a lot recently and Emily suspects an affair. Kevin is about to invite her to dance, when three armed men enter the restaurant with semi-automatic weapons.
Kevin does his best to protect Emily, however the assailant Paul presses her up to the window and threaten to shoot her if the authorities don’t release Joe Politsiano, a mobster with links to the Italian Mafia. Paul, the leader is on the phone to the police, while Rick and Vinnie are on crowd control. The police negotiators have asked for one hostage to be released. Paul offers up Kevin, who refuses to leave without Emily. The attackers shoot Kevin in the leg and jokes that he can’t go anywhere soon now. Emily tries to tie his leg up to stop the bleeding. Another hostage, Cliff begs for his release. He is on a blind date with a woman who is shocked by his cowardice. Paul pushes Cliff out of the restaurant.
Kevin goes pale from the bleeding and Emily begs Paul to get him to get medical attention. Kevin thinks he is about to die and confesses that he knows that she thinks he is having an affair, and that he was just going to dance classes with a female friend form work and he was going to surprise her tonight with the tango. Emily, thinking that it is her last resort takes the phone that Paul had been taking with and says that Kevin has been shot and he needs help or he will die. Emily is beaten and falls to the ground. Kevin is distraught and begs for Emily’s release.
Paul says that he will shoot another hostage if a van doesn’t arrive in 10 minutes. The police arrange for a van to pull up to the back entrance to the restaurant. As Paul and his goons approach the van, they grab Emily and force her in front of them. As they open the back door of the van the Police open fire and shoot all of them dead, including Emily.
Reflections
How useful was the exercise in helping to construct a story outline?
The exercise of creating characters worked well and when I started writing it became easier to create the details of their history. When it came to constructing the story it became a lot harder to fit these highly individual characters into the story. I enjoyed coming up with premises, but didn’t really like many of the ideas that I came up with. This process made it easy to construct a story, however I feel like if the scenario/ premise and character’s where reverse the process might be more successful as it is difficult to construct a story with pre-existing characters, and it might be easier to first create a premise then construct the characters.
How easy/hard was it to place your characters into your scenario?
It was not an easy task to place the characters in the scenario because I created characters with difficult backstories which I ended up ignoring when it came to placing them in the story. I ignored the fact that Kevin is transgender and the difficultly that Emily has with her complex parents. It was easy to create a story based on the premise, however coming up with a resolution was difficult because it devolved into a typical action plot line. I relied heavily on the tropes of the sub-genre hostage drama.
Did choosing a genre help to guide your story in any particular direction?
I chose a particular type of genre subset, the hostage drama. This genre started up being useful for guiding the story along, however the options became limited when it came to a story resolution, as some of these films have specific endings, usually the hostage films are from the point of view of the people who are taking everyone hostage, however in this case the story was focused on the two victims, Kevin and Emily.
Do you think this type of exercise is a good pathway into writing a screenplay? Why/why not?
In future this would be a good exercise to either flesh out new characters, or come up with new story ideas. I don’t think that coming up with characters and then putting them into preconceives situations aids creativity because the writer is limited in what they can achieve with this format. The exercise does work well in terms of actually getting ink on paper, and is very productive in that respect. I think this would be a good exercise for me to use in the future just to get started because sometimes when I intend to write it is hard to get started.
