Brief: Develop your idea into a short narrative of 10-20 pages.

‘The Wonderful Things’ project was to explore how a child’s imagination can be inspired through their engagement with the natural world. How a child, inspired by a spark of knowledge gleaned in the classroom, can make imaginative connections between what she sees and experiences in the natural world. How her immediate environment can fuel her imagination in such a way that she too inspires others to join in her journey into the beautiful wilderness that is the natural world. I wanted to explore how important the nurturing of a child’s imagination is to their future growth as a person.

Planning

The premise came from earlier work I had done in Exercise 2: Analysis ‘if you nurture a child’s imagination, she will grow up to do wonderful things’ and combined it with information discussed in an interview with a science teacher I filmed earlier this year about using aquaponics to create a sustainable urban farm in schools.

From there I came up with the idea of an imaginative young girl who, inspired by the miracle of aquaponics, goes in search of the perfect fish.

Following the instructions from the course material, I outlined the protagonist’s initial state and the catalytic person who changes that initial state. From there I went on to outline the protagonist’s response to the problem and the antagonist’s response to the protagonist’s first challenge, thereby triggering a cause and effect sequence of events for the screenplay.

For the protagonist’s initial state and how I visualised it, I again drew upon my work for exercise 2. Taking the first of the three scenes I had written for that exercise, I began the story with the classroom scene and then moved on to the girl’s encounter with the Principal where, in response to his reprimand, she says ‘I need a fish’.

I went on to outline the way in which the girl attempts to resolve the problem of her mother’s reluctance to her having a fish, and further ways of frustrating the girl’s desire for finding the perfect fish, until, after enlisting the help of her best friend, the postman and a local farmer’s boy, she finally succeeds in her goal.

Scenes

Focusing on the quality of the scenes –  the problems, the solutions, the dialogue, the situations – was an important next step in the story development process. Here I compiled and listed a logical series of events required to tell the story.

Initial list of events:

1. A girl is gazing out through the classroom window.
2. She ignores her teacher’s request to stop daydreaming and get on with her work.
3. She is sent to the Principal’s office, where she receives a stern reprimand for her behaviour. When asked what she has to say for herself, she says she wants a fish.
4. At home that afternoon, the girl’s mother says she cannot have a fish.
5. In spite of the girl’s surprisingly articulate argument why she thinks she should have a fish, her mother is adamant that she can not have a fish.
6. The girl goes to her friend’s house and asks if she would like to help search for a fish.
7. The girls begin by looking for a glass container in the garden shed.
8. They walk into town and buy a small fishing net.
9. The girls run out of town in search of a nearby stream.
10. The girls are leaning into a stream, trying to catch a fish by dipping the glass jar into the water.
11. The girl’s mother calls her friend’s mum to she if she with her.
12. Meanwhile, the girls are ankle deep in water trying to catch a fish, but the water is too fast and the fish too quick to catch.
13. The mums realise their girls are missing, get into their car and call the local police.
14. The girls are found, wet but safe.

However, as I was looking for a story that focused on the ‘wonderful things’ within the story’s premise, I decided to change the end of the story. Rather than letting the narrative build up to an overly dramatic climax, I decided to focus more on the girl’s sense of wonder at the miracle of the natural world, and in particular the fish. To find a way of portraying her joy and wonder at the landscape and all it contains.

So, taking this idea further, I removed the events around the two girls getting lost in the wilderness and their parents calling the police to help find them. These events felt over dramatic and too conventional. So I replaced the final quarter of the original list of events with another series of events in which we see the girl enjoying the ‘wonder’ of the natural world and enlisting the help of several people to help in her search for the perfect fish.

This was an important stage in the story development process, as it revealed what I felt were the weaknesses in the initial story. It also revealed the need to be bolder and more experimental in my approach to telling the story. To allow the story to be more poetic in places if necessary.

Conscious of the three act narrative when reorganising these events, I arranged the scenes around a simple three act structure. In the first act, we see the girl in the school classroom. The dramatic event at the climax of the first act comes when the girl’s mother refuses to let her have a fish. Act two shows the girl and her friend search for the perfect fish, first in the pet shop and then in a small river outside town. The climax to Act two comes when, after all else has failed, a boy helps the two girls catch a fish.

