Script Development

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Following on from our sessions with Steve Coombes, as part of the first project we have been given the task to write a 10-page script for a short story. The brief is ‘The Meeting’ which means that our script must include a meeting of some kind between 2 or more people. The 10 pages must include a full story and cannot be a section from a longer story, which means that it cannot be too complex. When planning a storyline we were instructed to think about the characters first and develop an extensive character profile to allow us to understand who they were going to be and what their aims are. This then lead me to think more about what the aim of the story would be as this is likely to be the main focus so I could build the problems my characters would face around that. In one of the sessions with Steve Coombes, he talked about different characters including the ‘hero’. The hero is someone who doesn’t know who they are yet but wants to find out.
They know that they can observe but struggle to experience things for themselves. This helped me to establish some of my main characters’ qualities and aims. I chose a young girl who is seemingly plain and ordinary but has an underlining ability to write novels, but doesn’t know this yet. She struggles with self-confidence, which means that she is afraid to expose herself and put herself at risk to judgement. I then thought about the location. I was on a train from St. Pancras and decided to set the meeting on a train, as this is a confined space where we often have to interact and meet people because of the close proximity and similar situation. I decided to make her main goal to be to write and sell her biggest story but the main conflict was that she is unable to overcome her fears and anxieties in order to reach it.
Another thing I learnt from the screenwriting sessions is that you need to break a hero in order to make them which means they need to face problems whether they are obvious physical problems or psychological ones. As an audience we are able to the see the growth and development in the character enabling us to want to root for them and see them succeed. I decided that I wanted the person she would meet to be the antagonist in the story and he would become her biggest conflict but in disguise. I wanted him to be kind, suave and charming so that it would gain both her trust and the audience’ trust to make the ending as surprising as possible. I also wanted the character 'John Smithers' to be older than her so that he can easily influence her and make an impression on her. When deciding on my ending, I had a few different ideas including having her release the novel herself and gaining confidence or him telling her he was a book publisher and offering to publish the story. However, I decided I wanted the story to end on a cliff-hanger and to not be happy so that the audience would be shocked and feel slightly puzzled about it. As it was only a short story, I felt that this ending was the most appropriate as the audience have the opportunity to like the hero and root for her but won't be so invested in the story that they would be disappointed with it.

In terms of my script, I wanted to have the meeting as the majority of the story and the train journey would be where most of the story would take place as this is where we see the character Natalie discovers that she may be onto something with her story and that it could be worthwhile. I also wanted the opening scene to be important as she is making her way to the train station, worrying that she may miss the train, therefore this creates a certain amount of drama and suspense for the audience. For this set of scenes, I wanted to give the audience little hints about her as a person so that we discover little things about her without having to describe her character directly to the audience. She is quite anxious when travelling to the train station, worrying that she is going to miss her train therefore I put in very short sections of dialogue where she has is speaking to other people on her way to the station to create a little more suspense and a sense of urgency so the audience is aware that she is running out of time. When she discovers a few queues along the way she speaks to a man in front of her, who reassures her that she will have enough time to catch the train. I wanted this conversation to also signify how vulnerable and sensitive she is because she needed that little bit of reassurance. With the meeting itself, I wanted her to be very polite and shy at first, which would be expected, even when John knocks the coffee over her laptop breaking it, she doesn't get angry and argue with him, she tries to deal with the situation and reassures him that everything is ok by saying things like 'No really, don't worry about it' whereas many people would be outraged and blame the other person straight away. I wanted John to respond in an equally polite way, apologising profusely and offering to pay for it, in order to give the impression that he is very kind and sympathetic but also trustworthy. With his character, I carried out the polite tone but I wanted to give away subtle hints through some of his dialog about who he is and what his job is such as 'Never written a novel, no' in reply to Natalie when she is talking about her writing.
In terms of the action, I included description of both of the characters, talking about what they look like so that the audience is able to picture the main characters. In order to set the scenes, I described some of the locations, particularly the first location where Natalie is walking through London on her way to the station, in order to set the scene and put emphasis on the busy environment. This will also help me when filming as I will know what kind of scene I'm looking for in order to replicate it. In some of the screenwriting sessions we were instructed on how to use Final Draft which is professional software for writing scripts. It was very simple and easy to use as it remembers headings and character names you have previously used so you don't have to type them each time. We also used size 12 courier which is the most widely used font for scripts as it is easy to read and looks very formal. For my script, I decided to use Celtx which has a very similar set up to Final Draft. I found the process of writing a script quite daunting but once I knew how to use the tools and how to start scenes and introduce characters, I found it relatively easy to tell the story through the script.