I want to tease out a first glimmer of an idea for a screen world I might like to explore…

Going into the Another World Studio I will be honest, I didn’t really understand what was meant by that other world. My mind immediately jumped to Middle Earth, or Harry Potter, or the Matrix. Literally another world, with its own unique laws different from our own because of the addition of magic or technology.

I hadn’t considered the idea of a ‘world’ as just a location in our own reality, but in class we started branching off from our conversation about Sex In the City to talk about the New York City portrayed in different movies. The NYC of Sex in the City, where a mugging is used as a punchline, is completely different to the NYC of Burlesque, where the girl gets immediately robbed of everything she owns.

It got me started thinking about worlds in a less literal sense, and I started looking for worlds not only in places, but in social and cultural spheres. I can’t remember the exact thought that prompted it, but I started thinking about my time in retail, specifically moving between the world of the shop floor and the world of the break room.

There’s this unique phenomenon in customer service, this persona you adopt that can be completely different from who you really are, and it is completed with your ‘customer voice’. I could be serving a customer and be sweet and lovely and charming and then as soon as they leave I resume my conversation with my coworker and my voice drops about an octave. Hell, just this morning I went to breakfast at the cafe where my sister works and in the space of ten minutes she called up a woman on the phone and called her lovely, not as an adjective but as a form of address, and then was ribbing her coworkers and called them fuckers.

Working in retail is like working as an actor, and I think I’d like to take a stab at writing the screen play for those actors. Specifically the roles they play on and off the stage, and the dissonance between the two. Maybe a piece going back and forth between the shop floor and the break room.

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