Bottle Rocket: Collaboration & Course Reflection

Writing for Filming, Filming for Writing has been an interesting studio. It’s challenged me by inviting me to test myself with work that I haven’t gone through before, while also questioning and stretching my capacity for collaborative group work. When I started this studio, I probably had three goals:

1. Learn the process of writing a screenplay.

2. Learn what makes a good screenplay.

3. Learn how to turn a screenplay into a piece of film.

While what we’ve done in the studio has certainly touched upon all three of these objectives, it hasn’t definitively answered any of them, and I think that’s by design. If this course has taught me anything, it’s that the onus rests firmly upon me. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that I have a sense of entitlement when it comes to my education – I expect to be taught things. I expect to walk into a lecture, and learn how to do something. What these new studios are is challenging that. All of a sudden, the amount that I learn and take out of the course is dependent on the amount that I put into it. This has always been true, to some degree, but I think that now the emphasis is well and truly on my own, personal reflective work. For instance, I did learn the technicalities of writing a screenplay. I did learn how to operate a camera. I did watch brilliant examples of screenplays turned into riveting cinema. However, the actual process of this transformation was left almost entirely in my hands. It would be a lie to deny that this approach to my learning initially threw me off-course. I was fairly static for the first few weeks of our group work, probably for the first half of the studio itself.

However, eventually something seemed to click. It seems too simple to claim that you learn by doing, but with the groundwork laid by the tutorials and exercises in the first half of the studio, Bottle Rocket (our group) had the freedom to experiment with what worked and what didn’t. I found myself reflecting, both in blog posts and on my own, on what worked and what didn’t when writing for filming. Hell, I actually found myself reflecting on that very phrase, and what it meant. When I entered the studio, I barely even considered it, just thought it was a semester of screenwriting. It wasn’t until that I had to actually bunker down and think through each line of big print, each individual sequence, and how it would translate to screen, that I realized that writing specifically for filming was something entirely new to me. I was forced to come to the conclusion that while I love creative writing, and I love film, the two do not automatically mesh – it requires a new and different way of thinking. This was actually a revelation, of sorts. It seems obvious now that in the past, when I’d written scripts, I was actually just writing short stories, and adapting them to screen during the production process. That adaptation needs to take place as you’re writing, I see that now. Screenplays aren’t just the words that the talent spout in front of a camera. They’re just as integral to the director, if not more. Anyway, like I said in our presentation, top studio, guys. I thoroughly enjoyed it. On to collaboration!

So, as well as everything I posted above, collaboration was a key component of this studio. It’s interesting to note, in retrospect, just how Bottle Rocket’s experience of collaboration evolved over the course of our project. While we all got along from the start, we were fairly resistant to collaborating on anything, in a very passive sort of way. Every group member (and I was one of the worst culprits) was constantly difficult to reach, whether through sickness, scheduling issues, or just plain laziness. We hadn’t implemented any solid form of communication (since Ashton lacked a Facebook profile, that was somehow out of the question), and the RMIT email system wasn’t proving particularly fruitful.

Our Week 7 Pitch Presentation was a definite turning point for us. I can’t speak for the rest of my group, but I felt as if, compared to other groups, we were under-prepared and our idea was under-developed. I was actually a little embarrassed. From there, it was as if a gear had shifted, and we just embraced the concept of collaboration. Ashton embraced social media and we begun a Facebook group to stay in constant contact – almost immediately it was flooded by scripts, schedules, casting notices, and more. We split the work up so that everybody had something to do – Jess wrote for Liam, Steph for Valentina, Matt and I for Martin and Ashton worked on the title sequence. We checked in with each other constantly and it seemed as if there was something new to tackle every week.

If I was being honest, and this is a reflection so I probably should be, there were some discrepancies in the amount of work being done within the group. Steph took on a lot of the work. Between writing for Valentina, contacting and organizing the actors, using her house as a location and doing the bulk of the editing, she definitely took on the role of leader and MVP. So, I think that I should definitely have volunteered to do some of the work that she was saddled with. However, what I am proud of is just how involved everybody was during the actual shooting. It felt like we all contributed equally over those two days, and it was just a thoroughly light-hearted and genial atmosphere. It was a lot of fun, and if I can take the collaborative atmosphere of this studio into my future work at RMIT, I’d be pretty happy.