To make the script feel more naturally appealing to people of this age we tried make the dialogue between characters feel as realistic as possible; we did this by using use of informal language such as slang and swear-words, we also tried to make sure that there was a decent amount of banter between characters, as teenagers are always trying to amuse one-another and make each-other laugh. One example of this is about half way into our script.
STEPHEN
(scoffs) Yeah I think a badger was eyeing the marshmallows in there earlier. Must’ve decided to take matters into his own hands. (DWAYNE laughs)
JESS
Don’t be an arsehole. It has all my clothes in it.
DWAYNE
Well even if Chip and Dale didn’t make off with your stuff, it might be worth having a look around to see if you dropped it on the way. Or if it like… blew away from camp or something.
Int his short extract you can see examples of all the elements I had previously mentioned: With both male character's joking about and not taking the situation seriously, whilst the character of JESS is starting to get annoyed at them and decides to insult and swear at them. You can also see a reference to pop culture with the mention of the cartoon character's Chip and Dale, we thought this would make our dialogue feel more realistic as teenagers often use pop culture and references to other things to make sense of situations and create humour. Modern Teenagers also have much access and are exposed to much more pop culture due to the internet and streaming services like Netflix, making it easier to find most TV shows or films within minutes.
We can see this use of pop culture references in an earlier line when the characters are trying to navigate towards the campsite: the scene ends with the character Stephen jokingly saying the phrase "Follow the Yellow brick road" which is an obvious reference to The Wizard of Oz. This reference in particular can be seen as foreshadowing because it is sang by character's in the Wizard of Oz before when they first set of to find the evil witch, and our characters use the line when heading to the campsite, which is where everything starts to go wrong for our characters.
Another example of more lighthearted humour comes from the second line of dialogue when character jokes about the other's navigation skills saying I think the map’s the wrong way round.
This small comment makes the relationships between character's feel a lot more genuine and shows a friendship that a lot of other teenagers will be able to empathise with and invest in, which makes the events that take place later in the narrative feel even more tense and scary.
We wanted to make sure our actors were conveying the character's in a realistic way as well this meant that were frequently using stage directions and parenthetical. One example of this is when Jess says the line "That’s much more likely than an animal, this light breeze might’ve carried it right off." Without any directions for our actors this line could easily come of as bland and unbelievable, however once we add (hums then speaks sarcastically) to before the line, it becomes a lot more realistic and fits the archetype of the character we are writing much more suitably.
For our characters to be realistic we needed them to be aware of modern technology and give reasons for if they couldn't use any of these types of technology. Later on in our script, when the characters of JESS and STEPHEN are becoming worried and scared we made sure that STEPHEN uses the line "I don’t know, there’s no signal to call anyone." We thought that this line was important as it shows how modern teenagers use technology as a main way of problem solving, and so by stopping them from being able to use this they instantly become a lot more vulnerable and have very little idea of what to do. This also makes our character's feel more isolated and like they are cut off from the rest of the world which makes them seem more like victims.
2a). When we presented our script to our clients they thought the best parts were the dialogue and banter between protagonists, they also thought we did a good job in making it appeal to our target audience. We were also praised on the tension our script builds, instead of focussing on scares as they would be harder to do with our low budget and small amount of resources. We were told, also, that our script managed to avoid being offensive and although there was some bad language, since
2b). We were also given information as to which parts of our scripts need improvement. As we were trying to make a shooting script a large amount of information is needed for the cameraman and editor and whilst we had put some in, more detail was needed to make it obvious what we wanted to created. We were also told to change some and remove some parts of the dialogue as they seemed unnecessary or like they didn't fit the characters and the rest of their dialogue. We were also told to add more stage directions and parenthetical elements to dialogue in our script so that it can be more easily read by actors and help them to product the best performance possible
4). I was creating a shooting script for the production of a short film. This meant that there was certain language and features I needed to remember to include whilst writing the product. I am going to be writing the majority of my script using formal language, this is because despite the creative nature of the product it is still a business document and integral to the production of the short film. I will also need to be sure to use a size 12 courier font and make sure that different types of information are in the right place. For instance, all the dialogue must be placed in the centre of the page with the character's name on top of it.
5). We are aiming for a 15 age rating with our film, this is because there are elements of bad language, implied drug use, violence and threat throughout our script. However, non of these elements are so strong though that it would push our film up to a higher age rating.
In this quote we see examples of both bad language and
implied threat .
STEPHEN
Why wouldn’t he have just stayed at the campsite? (Panicking) Why
does he have to fuck about all the time? This isn’t even funny, why couldn’t he
just...
The bad language is used however to try and create realism,
as teenagers often use curse words when talking. This is also to heighten the
idea of danger and make the audience empathise for the characters and
understand their fear.
We will be going to creative Commons ( https://creativecommons.org/ ) for
things like music and title fonts during post-production of our film. This is
because given our schedule we will not have time to create these ourselves, so
our only option is to outsource these things. Creative Commons will mean that we will have a
large variety of free music, this means that we should be able to find a
collection of tracks that suit our film perfectly. The problem with his will be
the time that will take to sort through all the tracks, we can search via genre
but this is the only filter available for searching.
All of the locations we will be visiting are public areas
that we don’t need any permissions to film in these areas. Our actors will sign
contracts that state we are allowed to use them in our film, and that we will
be able to release/ use the product for our college work.
