After seeing everyone’s completed photo narratives from week 2, there were a few individual photos that really stuck in my mind. Especially the first photo of the “On The Run” series. Conveniently, we were given the task to choose a frame and write it as a scene. I’m not really that confident in my ability to write scripts, but just writing without thinking too much is a good place to start for me. I didn’t stick to the original narrative of the photo series, which shows a girl running through the RMIT campus, but I thought because the first frame of a shadow of a hand was quite ambiguous, the story could go anywhere. I’ve always been really interested in films about domestic relationships and dynamics, so the shadow of the hand lead me to a scene of abuse.

Frame from photo series On The Run

I wasn’t too focused on writing shots for the scene, I wanted to keep it simple to start of with, and just write a short scene or two. Overall I am pretty happy with this as a starting point, but I know there are definitely things I need to work on, which I will continue to over the course of this studio.

We touched a bit on tone last week and I think this is one thing that I’ve managed to portray in this short piece. I think I’ve managed to set a dark tone, with the subject matter and the action between the two characters. I initially thought that one thing that needed improvement was my character introductions, but seeing the dark tone I believe I have started to get at, this ambiguous opening to these character’s lives actually could work very well. The audience don’t exactly understand the dynamics between them and their history, which could lead to something interesting.

One thing I struggled with while writing, was how to write the ‘action’ of the script. As I said, I don’t have much experience in writing script in the correct format and structure like this and being told that it’s better to keep the action description short, I panicked a bit and started overthinking. I also haven’t read many scripts, which is something I need to do a lot more of, so I’m not really grasping the language that is supposed to be used. When writing the action, I knew what I was writing didn’t sound quite right, but I didn’t really know how to improve it. This must just come from practise. I also didn’t have the idea of ‘world’ in mind when writing this in class, which is quite foolish of me considering how much we’ve been focusing on it and how I wanted to incorporate creating worlds more into my work. If I were to keep going with this piece, I would make sure to really keep this in mind.

Something I did find really interesting learning in class was the use of description in dialogue, like you would see in books when a character mutters or sighs, this isn’t needed as much in a screenplay because you have the actor. If you give too much direction to the actor in a script, it doesn’t give them much room to fully commit to a character and work with the dialogue.