Characters

DAN 

Dan is a golf teacher with his membership jumper and shirt combo with loose black golfing trousers, right down to his new golfing shoes. With money in his eyes, he tries his best to help his students but as his job loses importance he loses interest too.

JAMES

Dressed in his favourite polo shirt and golfing trousers, James brings along his golfing clubs to his local golfing centre. He’s tall and lanky, with hair covering his face. He walks with his back hunched slightly and his head to the ground.

ELIZABETH GREEN (MOTHER)

Elizabeth Green, is dressed in a pastel jumper and trousers, with her favourite pearl necklace and headband. She has a maternal look about her and her groomed hair has become messy and grubby.

JOHN GREEN (FATHER)

With a stern look on his face and gritted teeth, John Green has worked hard for his possessions. He wears his designer clothes proudly and checks to straighten up his tie. His shoes are off and his colorful socks are revealed. Only a few strands of messy hair have escaped from his smooth exterior. Normally he oozes allure, but now, slumped against the cold basement wall, he looks fragile and pale.

Locations

FIRST LOCATION - GOLF CLUB

SECOND LOCATION - MY HOUSE (Living Room + Kitchen + Basement)

First Script Draft

Reasonable Doubt Spoiler Review

An investigative news reporter looking for a story that will take his career to the next level suspects that the District Attorney, who is hotly tipped to be the next State Governor, has been deliberately planting evidence to secure convictions in high profile murder cases. To prove his suspicions, he deliberately fabricates circumstantial evidence against himself in an unsolved murder, but his plan goes horribly wrong. Reasonable Doubt (also known as The Good Samaritan) is a 2014 Canadian crime thriller film directed by Peter Howitt and written by Peter A. Dowling. The film stars Samuel L. Jackson, Dominic Cooper, Erin Karpluk, Gloria Reuben and Ryan Robbins. ‘Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’ has a zero rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 22 reviews. I have no doubt it is not the only film to ever receive a zero rating, but it is the first one that I have come across. Writer and director Peter Hyams has had a long career, which has produced a mixed bag of results, from interesting earlier outings like ‘Capricorn One’ and ‘Outland’ to the slightly more recent horror films ‘Relic’ and ‘End of Days’, with a couple of Jean-Claude Van Damme films in between. His past record suggests that he is a better director than this lame and hackneyed debacle would indicate.

Out of the Furnace Spoiler Review

The story of Out of The Furnace focuses on the steel mill town raised Baze brothers Russell (played by Christian Bale) and Rodney (played by Casey Affleck). Russell is a man who does as his family has done for generation, work at the steel mill then go to your loved one, of which for Russell is Lena (played by Zoe Saldana). Rodney, on the other hand, works for the military seemingly to escape the family pattern of working in the mill, but ends up only trading boredom and stability for the gruesomeness of fighting in the Iraq war. These two lead us on a journey in which we watch them both fall, and while Russell is given the chance to stand back up after a drinking and driving conviction which puts him away, and causes him to lose Lena to local officer Wesley (played by Forest Whitaker), Rodney finds himself relying on assistance to stand on his own. You see, while Russell was away, Rodney had to deal with their dad dying as well as mounting debt which seemingly the military wasn’t helping much with. So this leads to him turning to local shark John Petty (played by Willem Dafoe) who he throws fights for. However, once Russell is out, and back at the mill, Rodney eventually figures that he minas well give into fate, but not before one fight to wipe his debt. Enter Harlan DeGroat (played by Woody Harrelson) a Jersey drug dealer, with a penchant for violence. He changes everything for the story by taking out a few characters and getting on Russell’s bad side, and despite Wesley saying he got things handled, Russell decides to play vigilante leading him to face off with Harlan.

Sock Puppet Practising

For our last film lesson we made sock puppets to practice our scripts. This helps to develop our scripts as we can practice a normal conversation between characters. This also helps for the scene to be natural and fluent.