Revised list of events:

1. A girl is gazing out through the classroom window.
2. She doesn’t hear her teacher’s request to stop daydreaming and get on with her work.
3. The girl is sent to the Principal’s office, where she receives a stern reprimand for her behaviour.
4. When asked what she has to say for herself, she says she wants a fish.
5. At home that afternoon, the girl’s mother says she cannot have a fish.
6. In spite of the girl’s surprisingly articulate argument why she thinks she should have a fish, her mother is adamant that they will not have a fish in the house.
7. The girl goes to her friend’s house and asks if she would like to help search for a fish.
8. The girls look for a glass container in the garden shed.
9. They visit the pet shop to buy a fish.
10. The girls run out of town and into some nearby fields in search of a stream.
11. The girls are ankle deep in water trying to catch a fish. But the water is too fast and the fish are too quick to catch.
12. Unable to catch a fish for themselves, the girls enlists the help of several people, including the owner of nearby shop and a postman.
13. Finally, they receive help from a teenage boy.
14. The film ends with the two girls walking home carrying a glass jar with a single small fish in it.

Story

The film opens in a small town school, where children are busily working away in a classroom. Sitting at a table on her own is 9 year old Aisling, who is gazing out through the window.  She is daydreaming, staring out of the window at the sky, while all around her, her classmates are busy with their tasks and talking loudly to each other. All of which she is oblivious. The teacher calls the students to order and everyone stops what they are doing and the class falls silent, all except Aisling, who continues to stare through the window. The teacher calls her name, snapping her out of her daydream and back into the real world of the school. She is sent to the Principal’s office, where she receives a stern reprimand for her behaviour. When the Principal ask what she has to say for herself, Aisling says she needs a fish.

At home that afternoon, Aisling asks her mum is she can have a fish. When her mum says no, she tries explaining why it would be a good idea to have a fish. Although her mum is sympathetic to her desire for a pet, says no again. Aisling decides to take matters into her own hands and walks into town to the pet shop, where she looks at all the fish to see if there is a suitable one for her project. The pet shop owner lists all the ones he has, but they are exotic tropical fish, none of which suit Aisling’s needs. She leaves the shop empty handed and disappointed, but not beaten. Rather than going home, she goes to find her friend Amy and tells her she needs to find a stream where she can catch a fish. Amy finds a glass jar for the fish.

The two girls head out of town in search of a stream. They enlist the help of several people in their search for a stream, including a local shop owner and the postman, who suggest one of the fields nearby. Finally, they receive help from a teenage boy, who shows them the best place to catch fish and helps them to catch a fish.

The film ends with the two girls walking through fields carrying a glass jar, in which we see one small fish swimming around.

When it came to writing the screenplay for this story, I found Christopher Riley’s book The Hollywood Standard particularly helpful in setting down on paper what I had visualised in the story in the correct format.

Reflection

This has been a demanding project. The task of developing and writing the screenplay took far longer to do than I had anticipated, as I quickly realised I needed to spend more time on my primary research before even thinking about writing the rough storyline for the screenplay.

I enjoyed the process of taking an idea and planning the story in terms of problems, solutions, dialogue and situations, which proved to be a very effective way of developing an idea into a finished screenplay. Creating a logical list of events to help organise my ideas into a sequence of scenes, which were then fleshed out with detail and written up into a rough storyline. Although I am quite pleased with the outcome, I do not feel as though the story is as fully realised as I would have hoped, due to my lack in both research and storytelling skills.

Action Plan

• One of my aims when working on the next part of the course is to improve my storytelling skills. To see the script as a blueprint, a valuable element in the creative process of making a moving image. To this end I shall revisit the screenwriting techniques introduced in this project as I work through the next part of the coursework and when preparing for the second assignment.
• I also need to develop a plan for my future research, to help plot my route through the research process when working on the next assignment, from research questions to end product.

 

---

References

Riley, C. (2009) The Hollywood Standard: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style, 2nd edition. California: Michael Wiese Productions