The Plot Thickens 2024 semester one studio produced exerts from our movie treatments for the week 13 exhibition. The aim of presenting these works was to highlight what we had been working on in our studio this semester and display the lengthy works we had collaborated on and submitted. We aimed to display these on screens in our regular studio classroom and some printed out examples on the tables in the room. I’m glad we stayed true to our script writing instead of attempting to create trailers or film scenes from our work. Our studio aimed to focus on the ways plot, story and narrative are all slightly different but intertwined when it comes to the movie making process and treatment/script writing. For those coming to look at the work that The Plot Thickens studio produced, I hope they would be able to look at a large collection of our completed movie treatments and visualise the incredibly intricate stories that my group came up with. My classmates and I curated a variety of different movie genres, and I am certain that there would be something that interested everyone who walked through the door of our exhibition. For my work (although I was absent on the day) I hoped to convey a story that played on the post-apocalyptic genre and the importance of the truth, and family connection. When originally joining this studio, I wasn’t able to fully comprehend how much work goes into producing a movie treatment and didn’t realise the number of scripts that never make it to the screen. After writing my own movie treatment I am in awe of the intricate scriptwriting that takes place and incredible ideas and plot twists that produce magnificent blockbuster movies. I am incredibly proud of the treatment I produced for one of my last assignments because it took a lot more brain power to come up with and execute than I thought it would initially.
As someone who loves writing, in future if I were to continue to work my movie treatment, I would be more likely to want to turn the treatment into a novel or transfer it to book form. I found that during the process of writing the treatment, there were moments I wanted to extend different back stories and character arcs chat I felt would be unnecessary to add to the script. The novel style of my story would be able to draw more into the lore aspect of my work which tends to be my favourite parts of dystopian stories. I feel that as a movie my treatment lacks a lot of explanation that I ran out of time to work on for this assignment. My treatment likely presents many plot holes that I have not yet discovered due to my best processing taking extensive amounts of time and planning. Some of the core parts of my plot I would like to extend through this format would be; the relationships characters have with each other, especially my main character Bronte and her brother and father and also the back story to the reasons why those in command of the underground created the aliens in the first place.
Reading the treatment ‘Linda’ by my classmate Lu Galante and ‘Frozen Frontier’ by James Houghton I was fascinated by the high-quality treatments all my classmates were able to produce. Both these treatments were incredibly different but equally captivating. On one hand I found Linda to be a beautiful and heartwarming story about friendship, grief and redemption and on the other, Frozen Frontier focussed on redemption, loyalty and past traumas. I loved getting to collaborate with both writers of these scripts and feel privileged to see what their original works looked like and how they have evolved over time.
Another studio that I interacted with is Instinct and Intention. For this studio I was fortunate to get to watch Alannah Vidic-Wirth’s Edit series assignment which compiled three different edits of various types of media on film. This video edit had what seemed to be a snippet from a horror type movie, a documentary segment and a television add with a dark twist. Through this edit compilation I interpret that the Instinct and Intention studio aimed to present how with little context, scenery/setting, filming and dialogue can direct viewers to identify different stereotypes in media and prompt them to expect outcomes. Something I found interesting in Alannah’s edit series was how her last edit gave a sort of middle finger to genre stereotypes. Although the video began as a 1960s style commercial it morphed into a dark almost mystery clip when those in the ad began to cough and splutter blood from their mouths. I was though roughly entertained. I wonder if the aim of the studio was to draw attention to the importance of familiarity when producing media and similarly creating shocking twists.
Overall, this year has been so eye opening for me. I loved my studio The Plot Thickens and felt so comfortable and welcome in my class. It will be missed.
Yasinta Grosser