It’s been the best part of a month since I last posted anything here, but I’m back, and it’s been a productive week. This morning, having finished our short film analysis essays for Creating Short Screenplays, we used our seminar to begin focusing on ideas for our own scripts, which we will be developing until just before Christmas. More specifically, we looked at how we might create ideas using locations, objects and mise-en-scene – defined as “the setting and surroundings of an event.” We came up with lists for each as a group, before using these to formulate our own individual rough ideas. I and the others on my table placed emphasis on the objects available to us, which were random and included such things as a sack, a toy car, a duck feather, a book and a skull. We felt that they all came with numerous questions that could be asked about them, giving us the basis of a film in the process.

With the exception of the duck feather, I managed to think of at least one idea for each of these objects. In my opinion, the sack, the car and the skull provided the most interesting ones, and this was backed up by the people around me. I thought of a single, unopened letter that had been forgotten at the bottom of a sack of mail, and the story left undiscovered within it. I thought of a toy car kept even into old age by its owner because of some deeply entrenched sentimental value. And, last but not least, I thought of a human skull, discovered on a shelf in a fridge by a young man who then questions his housemates about its origins, only to be mysteriously denied an answer by all of them. It was pointed out to me that that idea resembles a scene from Sherlock in which Holmes stores a head in his Baker Street fridge for experiments, so whether I use it will depend on how original I can make a story of my own. In any case, it’s always interesting to see how so much can be drawn from so little, and this morning was no exception.

Tuesday afternoon also saw me work on something promising. This was in my Rewriting and Adapting class, where we are working on our own adaptations of famous Gothic texts. We can choose from The Tell-Tale Heart, Dracula, The Woman in Black or Frankenstein, and I have now opted for the latter, although my idea is not a straight interpretation of the original novel – it only retains certain elements. In it, a man paralysed from the waist down in the present day encounters Dr Frankenstein, who in this instance is a very dubious surgeon, and accepts his offer to have a pair of working legs crudely stitched on so he may walk again. Unfortunately, these legs not only look odd, but behave very erratically, alienating everyone he is closest to and leading him to lament both his loneliness and his loss of identity as a disabled person.

That’s the planned story arc, although the piece is still in the very earliest stages of its development. Before it is written and submitted in early January, I have to complete a rationale describing what I intend to do and achieve with it, but I’m sure you’ll get to see the finished story when it’s ready. Skulls and Frankenstein – very apt for Halloween, don’t you think?

Mason