I came into this studio with zero ideas for screenplays and zero knowledge about how to even write a screenplay. I didn’t even have that much of an interest in screenwriting but I saw it as an opportunity to learn a new skill. And learn I did.

Writing is something I love to do (as you can probably tell from the absurd length of some of my blog posts) and it’s something I have always done but writing, say, a short story is a hell of a lot different to writing a screenplay. There are a lot of rules when it comes to screenwriting – or at least that was what it felt like at first. It felt stifling and honestly somewhat paralysing learning about how you shouldn’t use certain words and how you should use an active voice and how your screenplay should cue images and sounds in the mind, and so on.

But then – because I’m a giant nerd – it became a fun logistical puzzle trying to figure out how to say things in my screenplay in a way that would simultaneously:

1. Evade the things I conventionally shouldn’t do and
2. Convey the visuals in the best way possible solely through text

I became less paralysed and became more driven to come up with a screenplay that employed good audiovisual techniques.

My final screenplay is literally only three pages long but I am glad I decided to go with a simple story because it let me focus a lot more on the visual aspect of it. I was able to explore so many ways of conveying things visually and I don’t think I personally would have been able to do that if I stuck with my story about people going to space and colonising Mars. (Only because I probably would’ve ended up being so hung up over the scientific accuracy of the plot. Nerd.) I think that one’s a screenplay for another time.

And there definitely will be more screenplays in my future, even if it is just me writing them for fun. This arcade one is the first but not the last. I wrote a blog post earlier in the semester about what I wanted to get out of this studio. In it I wrote, “Maybe I’ll end up realising that this was the path I was meant to take all along. Maybe I’ll end up hating screenwriting so much that I’ll never do it again. We’ll see.” Well, I didn’t have any kind of coming-to-God moment where I discovered that this was the definitive career path I was missing all along but I definitely did not hate it.