Reflection upon our first three classes
The beginning of this studio has been rather different to the usual first weeks of semester. Rather than starting off with the typical name sharing and course outline, we jumped right into the heart of the subject; a workshop about scriptwriting (what makes a good script and how instrumental a script is in the development of a film or episode) with Australian director and producer Ana Kokkinos. In reality, this may have been the lung or the liver of the subject for the media students- I think it was more relevant and essential for the creative writing students. But nonetheless these two first lessons were enlightening and covered skills and processes that are relevant and essential in any part of the production process.
In the first lesson on Tuesday we covered the characteristics of a good script, and Ana talked us through scene analysis. First, we were asked- why do we write scripts, and even more, why do we tell stories? We do this to communicate something, or to make sense of the mess of life. I really like this overarching sentiment, that stories, and films and episodes and scripts are making sense of life and helping the audience understand it.
We learnt that the foundation of a good script is theme, characters and structure. A good story well told:
- Is about somebody with whom we have empathy
- This somebody wants something badly
- This something is difficult to achieve
- The story must come to a satisfactory ending
While this was all very interesting and relevant to a degree, there was still more in It for screen writers. However, Ana did explain how key the script is to the entire production crew- from the director, to the costume designer, to the production manager and of course the actors. In this way we found out how the script is handled by each of these people, including the development of a mood board from a script. She showed us a copy of a mood board for a film she had worked on, in which the concept of heaven was presented and visualised in almost innumerable ways. Towards the end of a lesson we read a short story and split into small pairs or groups- in which one person would develop the story into a script and the other would develop a mood board from it. We did this between Tuesday and Friday.
I loved creating the mood board from the script I read (can be found under Olivia’s moodboard, alongside Cam’s script which I worked off). I enjoyed taking different parts of the script and playing with them visually. For example, I thought the time of day in Cam’s script was pertinent to the story, as the lighting and eeriness of dusk is so powerful. I also enjoyed thinking about the cast and what kind of person would be able to portray these characters. I thought it was a pity that Cam and I did not get to share our work in Friday’s class but all the work that we listened to and saw was awesome and it was very interesting to see how people could take adaptions in different ways. I really enjoyed Jen’s script as it was so different to all the other adaptations, as was Eve’s, which is what we focused on in today’s class.
Overall Ana was really engaging and gave a valuable insight into scriptwriting. This previous Monday, we met our actual teacher/tutor/studio leader Robin for the first time. I can appreciate that the switchover between tutors must’ve been frantic and it seems it’s given us as students a bigger chance to shape our course which is a novel but enjoyable experience. I liked that we got straight into filming something even if it was very quick and very un-polished, but I think just with the structure of it all and the group sizes, I didn’t really get much out of it. It was still fun though and helped contextualise the rolls we had talked about in that class.
In terms of the weeks going forward, I’m looking forward to getting into it all and starting to work on our actual project, even if it does take a while for any episode or tangible product to be formed. It’s all a bit topsy-turvy right now but I’m happy going along and seeing what comes of it all.
