STORY DEVELOPMENT

Developing my ideas and influences into a new story...

I wish to use my grad project to build on my production and directorial skills developed during my previous projects to make a film bigger and better in both scope and technical quality, but also in its attention to character, something I did not focus too heavily on in my previous short film Dead Alive Girl.

Part of this will come down to my writing, something that I very much wish to improve on. Strength of story, character-building and dialogue are all areas I feel I would like to showcase via my script. Although elements of these were deliberately made imperfect for the style of Dead Alive Girl, some of that film's ropiness came from actual problems and oversights I experienced over the course of the production and became unable to fix.

As such I will aim to inject my new film with more dramatic character interactions and situations and concepts that will hopefully be clearer and more thoroughly explored but still retaining an air of mystery and self-interpretation for the audience. This will be helped by me making the most of the additional four mins run time, allowing me more capacity to produce a vaster, more character-driven story. However, this means I will have to put in a lot more work into planning and logistics.

The following are mood boards that I've created using stills from films I have been influenced by. These have helped me to collate all the stylistic elements I love and wish to combine in as unique a way as possible...

The following is my 12-page script (following the rule of a page per minute of screen time!) that I developed over the summer of last year, which brings together all of my ideas, themes and the characters that I wish to bring to life...

Below are my storyboards created myself from my script and denotes all my initial ideas for possible shot compositions, camera directions and blocking, and incorporates the signal station location specifically...

Through my script I have tried to combine a story set in 1600’s England, an era synonymous with earlier tentpole Folk Horror efforts of the 1960’s and 1970’s, with overtly Sci-Fi aspects. With attention to scoring, the last act of my film will feature a sudden change-up in the soundtrack, in which a discomforting, traditional-sounding musical accompaniment will transition dramatically into a synth wave soundscape as the two main characters discover a space-originated structure and are ascended physically and spiritually by it. The following mood reel is aimed to encompasses the atmosphere and styles I wish to portray and demonstrate the kind of progression I wish my film to go through...