PRE-PRODUCTION; FIRST IDEA AND TUTORIAL FEEDBACK

As previously discussed, my group going forward for both the pre-production and production unit is Katie who will be the editor and Laura who will be the director, with myself being the producer and script writer. Over the summer we all met up to start discussing possible ideas that we could move forward with, we wanted to try and get ahead and have begun thinking about the story before we came back. We all went to see the film called Adrift, starring Shailene Woodley.
It tells the true story of a couple who's boat capsized during a hurricane on the Pacific Ocean; the film details the couples struggle sailing along on a half broken boat, delivering a final plot twist that the male star of the film actually died during the hurricane and Woodley's character had been hallucinating him the entire time. This was a plot twist that influenced us all and we really liked the idea of hallucinations. Using this as the beginning of our research we have discussed the option of using a teenage boy who has been hallucinating his dead twin sister. I really like this idea because its got a real sense of drama involved; something I like to create within narratives. We all juggled around a few ideas about this boy who maybe had some mental health issues, he sees a doctor who urges him to speak out about his feelings. The idea we mainly finalised on was that of showing two days running concurrently, the first showing the twins as young kids, and the second showing them as teens going about their day, both days eventually reveal that firstly the twin sister died when she was young, and secondly that the boy was only hallucinating her (implied by her death). This is an idea that I really like because i think it allows us to all have a lot of contribution to the project; there would be a lot of casting and locations involved, as well as editing because of the two different timelines so i think it could work really well.

We went in and spoke to Simon about our initial roles and ideas. We spoke about the idea that we had and explained how we all had a part in coming up with the idea and that was one of the main reasons we wanted to move forward with it. The feedback we got from Simon was as follows:

- What do we want to explore?

- What is our main theme?

- The mechanics of the film at the stage do not matter, we need to focus in on what the sole of our story is about

- who are the twins? why does it have to be twins?

- Strip back to basics

Simon suggests that we need to look at what we want to tell a story about rather than what we want to show to tell a story. Thinking about this it helped me to look at past years work, seeing work that was made meaningful by a specific message that was being conveyed. The nature of storytelling needs to have reasoning, the tutorial helped me to realise we need to find a topic as our starting point and then build a story around it, rather than fitting a topic over a story. A topic that I wanted to explore was trauma, as far as i'm aware i think it would be an interesting topic to look at and would allow for good points of research to begin with, as well as a broad narrative structure.

What's next? Following on from our first tutorial as a group, i would like to get started on researching what we want to tell a story about, i would like to begin with researching trauma. As the script writer I am feeling the pressure to get pen to paper asap, but i know we need to be researching first so that we have a story we are passionate and interested about.