Beyond a Joke, Beyond a Genre – Week 8
Brainstorm, brainstorm, and more brainstorm…
‘This is a chaotic way to write, but I find that chaos to be helpful.’ (M Trapp, 2022) – Mike Trapp’s interpretation of brainstorming, and I could not agree more! We have been brainstorming for two week’s and it has finally paid off. I appreciate that brainstorming can be a great writing tool in a group setting as well as individually.
Wow, this week has consisted of a lot of brainstorming and fleshing out ideas. I was away the previous week, so I have come back to lots of open ideas from the group. We know we want to create a fictional story that follows a fictional character, and use genre hybridisation as our dominant mode of comedy.
With that in mind, the genre had not been decided for our piece, so that is what we worked on in our Monday class. After a bit of back and forth, and looking at our mood boards; Mood Boards ,we decided to think more of WHY our character is going to the future. From that discussion, I thought that our character could be on a mission and needs something from the future, like a spy/agent. As a group, we fleshed out this idea and decided it would be best to make our project a short film, rather than a series. Our film will be a journey, with a beginning, middle and end. Our spy gets given a mission, they travel to the future, do the mission whilst also being interrupted by modern day complications, then they solve the mission and come back to HQ.
Through the week, our mood boards have now changed from The Wizard of Oz (1939) and 17 Again (2009), to Men In Black (1997-2019) and Johnny English (2003). The genre that we will be hybridising is Action/Adventure, and we hope to capture a lot of our comedic moments through the character of Agent Whyte.
On Wednesday, we had a break through! You see, we knew we were sending Agent Whyte on a mission, however it was tough to create this mission. With limited resources and cast, we struggled to think of clues. We then came up with the idea that another agent, Agent Wolley, has travelled to the future to steal a list that the Boss of the agency wants. It is Agent Whyte’s mission to capture Agent Wolley and the list. We discussed this at length and all felt like this will be an achievable outcome.
Our goal is to have our 1st and 2nd draft written up by the end of next week. Here is our 1st vomit draft;
Reference:
- Trapp, M. (2022), “So You’ve Got A Good Idea… Now What?: Brainstorms & Outlines”, Chuffah, <https://chuffah.substack.com/p/brainstorms-and-outlinesLinks to an external site.>.