Film/TV1 – Question number 2.

So for our first lecture for Film/TV1 this year, Jasmine kicked it off talking about scriptwriting (probably the topic that interests me the most in this course). Most of what Jasmine was going over was reaffirming past ideas and concepts, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find it interesting!
One point that Jasmine raised that I loved was the fact that she highlighted the idea that real life is boring! Our short stories and fictional writing pieces can’t be like real life. We live in real life, why would we want to read or watch it?
Our writing should be based around an unusual event that occurs, something out of the ordinary. This is all pretty common knowledge stuff, right? Right! But when we’re writing, we tend to think; “why am I writing this, this couldn’t possibly happen?!” But, as Jasmine pointed out, that’s exactly why we are writing it!

Another point I took from Jasmines lecture was the idea of no wallflowers, introverts or nice guys, because they tend to be boring. I thought yes and no to this point. Yes, because at first glance, these people are typically considered boring, quiet and uneventful – but are they really?
Not everyone can be crash boom bang! and we need to have these types of characters. They can contain secrets, hold evidence that may be needed to solve a mystery and hey, protagonist or not, every story has to have a nice guy.

At this point in the lecture, my mind naturally jumped to the movie ‘Perks of Being a Wallflower’ and ‘Twilight’ (internal shudder, but for the record, as usual, the book was better). Our two main characters in these movies; Charlie and Bella, are respectively typically considered a wallflower and an introvert, and yet here they are dominating our literature and stealing our big screens; the hero and the heroine.
Wallflowers, introverts and nice guys can work. At the end of the day, we all have a story to tell, and anything can happen at anytime. Reading or watching different types of people handle situations is what makes stories interesting to us!

However, in saying that; what makes for a successful story is the way in which the audience connects and identifies with the characters. Not everyone is a badass, kicking butt, saving the world and having the courage to ask that hot crush out; so sometimes it’s just nice to know that there are people similar to us out there in the big bad world.