12-Step Screenwriting Videos

Dallas Buyers Club Spoiler Review

Dallas Buyers Club is based on the true story of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a Texas man who, in 1985, found out he was infected with HIV. Through Ron, we experience the frustrating and nearly absurd battle fought by millions of people who were struggling just to stay alive. Ron is a proud heterosexual living in Texas, so the fact that he has contracted what was being called “the gay cancer” ostracizes him from his community of rodeo enthusiasts and good ‘ol boys. The only glimmer of hope at that time was the drug AZT whose short-term effects were mildly encouraging and long-term effects were unknown. When Ron is denied entry into an AZT trial, he begins searching for other treatments, a journey which leads him to an exiled former U.S. doctor named Vass (Griffin Dunne). In his desperate fight to stay alive, Ron meets Rayon (Jared Leto), a transsexual who is also infected. Ron and Rayon develop a partnership to sell the alternative treatments Ron has brought back from Mexico. They begin the Dallas Buyers Club, a membership-only organization that provides AIDS-stricken people with the medicine the FDA and doctors won’t let them have. With the help of a rogue doctor, Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner), Ron and Rayon are able to bring a small sense of optimism to the hundreds of infected people living in their community. Ron Woodroof’s story is heartbreaking and infuriating, made more so by McConaughey’s outstanding performance. The last few years have seen McConaughey re-invent himself as an actor, taking roles which challenge him on a physical and emotional level. McConaughey’s dramatic weight loss for the role – and it is staggering – is not the most impressive aspect of his performance. His complete lack of vanity and commitment to the role is akin to the work Christian Bale does time and time again. Ron’s desperation is communicated through the sheer panic in his eyes and steadily more broken posture as he is repeatedly beaten down by the federal government. If not his most impressive work to date, this is certainly McConaughey’s most authentic. Ron’s story wouldn’t be complete without his partner in “crime,” Rayon, played by Jared Leto in a performance that is beautifully deep. Rayon is not a caricature of the transgender community. Leto makes Rayon a real person whose physical appearance betrays his inner self. Leto also transformed himself physically, being almost unrecognizable for most of the film. His voice, though, may be the most surprising change, however. Rayon’s manner of speech, cadence and tone is so completely different from Leto’s true voice it is uncanny. Both McConaughey and Leto deserve serious recognition when the awards season launches next month. 

Despite the two powerhouse performances by McConaughey and Leto, Dallas Buyers Club suffers severely from the lack of directorial control by Jean-Marc Vallee and a maddeningly uneven script from Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack. The film doesn’t progress so much as keep happening. The script signals it will move in one direction and then goes off the rails as a more interesting storyline catches its interest. What begins as a one-man odyssey for justice morphs into what could be a terrific examination of a non-sexual relationship between two men brought together through the most unthinkable of circumstances. This is then eschewed for an overt condemnation of the big pharmaceutical companies and government bureaucracy. Borten and Wallack regurgitate every type of “message film” trope they can conceive of while their script’s tone lacks any type of focus. Vallee, for his part, allows all of this to happen and gets in on the action, blending so many directorial styles it becomes dizzying. The film opens as a tender, indie-spirited drama but becomes a bad Danny Boyle rip off as Ron begins travelling the world, complete with frenetic camera work and excessive music cues. The film, which should be engaging from beginning to end, becomes boring by the end due to Vallee’s pathetic work as director. There is no impact or punch because Vallee lets every story and every character just fizzle out of existence, a sad end to what should have been a magnificent tribute to those whose lives needlessly ended.  

