As preparation for my presentation I had one simple task: further develop the narrative I already had with the focus on drawing from the notion ‘world’. What I had so far was a whisper of a story, the bare bones of a narrative that would come to inhabit the world I would build around it.
My narrative so far was:
Four young people encounter a conundrum. They are somewhere they shouldn’t be when they discover an injured dog in need of their help.
But that was it. That was everything I had.
With this came endless possibilities. Since I hadn’t yet formed my world, every crazy idea had a home in that world. I could literally go in any direction, and attempting to narrow that down was hard and stressing me out. It seemed I had presented myself a classic Paradox of Choice scenario, as framed by psychologist Barry Schwartz: The more choices we have, the more anxious we are about making a choice at all.
It was from here I decided to draw on my previous studio experience- Translating Observation with Robin Plunket. During the beginning weeks of this studio, we were tasked with observing our often-mundane surroundings and attempt to translate it into a story that could then potentially be translated into film. With this method in mind, over the Easter Break, I observed multiple real life scenes and imagined they were located within the world of my narrative. I would write dot points about the world and how these scenes fitted in it. It was my hope this would help identify and flesh-out some ideas of my world, its parameters, limitations, internal logic etc.
Basically my goal was just to make a start. And it worked.
During this creative exercise, I wrote freely and as quickly as possible, it was almost like a stream of conscience, I didn’t stop to correct spelling or use punctuation. The end results were pretty gosh darn messy and borderline illegible.
I did this exercise twice and during one of them, I had a Eureka moment: Go small!
The video I’ve submitted as my work-in-progress demonstrating my explorations toward creating a screen story inspired by the notion of ‘world,’ is the video that was one of the prompts I used. The video depicts an elderly woman beside her little blue Hyundai out the front of her local IGA. Slowly and cautiously putting shopping in the back seat before getting into the front seat and closing the door.
I decided I wanted my world to be claustrophobically small. Like an organism where every character is a microscopic cell, interconnected with the next, all part of a greater whole: the world of Broken Pine.
From this idea, I formed the basis of my power hierarchy. Keeping on theme, I decided to set the world in a low socio-economic landscape. Further limiting the world and freedom of the characters by introducing an economic reliance to a central figure: the lumber yard. This reliance creates power, elevating the lumber yard and the ‘lumber boss’ to an almost untouchable level. I hoped this would create a mentality of: ‘to go against him was to go against yourself’.
In such a small world I believe freedom must be reduced. Options limited. I found this to be a classic match up. In almost every small screen world I researched, present too are restricted options and feelings of being trapped, yearnings to break free of the small world.
Beautiful Creatures, Dir. Richard LaGravenese (2013)
The Truman Show Dir. Peter Weir (1998)
I asked myself why this coupling is repeated again and again? I came up with a work in progress theory: Freedom matches the space.
When there is space there are options, escape routes, freedom. Similarly, where there is limited space, when the world is small, there are equally limited options and therefore less character freedom.
For example: When Arya kills the Waife in Game of Thrones, (2011-) (season 6), due to the incredible size of the world of Game of Thrones, she is able to leave the House of Black and White in Braavos, and therefore the consequences of her actions behind. The freedom she extracts due to the space of the world also acts as a motivating factor. Raising interesting questions, would she have even killed the waif if she knew she had nowhere to run to afterwards – if she was trapped in the much smaller world of Braavos?
I factored the size of the world into my character motivations too. Initially I didn’t know myself the resolution to my story. What do the kids do with the injured dog? Now, factoring in motivations based on world, I decided the kids would split into two camps, led by ‘lover boy’ who is acutely aware he is probably going to be trapped in the world of Broken Pine for the rest of his life, just like his father and elder brothers. Therefore he is against killing the lumber boss’s dog, as such action would anger the lumber boss and result in wide-felt consequences he couldn’t escape. The other camp led by ‘quiet boy’ has no ties to the lumber yard and has no intention of staying in the world of Broken Pines. Ambitions of leaving the world strengthens his motivation to put the dog out of its misery by killing it, since he knows he will be able to escape the consequences by leaving the world for university in the near future.
This exercise was incredibly fruitful in regards to developing my world further, especially with the presentation on the horizon. I will certainly be bringing this creative exercise out again when I am troubled with any pesky Paradox of Choice scenarios in the future.
