The Birthday Girl
The Birthday Girl is an experimental short film, following the life of Julie through her day of birth, year after year. The film includes no dialogue and is instead told through short scenes which transition through match cuts to one another. From ages 5 to 80, we see how Julie’s life has changed, and yet the one constant of the birthday and growing older has remained. The through-lines of Julie’s life that are explored, are her struggling to feel noticed and loved, and the romance that is present throughout between Julie and Alex, a girl who does appear to notice her. The short film attempts to capture life experience through not only character and story but aesthetic as well. By taking into consideration the visual style and technology of each different era, we want to convey as authentic a representation as possible.
The process of collaboratively writing this script saw the writers team contributing at least an hour a week each (for the last 4 weeks of the course) to refine and add to the script. Roles would not be directly allocated, but each week, through feedback sourced from our peers, we outlined dot points of what should be focused on; whether it be focusing of scenes, modes of communication, or world/character building. This enabled the team to have am agreed upon direction when editing, iterating the flow and level of depth in the screenplay.
Due to the lack of dialogue, this script exercised the team’s visual storytelling skills. The greatest challenge here surrounded communicating our central character, Julie, without hearing her say anything; forcing us to rely on visual nuance and body language to develop who she is. Visual elements such as her physical discomfort when around certain individuals, and chewed on nails, shape Julie’s character and convey her personality to the audience. This exercise proved to be extremely useful, positioning the writing team to think of alternative ways of storytelling, opposed to dialogue; encouraging a tendency to “show” instead of “tell”.
Cryptids Anonymous
Cryptids-Anonymous takes the form of an absurdist ensemble comedy, following the infamous Bigfoot, on his first day of group therapy. But this isn’t just any group therapy session; all the attendees are fictional cryptid and mythology creatures and characters, ranging from Mothman and the Loch Ness Monster, to Bloody Mary and Chupacabra. Bigfoot enters the session motivated to better himself and come to terms with the individual that he is, but quickly realises this may be a difficult goal to achieve when surrounded by various quirky characters who believe that they are the centre of their own world. The greatest source of comedy in the story derives from both the interactions to be had between the ensemble, and the cryptids’ responses to living in a modern world. The abnormality of the cryptid’s mythicality proves to pale in comparison to their strange behaviours and personalities.
The process of this screenplay saw the writers team prioritising humour and comedic execution. As humour is infinitely subjective, the most effective way to collaborate on writing comedic dialogue, came from simply riffing and sharing joke ideas. Quickly, individuals would be able to gauge the reception of the other writers, either confirming the inclusion of jokes, or creating an avenue for writers to adapt them into something they thought could’ve been even funnier. A base outline of the narrative was developed initially to guide the script, but then jokes took central focus, bulking out the world, characters and local environment in the script. This initial outline then later adapted to something quite different, but served its purpose in guiding a majority of the dialogue. Comedy came first, and then at the end we were able to cement a solid plot and narrative development.
The greatest experience gained from writing this screenplay was developing the skill of balancing an ensemble cast of characters. Having a diverse 10-character cast with rich comedic potential, proved stressful in attempting to balance and utilise every character (especially in the limited timespan of a short film). A fear that came about was the possibility of having characters fall to the wayside, and not reach their creative potential – but coming to terms with the fact that the short form of content wouldn’t facilitate use of every joke, shifted the team’s gear towards including the best jokes produced of each character. As well, in balancing the cast, the importance of development through character interaction shone bright; constructed lines between two of the script’s cryptids developing multiple characters at once, this proving efficient for comedy and character sake.