Escape Plan Spoiler Review

Ray Breslin, played by Sylvester Stallone, is a former prosecutor who co-owns Breslin-Clark, a Los Angeles–based security firm specializing in testing the reliability of maximum security prisons. He spends his life getting into prisons to study their designs and the guards' habits to find and exploit their weaknesses, thus enabling him to escape without a hitch. He claims his goal is to ensure that criminals sent to prison stay there. One day, he and his business partner Lester Clark are offered a multimillion dollar deal by CIA agent Jessica Miller to test a top-secret prison and see if it is escape-proof. Breslin goes against all his own rules and chooses the money. He agrees to the deal and gets himself captured in New Orleans, Louisiana, under the guise of a Spanish terrorist named "Anthony Portos", but the plan goes awry when his captors remove the tracking microchip from his arm and drug him on the way to the prison.

Breslin wakes up in a complex of glass cells with no outside windows to indicate the prison's location. He meets fellow inmate Emil Rottmayer, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they both stage a fight for Breslin to study the solitary confinement cell, which uses high-powered halogen lights to disorient and dehydrate prisoners. Seeing that the cell floors are made of aluminum, but the rivets are steel, Breslin has Rottmayer procure a metal plate from Warden Willard Hobbes's office floor before the both of them and Muslim inmate Javed are once again thrown into solitary. Using the metal plate, Breslin focuses the reflection from the lights to heat the rivets and pop open the floor panel to reveal a passageway below. He goes through the passageway and discovers that the prison is inside a cargo ship in the middle of the ocean, making a simple escape impossible. Breslin and Rottmayer continue to study the complex by learning the guards' daily routines, and Breslin gives Hobbes false information about Rottmayer's boss, Victor Mannheim. Meanwhile, Breslin's colleagues Abigail Ross and Hush grow suspicious of Clark when Breslin's paycheck for the job is frozen. They discover from hacked documents that the prison, codenamed "The Tomb", is owned by a for-profit organization linked to Blackwater, and Clark was offered a US$5 million annual salary from them in exchange for keeping Breslin behind bars.

Back in the prison, Hobbes reveals to Breslin that he is aware of his identity, and with chief security officer Drake watching him, he wants to ensure that Breslin stays for the rest of his life. Rottmayer has Javed convince Hobbes to bring him on deck to do his nightly prayer when he actually uses a makeshift sextant to get the ship's latitude. Using the latitude and observations of the weather, Breslin and Rottmayer deduce that they are in the Atlantic Ocean near Morocco. Breslin visits the infirmary of Dr. Kyrie and convinces him to help him and Rottmayer escape by sending an email to Mannheim. Breslin then transmits a false tap code message from his cell, giving Hobbes the impression that a riot will occur in cell block C. With majority of the security stationed at cell block C, Javed instigates a riot at cell block A, giving him, Breslin, and Rottmayer time to run toward the deck while a lockdown is initiated. Breslin kills Drake, but Javed is shot dead by Hobbes and his men during their escape. Breslin goes to the engine room to reboot the electrical systems, giving Rottmayer time to open the deck hatch while a helicopter sent by Mannheim engages in a gunfight with the ship's crew. Rottmayer boards the helicopter while Breslin is flushed to the bottom of the ship by the automated water system. The helicopter picks up Breslin, but when Hobbes starts shooting at them, Breslin kills the warden by shooting a group of oil barrels in front of him. They land on a beach in Morocco, where Rottmayer reveals that he is actually Mannheim, Miller is his daughter, "Portos" was a codeword used to alert Mannheim that Breslin was an ally, and Hobbes was originally unaware that Breslin's cover story was fake. Later, at a Moroccan airfield, Ross informs Breslin that Clark had fled, but Hush tracked him in Miami, Florida, and locked him in a container aboard a cargo ship while the existence of "The Tomb" is made public before it is shut down.

The Wolf of Wall Street Spoiler Review

In The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio plays Belfort, a Long Island penny stockbroker who served 36 months in prison for defrauding investors in a massive 1990s securities scam that involved widespread corruption on Wall Street and in the corporate banking world, including shoe designer Steve Madden.

