Scriptwriting. A necessity of sorts in this industry. But it’s more than that. Not only is it a dream for many, but you could consider it the art of translating dreams. Translating our perspective, how and what we observe into a format, a bare bones structure, that is born specifically of the mind. It is not a visual sensation we absorb and disseminate. The visual translation is someone else’s job, the job of the director, cinematographer, set designer… It’s your job to build the WORLD in which they work. The WORLD they must translate into a visual context and reality. And this is where my final studio comes into the picture.
Another World is a studio based on creating scripts and observing screenworks from the perspective of the worlds they create.
We kicked things off with probably one of my favourite writing prompts:
Write something you like. Then something you hate. Add five reasons why you like what you like and why you hate what you hate. Write five reasons why someone might like what you hate, and five reasons why someone might hate what you like. Who would these people be? What stories could they tell?
This exercise was the first time I had every really thought in depth about characters, and with each point of the exercise, I could feel these unique characters forming and coming to life. Worlds developed around them the further into their reality I went. Previously I created characters based on myself or on tropes. They were never really multi-dimensional. This exercise really drove me to develop characters far beyond that point, on the verge of uniqueness.
Exercises like this make you think outiside the box and realise just how large that space is. How much can truly occur outside the box, as opposed to skirting the boundaries of the box. Go out into the wild, green yonder. I dare you, and I bet it’ll be worth your while.