Dialogue/Script Workshop and Reflection
Dialogue/Script Workshop
In the workshop we discussed storytelling, character, plot and how dialogue is a key aspect of any story. We talked about how it instills personality, emotion and relationships in a story, and how even the most mundane conversations in film and TV can establish a lot to the viewer.
We watched a number of examples such as the coffee shop scene in Pulp Fiction, the restaurant scene in Heat, and the only scene in the film Hunger with dialogue.
Following this we sort of created our own brief, the class suggested different scenarios, locations and characters.
As seen above; the brief was to write 2 drafts of a script and character profiles for a scene in a coffee shop, in which two characters converse in some way. The brief was left deliberately vague to allow us creative freedom to write what we wanted. We were then sent out into the city to find a coffee shop and personally experience the scene for ourselves and get some visual research done. During this time, me and a couple of my classmates went into the St Andrews Brewhouse, where we sat and absorbed any information we could; the smells, the sounds, the people, what they were doing, what they bought, etc. while discussing eachothers' ideas.
That day I thought about what my interaction was going to be and I decided I wanted to establish a lot of emotion in the short time I had, so I decided I wanted it to be about two family members arguing about the organisation of their deceased relative's funeral. I wanted one there to be blatant conflict between the individuals so I decided that the person in charge of organizing would not emotionally invested in the task and trying to get it over and done with in a manor they see appropriate so they can get back to their own lives, while the other individual contests this as he feels he knows what the deceased would have wanted and the person organizing it is doing it wrong.So, when writing the character profiles I tried to encapsulate their personality, their relationships and a bit of their history to guide me when I wrote the script itself. The idea of the funeral discussion draws inspiration from Skins season 2 episode 10 when a dead character's father tells the character's friends that they can't attend the funeral, the antagonist resembles the father from that scene in a lot of ways.
After using my character profiles to construct the first draft of the script, I then read through it and reflected on what I thought I did well and what I could do to improve it. While I feel like I adequately captured Simon's disregard and James' general personality and fondness for his uncle, I feel like there's a lot of good backstory that I didn't get the chance to interpret in the script. I also showed my friends the script to get some criticism from them aswell, From this I learned that the structure of the argument was a bit unrealistic in that people don't take turns arguing their point like a formal debate; people are rude, people like Simon especially, people interrupt. And so in my second draft I kept this in mind and made some alterations.
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