Update by: Justin Luh,  Meg Doyle, Vera Pavlovich and Matt Manning.

Week 9:

For week 9, we continued to undergo our group experiment, where we sent our work out to our classmates to read and to analyze before class. By having our peers overlook our work in this manner, it is incredibly helpful, not only to motivate us to continually refine our screen works, and their respective worlds, but also to hear the ideas that people have. The value of having another perspective, for another world, really is something. As all of our prototypes are still developing, it’s incredibly valuable hearing from people in the same situation, as well as giving off similar feedback. The turnouts this week represent the university fatigue one can have, however, as always; this didn’t stop Stayci Taylor creating an incredibly exciting week. Beginning with exploring how a logline can influence the tone, rules, parameters and history of ones screen worlds; Stayci led the class in exploring the importance of one small, establishing statement. The class all contributed in discussing how the logline can help create an idea of how to perceive the world/story. The next activity was a script editing exercise, which was incredibly helpful. Each script had also been worked on by anonymous students from overseas, which allowed for us to be as critical as we liked. By analyzing and picking apart a script, in our individual groups, allowed us to see what worked incredibly well, and what needed to be tweaked. Each script had one similarity; they all had no dialogue, and relied solely on action lines, which was another way for us to appreciate the important of big text within script and how it helps dictate the mood and delivery of scenes. Not only was this entertaining to pick apart somebodies work without needing constructive criticism, but it truly helped us gain knowledge and insight into how we construct our own scripts.

Week 10

Week 10 involved us continuing further development on our respective ‘worlds’ and really providing a constant stream of feedback on the worlds of our peers. At this point, many of the weekly groups assigned to us held familiar faces, and so we were able to update them on our progress thus far. People had the usual reworked scripts to show, but some had additional information on characters represented in diagrams or maps, which was a delight to see. One particular example was Jen’s, which involved an extremely detailed character breakdown, complete with motivation and personality. This helped in solidifying her world, which essentially revolved around the characters.

It is exhilarating to see just how far some of us have come with our worlds – narratives have begun to take form, expanding and branching out on our established worlds.The initial exercise we underwent in Week 10 with Stayci was to take our world and add an entirely new story element to it. For this, we had little cue lines that accompanied each new sentence: “Once upon a time”, “Until that day” to help us structure a small paragraph detailing this new narrative. It was insightful in the sense that it helped us to develop the flexibility of our worlds, and to further understand the internal logic that we had worked so hard to establish. From my own work, I comfortably delivered a whole new premise based around a lonely protocol robot wandering an abandoned space station. Instead of a populated area, I reversed and put in place one devoid of life.

The struggle to complete the semester is evident across the studio, but there is promise across all the works we have developed.