Lisa’s Group

Not It

Two young but ambitious marketing employees look for fun and interactive ways to promote an upcoming clown horror ‘Not It’. The two create and post a video that becomes an overnight viral media sensation, encouraging people to recreate their video in various situations. This gives them the recognition they were after but the trend quickly spirals out of control causing real societal repercussions. Their morality is questioned as they have to decide between professional success or taking accountability and prioritising the greater good of the people they have influenced.

This short film is a critique on capitalism and the exploitation of media particularly with how virility can be a precursor to a dangerous sequence of events. Dark obsessions underscore the film as we see the innocent protagonist fall prey to the monstrous corporate entities and the online world. We deliberately did not give any lines to the executives to really highlight the personal experience of the two friends becoming victims to the capitalist order. We believe the film is unique in that it is also about friendship and testing the limits of morality whilst still including elements of horror and conspiracy. 

The killer clown sightings that happened in 2016 was a media craze that consisted of viral photos and videos of people in clown costumes roaming the streets across the globe. The incident was unexplained at the time and occurred randomly, leading to many conspiracies that it was a campaign for the 2017 film It. The police were put in a constant state of pressure and panic ensued as the safety of each individual was put at risk. 

PROCESS:

Again, we preferred working as a group and sifting though each scene together as opposed to going off and writing a scene or a part of it each and combining those.

Often we found that we included information or scenes that, while good from a story perspective, disrupted the flow of the script, meaning we had to cut out or edit scenes that weren’t received as well when presented to an audience. This forced us to reassess how information was presented, with critical information being reshuffled to seperate scenes that flowed better or removed entirely for being superfluous.

As a collective, we really learnt to embrace each others skill sets and understand where our talents lay. For example some of us are better with dialogue and others with big print and over all story structure. Learning these fundamental group writing skills was challenging but overall set us up with the skills and confidence to continue writing in future group settings.

We all have two polished scripts that we are proud of and are excited to show to our peers and potentially to future industry experts.

‘Not It’ Script Portfolio

LILITH

A mini series based on the biblical stories of Lilith, Adam and Eve retold as a modern day billionaire family in a parallel fantastical New York City. Based on the myth of Adam’s first wife Lilith, who became a demon after refusing to be subservient to him. The story primarily follows Lilith, and her difficult romance with Adam and of her gaining her independence, emerging as a modern day feminist figure. The show is unique as it incorporates myths to modern day morals and is an exploration of religious values and its impact on modern society. It is genre bending and a twist on ancient stories with elements of magical realism. It is an exploration of religious values and its impact on modern society whilst interweaving aspects of power, family, reputation, and love in the narrative.

As a group, we all have a vested interest in mythology. We have mainly been inspired by tales and twists in mythologies, folklore and fables from the bible and multiple religions. An example of our inspirations would be the films of Shakespeare’s plays that retain all the original dialog but present it in a contemporary setting, creating a dichotomy between the story and the world.

PROCESS:

Despite sometimes having conflicting ideas over how we should approach a script, we were able to overcome these challenges by refocusing and taking a step back and analysing the current story in a way that compliments our differing interpretations.

Whilst writing this script we all learnt invaluable script writing and fundamental story structure lessons. Specifically, with writing dialogue for the characters, we made an effort to be as specific as possible with Lucifer especially, as the more specific the more relatable and universal a character actually becomes which is evident in the class’s fascination with our “villianous” character.

we continued to hone our skills for writing not on the nose dialogue and try get the point across with out being too overt. This is a challenging but necessary part of the process and in in the finishing touches we managed to be able to execute well.

As a group, we worked well and embraced each-others inputs and ideas, and overall did everything as a group as opposed to setting tasks for one another. We went through each part of the script line by line as a whole to dissect and enhance the script. This formed a group collective consciousness and a cohesiveness to the writing that may not have happened if we did it separately.

‘Lilith’ Script Portfolio

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