L’APRÈS-MIDI / XIÀ WǓ (AFTERNOON)
In the few hours after school and before hometime, the daughter of a French hairdresser and the son of a Singaporean Restaurant owner form an unlikely friendship at a Suburban shopping strip.
The short was written collaboratively – we begun with our opening scenes and treatment – before expanding the story world and completing the whole story. We each had certain elements or characters that we were able to delegate, and then return as a group to share feedback and re-work. For example, Emmanuelle wrote for the character of Alain, and imbued it with qualities from her own father, whilst Renasha wrote for the character of Michael using knowledge from her Singaporean/Chinese background.
What did we get from this?
Emmanuelle:
The process of writing taught me a lot about the power of specificity in writing. It was only through ‘writing what we know’ that our group was able to make a piece that explored the universality of migration and childhood. I also learnt a lot about creating tone in writing. I’m a very visual person (and enjoyed putting together the visual treatment way too much), so learning how to emulate certain qualities into writing, along with the melodies of dialogue, has been a wonderful learning experience.
Connor:
It was really interesting making a script heavily based off of a personal story of one of our group members. Not only did it allow for really nice moments losely based off of real life, but I think that it leant a certain ‘authenticity’ to the story as a whole. As opposed to stories, not everything in life has a real ending. Sometimes things are left on an unsatisfying note, or are just never resolved, which I think really came through with this script. It emulates real life more than a generic story, simply because it’s based off one.
Viv:
The process of developing and writing ‘L’après-midi / Xià wǔ (Afternoon)’ was an exercise in bringing truth and heart to the story. With the narrative of the script being based on an experience that one of our group members had while growing up, it was important to communicate these little idiosyncrasies in the script. Achieving this meant listening closely to the recounts of this memory and story in our writer’s room so that the script could have that same uniqueness to it, from the little descriptions in the big text to the overall structure of the story that takes place.
Afternoon – Info Sheet Afternoon – Visual Presentation Afternoon – Script
ITZ.LILY.XO
A 15 year old boy lives a secret life as a lifelike 19 year old female streamer. As the online world starts to interfere with his real one, an internal conflict brews within that not even his avatar can hide.
The process of writing Itz.lily.xo was fascinating. We begun with ideas that we wanted to communicate, rather than a narrative, so learning how to create a story in order to best articulate our themes was a really interesting journey of working in a different way than we have in the past. As a result, we struggled for a long time to not make the work too didactic, and explore how we could use plot and character in nuanced ways.
What did we get from this?
Emmanuelle:
The feedback process when we pitched Itz.lily.xo to the class was wonderful, as I feel like it was this script that got the most immediate visceral reactions. It was incredibly insightful to watch the moments that the class reacted to (like certain lines from Lily’s dialogue, and the reveal that Jacob’s dad had been watching her channel. Even over zoom it gave us a great sense of what was working and what wasn’t, and the process gave me a much better understanding of how to incorporate feedback into the writing process.
Connor:
I really loved learning how to write more taboo and acerbic themes and dialogue with this one. It’s something that I’ve never really gotten to do before, and was really interesting compared to more ‘normal’ dialogue in other scripts. It was also tough balancing the different tones of the project, making sure that one didn’t overpower the other and create an imbalance, but also learning when to keep one tone. The overall darker themes mixed with teenage humour during the streaming sections couldn’t be done during the father reveal, otherwise it would break the tension and audience immersion to the story, so figuring out how to balance tones, but also when to keep a consistent one was a really nice thing to learn here.
Viv:
I got a lot out of the process for writing ‘itz.lily.xo’. Tapping into the taboo themes and concepts presented in the script made for many interesting discussions within our group about what avenues and directions we could take the story. More importantly, though, it was a good exercise in learning how to carefully balance these ideas by writing in a way that wasn’t over-the-top gratuitous but also didn’t hold the audience’s hand. This helped strike a balance in the script that made it engaging to imagine, write and read.
itz.lily.xo Info Sheet Itz.Lily.xo-Script ITZ.LILY.XO-Visual Treatment
