As part of the film course I’m attending, we get the opportunity to film two short films – up to three minutes in length.
Naturally, I jumped at the chance to get a script made (Even if only three minutes) and happily mine was one of the two selected.
The lecturer for the course liked my idea because of its simplicity.
The short film only needed one actor (and a spider or fake spider), could be filmed all in one room (with a sound effect of someone rifling through kitchen cupboards needed at one point but done out of vision) and really that was it.
The script originally took place in an old cottage with multiple rooms, but seeing as there’s only one living-room set available, I did some re-writes so it could all take place in one room.
The lecturer noted that a lot of the scripts received are too ambitious for the budget of £0.00 that is available to students and it made me think.
I have often been told in screenwriting not to worry too much about how things are going to happen. If you need a fiery tornado in order to tell your story, then put in a fiery tornado in order to tell your story. How the fiery tornado gets made and put into the story is a problem for the director, editors and special-effects crew to actually make happen.
But what if that’s not an option to begin with?
Re-writing a script multiple times is something that writers have to do on a set. Re-writing scenes so they take place in different rooms if one isn’t available, different characters if an actor isn’t available. So surely that might also include taking out the fiery tornado if no-one can make a fiery tornado?
Re-writing the script so it can be done in another way, with fewer characters or suddenly take place in one room instead of three is an interesting exercise and tests my ability as a writer.
Sure I might need a fiery tornado to tell my story, but without one what will happen? Will the characters see the tornado outside the window, but it will be invisible to the audience? Maybe we hear about it on news segments or we simply see its aftermath?
It’s made me think that in future this will be a useful exercise to try with all of my scripts. How many ways can I think of to tell the story I need to? Therefore I can learn not only which approach works best from a writing point of view, but which one works best from a camera operating/directing/editing point of view, too, and they might not always match up!
Besides anything else, we discovered that the best way to film the (fake) spider falling into a mug of hot chocolate was to tie thread around it, put it in the mug in the first place and slowly pull it out of the mug from out of shot. We will then, in the editing process, reverse this footage so it looks like it’s falling in. Which means I have given everybody on the course the chance to learn how to reverse footage as a bonus lesson!
ChristyESWriter 