Ideas-in-progress
My group and I first started developing ideas through a brainstorm, including various different sources and inspirations which connect to the prompt, “Where there is crime there’s violence, where there’s youth there’s love”. Everyone seems to have great interesting points, simple and succinct.
Brainstorm Map
As we divided individual roles, I personally learned and experience something new as a whole. I have never written an ‘official’ script before and it really overwhelmed me as I started. Like most writers, I was totally blank. Dea was in charge of the character biography and development and therefore she had taken a part in developing our script. Because of our idea of character driven narrative, we tried to focus on our two main characters. Hence, the dense dialogue, mental subjectivity through flashbacks and time lapses and a heavy set of actions as well. What was challenging for me is to keep tying the script back to the main idea of youth and love and crime and violence. To add a little harmony to our experimental film without too much of the abstract touch, I though I could have a balance of both dialogue and action regulating in turns with each other.
Script-in-Progress
Character-in-progress
There are a number of inspirations for our characters. Most on real life youth stories with crime issues, but we have also taken parts of character portrayals from different outstanding films. These films often explore the psychological side of youth behaviour and mental subjectivities, which we are aiming to really focus on. This way we are able to tie the character back to our prompt and play around with our experimental indie style. Dea and I thought it would be a good idea to have some opposite personality clashing together. For example Ryan, the main character is an expressive guy in his early 20s with the problem of anger management and violent behaviour caused by various reasons including drug addiction. In contrast, Julie is a calm introvert needing sense of true belonging despite her closed up and almost-anti-social behaviour. What I think we need to do though, to dig deeper into the psychological theory side of these character bio is to do more research mainly on anxiety and drug issues.
- Story of Ahmed’s experience with drugs, mother and detention centre
- Basketball Diaries- Di Caprio’s character
- Youth development and characters on Palo Alto
- Background info- Juvenile justice system in Australia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCJYlFHvlYU
Life as a Young, Indigenous, A-Class Offender in Australia. (2015), October 26, New South Wales, VICE.
News, ABC. (2014), Juvenile Justice: Three young Australian men share their experience of life from the inside, ABC, accessed 9 Apr 2016, online <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-05/three-young-men-share-their-experience-of-juvenile-justic/5946376>.
Palo Alto. (2013), film, USA, Gia Coppola.
The Basketball Diaries. (1995), film, USA, Scott Kalvert.