My group – Bianca, Wei Yun, Dylan, Raph and I – went on a pretty fluid and exciting journey in deciding on the route we would take in order to create a prototype for our final project.
As our group is collectively more television-oriented, we chose this medium as our focus, as opposed to film. The convo started with chats of opening sequences and whether they directly influence or simply draw influence from the premise and genre of a show. This then led us onto the topic of genre, and how a simply formatted show/plot/premise can be applied to any genre.
Enter ‘Lord of the Land’.
Drawing inspiration from the popular televisual premise of mixed personalities sharing a house (see Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Big Brother, Frat/Sorority/College shows, etc), we decided on a premise that could easily be manipulated and molded to a range of genres.
THE PREMISE (in dot point form to avoid convoluted babble):
- Three people (20-somethings??) living in a share house.
- Two male, one female.
- Male 1 is son of the landlord, his mother.
- Male 1 is dating the female.
- Male 2 is a bit of a third wheel (aren’t we all)
- Landlord moves back into house following divorce from husband.
- Landlord is unaware her son is dating the female housemate
We then brainstormed a bunch of different genres we could apply our premise to, including but not limited to;
- Rom Com
- Horror/Thriller
- Mock Doc
- Drama
- Comedy
- College/High School Humour
- Musical
- Reality
- Superhero/action
- Mystery
- Etc etc (a personal favourite).
From this, we decided the next step in our project would be to divvy up the genres and write two scripts (+/- one page per script) each before we were to meet again, to later shoot as experimental exercises, a key component of our prototyping journey.
As a group, we decided that in order to conceptualise a prototype we will explore the process of genre determination, and will choose the genre we feel is most effective following the production our mini-prototypes. We then intend to create an extended scene and/or series trailer for our final prototyped TV show.
STAY TUNED! x