In the early 1990s, Jordan Belfort teamed with his partner Donny Azoff and started brokerage firm Stratford-Oakmont. Their company quickly grows from a staff of 20 to a staff of more than 250 and their status in the trading community and Wall Street grows exponentially. So much that companies file their initial public offerings through them. As their status grows, so do the amount of substances they abuse, and so do their lies. They draw attention like no other, throwing lavish parties for their staff when they hit the jackpot on high trades. That ultimately leads to Belfort featured on the cover of Forbes Magazine, being called "The Wolf Of Wall St.". With the FBI onto Belfort's trading schemes, he devises new ways to cover his tracks and watch his fortune grow. Belfort ultimately comes up with a scheme to stash their cash in a European bank. But with the FBI watching him like a hawk, they aren't able to maintain their elaborate wealth and luxurious lifestyles.

Script Outline

SCENE DESCRIPTION

Starts with the boy cutting open a grapefruit, slowly. He juices the grapefruit, with the juice representing blood and the skin representing human skin. He transfers the juice into a glass, adds sugar then takes a sip. 

He opens the door to the basement and walks down the stairs, slowly. We hear muffles of sounds and screaming through taped mouths. 

The parents are revealed and their muffled screams gets louder. He stands over them and takes another sip from his drink. He peels away their masking tape from their mouth.

DIALOGUE

DAD: You sick bastard!

MOTHER: What are you gonna do with us?

The boy takes another sip from his drink

DAD: Say something!

The boy spits out the drink.

MOTHER: Why are you doing this?

BOY: Why not?

The father kicks his legs out in fury.

FATHER: Look son, lets talk about this, whatever you're going through, we'll understand.

BOY: You'll never understand! I'm not your son!

FLASHBACK STARTS AND ENDS

The boy holds his head. The parents start talking to him, trying to give positive thoughts. But their voices are muffled.

MOTHER: Everything will be fine, just let us go and we won't say anything more about this.

FATHER: Listen to your mother, listen to us, you need help, we'll get you some, we'll get you some help.

The boy tries to block out the noise, he sways and starts to wave his arms around, creating a mess of destruction. He punches the father and the mother screams.

MOTHER: NO! Stop it!

The boy leans over the parents with a knife. A camera shot shows the door closing and the scene unfolds in the distance.

Homework

Link between Wreck-It Ralph and the MACRO Wall

Wreck-It Ralph breaks down the MACRO wall because the story break the 'rules' of CHN, Genre conventions and stock characters and Stereotypes. It breaks the rules of the Classic Hollywood Narrative because the supposed antagonist is sympathised with and he becomes heroic. The Genres of this animation show that it's not the classic Disney movie as it features Sci-Fi and an element of a Dystopian future in their world. Ralph rebels against his role and dreams of becoming a hero. He travels between games in the arcade, and ultimately must eliminate a dire threat that could affect the entire arcade, and one that Ralph himself inadvertently started.

The main character Ralph doesn't display the typical heroic stock character that you see in most Disney films as he the Vigilante that we sympathise with. They also break the stereotype as instead of sympathising with the supposed protagonist (Felix) with sympathise with the supposed antagonist which is Ralph. Also they highlight messages that Vanellope von Schweetz and Ralph shouldn't be treated like an outsider.

Film Pitch

Sundance Film Festival 2014

The 2014 Sundance Film Festival kicked off on Jan. 16, once again bringing dozens of new and innovative films to Park City, Utah. The 11 day event, which runs through Jan. 26, featured stars such as actor and festival founder Robert Redford.

WHIPLASH

The film Whiplash was premiered is about a drama about an aspiring drummer (Miles Teller) who is criticized by his art college professor (J.K. Simmons) has received one of the warmest receptions for an opening film in recent memory at the Sundance festival. Miles Teller — who can be seen on screen later this month with Zac Efron in That Awkward Moment — took four-hour drum lessons three times a week to play the lead in Whiplash, shown below in the movie scenes.

