Attached is my short screenplay, please see below.

Brydan Meredith_Another World_Draft 3 Another World_Screenplay-pjzx26

Before I talk about where I’m at, I must first talk about where I’ve come from.

In my Project Brief 2 blog posts I wrote of an idyllic, quintessentially Australian, sun drenched town, that served as merely a setting, rather than a world, for my damaged protagonist to roam.

When writing PB2 I was hit with a colonel of an idea, albeit vague, of the type of world I would like to begin to mould.

“I think the relationship between the story world and the characters is strong. The idea (that I just touched on) of my characters being in a relatively flat, dry and unchanging world is something that, now that I’m conscious of it, works quite nicely.” – PB2, Brydan Meredith.

Here I identify a key aspect of my world, that it doesn’t change, but I don’t go on to show the impact that this characteristic has on all the other elements that comprise my world. How do people operate in a stagnant culture as opposed to a progressing one? How does this influence behaviour?

Whilst I was thinking about these ideas I read George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, presents to the extreme what happens when a society or culture is so insular and self-indulged that it exists purely to reinforce its own image, its own idea of itself.

And what does happen? People operate in uniformity; Independent thought is outlawed and citizens rapidly lose empathy. For me this was a big ‘ahhhh’ moment when thinking about specifying my worlds internal logic and the relationship between my story world and its characters.

My world evolved from being merely a ‘stagnant’ place to having dystopian culture of its own: I changed the geography of my town (it became a town cut off from mass culture due to physical distance), I made the people of my town cruel and un-empathetic, the weather became permanently bitter, physical pleasures (like sex, violence, drugs, alcohol) dictated behaviour and much of its infrastructure became run down due to lack of use. Lastly and most significantly, the people of my world began seeing their world as flawless. They live for the world, for their idea of the world- not for themselves.

Attached is a short screenplay, featuring my original protagonist from Project Brief 2. I initially had this idea about three weeks ago. All I knew at that stage was that my story would begin with a stranger approaching Ryan (my protagonist) whilst he is sitting on the beach and that it would end with Ryan attacking this stranger.

Initially Ryan was going to be the aggressor, the trouble maker, a man looking for cleansing in a rather naturalistic world. In my initial prose, I wrote Ryan as a ‘dark shadow’ trying to rid guilt. However, as I altered my worlds culture, I had to alter my writing appropriately.

I began to imagine Ryan as being to my world what Winston, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s protagonist, is to Orwell’s world. They are both free-thinking individuals that don’t want to conform to the oppressive society in which they live. Ryan switched from being the problem in a forgiving world, to being a sense of hope in a very problematic, cruel world. Ryan, like Winston, is an outsider whose morals don’t align with the ethics of the town.

This ‘world first’ approach completely changed my initial idea. Leon (the stranger), symptomatic of his world, was unforgiving. Ryan was submissive. The roles were completely reversed. There would be no physical altercation at the end. The rules of my world certainly created limitations, I had to change the whole dynamic of the scene, but it ultimately forced me to write something consistent, with its own internal logic, which is not only apparent but a point of interest in the writing.

I focused heavily on pacing when drafting the screenplay; aiming to write a slow scene. I wanted to write a slow scene to represent the stagnant, boring nature of my world. One of my favourite novels, John Updike’s Rabbit Run, does this very well. Rabbit, the protagonist, is trapped in this dry, boring, homogenised American town (Brewer). Updike writes of life in Brewer through long, drawn out passages that encapsulates the towns nature and makes the reader feel trapped just like Rabbit. Through my pacing I want to achieve the same effect as Updike. To tell a quick paced story wouldn’t be true to my world, this doesn’t mean I need to tell a boring story, I simply shouldn’t rush.

Lastly I will write about how my evolving world led me to make stylistic changes in representing Leon. Leon was initially envisioned as a middle-class character, he was to wear chino’s and a designer ski-jacket. Instead, ‘Leon wears baggy, faded jeans and an old Essendon Bombers Jacket. He is smoking a cigarette’. In regards to characterisation Leon channels a hardy stoicism that he previously didn’t have. ‘Leon is smoking a cigarette. The cold wind blows against his face causing him to grimace’. These two minor changes in my character, as a consequence of my world changing, turned Leon from a plain, 2-dimensional character to someone interesting and idiosyncratic.