Personal Project Idea: How does it feel when you...?

This project idea stemmed from some of the sound design techniques I have been learning over the couple of years, in particular, the sound design masterclass with Glenn Freemantle that I attended during the summer. In that masterclass, he told us that he tries to design sound based on how it feels when a certain situation is happening. The example he gave was his work in 127 hours. As that is based on the experience of a real person, he asked what it felt like at certain points and then based the sound design on how it felt; essentially making it sound how it felt. To see what I mean I'll link a scene below:

Particularly in the end of this scene, the electric guitars represent how it felt. Freemantle described it as how the pain rushes through your body like lightning.

So, the project I am proposing so far is an exploration of this idea of how feelings can be reflected through sound. What I am considering right now is either having a series of situations or one situation and reflecting what each feeling of either each situation or each person in the situation might sound like. What I am also hoping to achieve, is making the audience feel some of how the characters feel.

In a tutorial with Kathleen I had today, she mentioned looking at site specific recording, whether I can use the acoustics of a location for effect, how I could also think about how I would present the work in a gallery environment. She also linked me to some further research to look at to develop my idea.

Script Development and Moving on with the Pre-production.

After many different versions of the script, myself and Laura kept going round in circles about ideas for the script, particularly the dialogue. I spent a fair while on the structure, so for the most part that stayed the same.

Because we spent so long on the script, Laura decided to break the script down into a visual structure, using elements of the different versions of the scripts. This is so we can continue with the bulk of the preproduction and come back to the script later for improvements.

Because of this, I took the version that Laura produced and spent a couple of days going through and developing a rough shot list. I then relayed this over to Shahid so he could start on the storyboard for the film. As this is a longer film and there is only one of Shahid, he is only doing the complicated shots and the ones I specifically asked for.

Also, after our group tutorial with Kathleen which gave us a lot of references to use when continuing to develop the story, Kathleen suggested I write the film as a short story, which I am more familiar with, and then later pointed me in the direction of the Creative Writing lecturer for some advice on the development of the story. I'm sure this will be very helpful.

Script- First Draft and Keeping on track.

After putting together a structure of the film, I started writing the first draft of the script. It was very rough and took me a couple of days to get through but I did it! I then left it for a couple of days and re-read it. There were some elements I liked and some I didn't. I went back to my screen writing books and saw ways in which I could improve the script.

One piece of advice given in one of the books that I hadn't implemented so far was a board with all the scenes on. Using the beat sheet from Blake Snyder's book and from the short film book I have, instead of writing up scenes I put down the major plot points. I figured each plot point could come down to about a page each, leaving me with 15 plot points. This is how it looked on my bedroom wall:

each row represents an Act, with the middle 2 rows representing Act 2. It is read from left to right. This is what the cards looked like up close:

In this I've given: Location, brief description of what happens and what beat this represents in my film.

The +/- Is the emotional progression that goes on at this point. Blake Snyder points out that a film should be an emotional rollercoaster, so you need to make sure that your characters' emotions are constantly changing throughout.

> < This symbol represents conflict that happens in the scene or at this plot point. There has to be constant conflict of interests in the film between characters or things otherwise the audience will feel like nothing is really happening.

After my first draft, I put all these cards up and moved them around, took some cards away and wrote new ones. It was a good exercise as it allowed me to easily see the weakest and strongest points of the script and fix them to make them all of equal quality. After this I changed the script a lot, and while I still think it has a long way to go, I'm much happier with it now than I was.