CAMP X-RAY

Camp X-Ray is about a young woman who joins the military to be part of something bigger than herself and her small-town roots. Instead, she ends up as a new guard at Guantanamo Bay, where her mission is far from black and white. Surrounded by hostile jihadists and aggressive squadmates, she strikes up an unusual friendship with one of the detainees. As two people on opposite sides of a war, they struggle to find their way through the ethical quagmire of Guantanamo Bay. In the process, they form an unlikely bond that changes them both.

INFINITELY POLAR BEAR

The year is 1978, and the Stuart family is struggling to hold it together. Cameron (played by Mark Ruffalo), is a bipolar father, and has had a nervous breakdown that leaves him unemployable, and Maggie, a hardworking mother, can’t quite make ends meet. Despite Cameron’s aristocratic genes and the couple’s top-notch education, they’re broke. When Maggie decides to accept a scholarship to pursue her MBA in New York, she must leave her daughters, Faith and Amelia, in Boston with their now-somewhat-convalesced father. So begins an untamed, unpredictable, 18-month experiment as eccentric, exuberant Cameron takes over primary parenting of his precocious, sensitive little girls. 

Inspired by writer/director Maya Forbes’s childhood, Infinitely Polar Bear lovingly and honestly portrays the pain and frustration of being raised by a father incapable of managing adult responsibilities and explores the gifts inherent in not being sheltered from that reality.

Pitch for Broken Soul

When a troubled young boy is adopted by a suburban couple, he struggles to adapt to his new life and finds that his past still haunts. In order to cope with his past he takes his anger out on them but becomes more and more violent. Will they be able to escape from him or will he continue to torture them?

The film will be set outside London where he kidnaps and tortures his adoptive parents. the film will appeal to viewers aged between 18 and 30. It is a psychological thriller based on the film We Need To Talk About Kevin and has aspects of the film Juno. The setup will begin with a brief backstory of the boy and the adoptive parents then the confrontation would be when the now older boy has a flashback of his past that haunts him and causes him to kidnap and torture his adoptive parents in their basement. The resolution is not clear as we do not know whether he kills them or leaves them in the basement.

Jack Reacher Spoiler

At the beginning of the film a man drives a van into a parking garage across the Allegheny River from PNC Park and, after dropping a quarter into the meter, readies a sniper rifle. He takes aim and kills five people on the river’s North Shore Trail from long range before fleeing in the van. The police soon arrive at the scene of the murder, headed by Detective Emerson (David Oyelowo), and discover a shell casing as well as the quarter used to pay for parking. A fingerprint taken from the coin points to James Barr, a former U.S. Army sniper. When the police raid his house, they find the van, equipment for making bullets, the rifle in question, and Barr, fast asleep in his bed.

During an interrogation by Emerson and the District Attorney, Alex Rodin (Richard Jenkins), Barr is offered a choice between life in prison in exchange for a full confession or guaranteed death row, as Rodin has never failed to convict. Thinking Barr is going to confess when he takes the notepad, they are bewildered when he instead writes "Get Jack Reacher". Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) is a drifter and former U.S. Army Military Police Corps officer. Reacher later arrives in Pittsburgh after seeing a news report about Barr and the shooting. Emerson and Rodin deny Reacher’s request to view the evidence but agree to let him see the suspect. Barr, as it turns out, was brutally attacked by fellow inmates while in police custody and is now in a coma. Reacher meets Barr’s defense attorney, counselor Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike), the District Attorney’s daughter, who's been saddled with the apparently hopeless task of saving Barr from the death penalty.

Helen says she can arrange for Reacher to see the evidence if he will become her lead investigator. Reacher retorts that he is not interested in clearing Barr. He reveals that Barr had gone on a killing spree during his tour in Iraq but was not prosecuted because his victims were under investigation for major crimes — and the U.S. Army wants them forgotten. Reacher vowed that if Barr tried anything like this again, he would take him down.

Reacher agrees to investigate if Helen visits the victims’ families to learn about the people murdered that day. Reacher goes to the crime scene and finds inconsistencies about this location, thinking that a trained shooter would have done the killings from the cover of the van on the nearby Fort Duquesne Bridge. After Helen reports her findings about the victims to Reacher, he suggests that the owner of a local construction company was the intended victim, with the killing of the other victims intended as a cover-up.

After an apparently spurious bar fight, Reacher realizes that someone is attempting to strong-arm him into dropping his investigation. Reacher is later framed for the murder of the young woman who was paid to instigate the bar-room brawl, but this only motivates him further. Reacher eventually follows up a lead at a shooting range in the neighboring state of Ohio, owned by former U.S. Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Martin Cash, who will talk only if Reacher will demonstrate his U.S. Army sniping skills.

The real perpetrators are the members of a Russian gang, who are masquerading as legitimate businessmen. The gang's elderly leader spent much of his life in a Soviet Gulag and is known only as the Zec (prisoner). The gang kidnaps Helen with the aid of Detective Emerson and holds her hostage at a quarry. Reacher outwits the mob guards, killing them with Cash's help, before confronting the Zec about the conspiracy. Reacher kills the Zec to prevent him from eluding justice.

Reacher and Cash flee the scene with confidence that Helen will clear Reacher's name. When Barr awakens from his coma, he tells Helen that he has no recent memory but believes that he must be guilty of the shootings. Barr's mental reconstruction of how he would have committed the shootings confirms that Reacher's theory was correct from the beginning. Still unaware of all these developments, Barr is willing to confess and accept his punishment, fearing that Reacher will mete out justice if the law does not.

Inspiration Moodboard

Both of the films that I am analysing play on the idea of relationship between a mother and child, however, the film Juno plays on the struggles during pregnancy, and the film We Need To Talk About Kevin talks about the struggles after pregnancy. The two mothers in the films Juno and Evie both show that their bond with their child is unexplainable because it is unique between them and their child. For my short clip based on these two films I will show  the bond of not just the mother but the father too. However the love between the parents and son will be unexplainable too because even though the son is no their biological son, they still try to love him unconditionally. My short film would play with the idea of a troubled relationship between a parent and a child.

My film idea is about a troubled boy who is adopted by a couple in a suburban neighbourhood. The boy struggles to bond with his adoptive parents which results in releasing his anger by bullying his adoptive parents when he's older. This results in him kidnapping and torturing his parents. The film ends in a cliffhanger because we dont know whether he's killed his parents or not.

Representation of Parenthood film extract

IDEA: A young boy is adopted by two suburban parents. The boys struggles to bond with his adoptive parents and finds that his acts of violence help to release his built-up anger that has been created ever since he suffered a long time ago with his biological parents.

ELEMENTS: I will take the idea from We Need To Talk About Kevin and how Kevin and his mother struggle to find the bond which eventually results in the one disastrous event that Kevin has created.

GENRE & LOCATION: My extract will be about a psychological thriller that is set in the present day in set in rural Kent.

CHARACTER (PROTAGONIST) Vs CHARACTER (ANTAGONIST): There is no obvious antagonist at the beginning of the film as the boy plays the innocent one as he has to deal with a devastating change. However as the film progresses and his acts towards his parents become more volatile and unreasonable we see that the parents are the protagonists as they are the victims of his outbreaks and the boy is the antagonist as he grows older so he should be old enough to know better than to bully the adoptive parents that tried to care for him and bond with him.

CHARACTER (ANTAGONIST) CREATES CONFLICT: The boy damages or kills something of value to the parents which arises when his past haunts him and causes psychological damage. He could kidnap and torture his parents because he is mimicking what his biological parents did to him.

CHARACTER (PROTAGONIST) RESOLVES THE SITUATION: There is no obvious resolution because the parents are seen before the scene ends but I will end it on a cliffhanger to not actually show if the boy kills the parents but I will show him holding a knife and heading towards the parents.