esterday we received our brief for our year one FMPs (final major projects). The three themes we were given to choose from were:

The Circle

The Distance

The Choice

I was extremely excited when I saw these three themes as, with a strong enough imagination, you could fit almost any story into one of these themes (especially the choice).

As a class we went through each of these themes brainstorming our initial responses.

Personally my favourite option off the bat is ‘The Distance’ as I feel you can get really creative with how you interpret it especially when talking about things like emotional distance or distance in people’s emotions.

‘The Choice’ is also brilliant as you basically have free reign with what you create here; you can pretty much take any story throughout history and find a point where a choice is made in some way or another. The reason I prefer The Distance is simply because it ties in with some of the ideas I had for my FMP before we were given our brief.

Pre-Brief ideas

Realism

The primary piece of inspiration for my FMP is the show, ‘The End of The F***ing World’ written by Charlie Covell. I first watched this when it came out back in 2018 and instantly fell in love with it. The main thing that made an impression on me was the characters and their relationship with one another, their dialogue and interactions feel very authentic and they compliment each other perfectly. This ties into my FMP as I also want to write something that feels very authentic and I want the relationships between my characters to be at the forefront of my narrative. I also want my main characters to be my age as I will be able to write them a lot more realistically because that’s maybe the biggest thing for me on this project, I want it to feel real. Another thing I love about this show is its use of voice-overs which represent the character’s inner dialogues, something I’m interested in exploring in my own film.

Quick fire ideas

• The Sixth Sense? – Make a film where one of the characters has been dead all along, but unlike in the sixth sense they will not be sentient they will simply be a projection of the other character’s memory of them (if that makes sense) This idea is the reason ‘The Distance’ immediately grabbed my attention.
• Moving Away – As I have recently moved from my home in Stourbridge to Kendal I figured I could write a pretty authentic story about a character either leaving their home or arriving at a new home. My inspiration for this idea was the writer Terence Rattigan who is known for always writing about things he has personal experience in. Again, this ties in perfectly to ‘The Distance’.
• Anonymous – I’m not really sure why but I really like the idea of never revealing my character’s names to the audience. It wouldn’t be be a major part of the narrative or really tie into the narrative at all but it’s just another idea I had. I got this idea from ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ where the narrator uses code names for all the characters except in my film you just wouldn’t learn the characters names at all.
• Hitchcock’s Bomb – This idea was inspired equally by Alfred Hitchcock’s famous interview about cinematic tension and the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds’. The idea is to have an interaction between two or more characters where you reveal information to the audience that the character’s are unaware of in order to create tension.

Post-Brief

The first thing I did when I got home after being given the brief was to show it to my parents as I am going to be bouncing ideas off of them a lot so I need to make sure they understand the brief as well. I then immediately stuck it to the wall behind my computer so I can keep checking in with it as I write to make sure I’m staying on-brief (I have had a love-hate relationship with briefs in the past).

I then copied up the class’s mind maps on the three themes we were given up and stuck them around my house.

Today, I mainly focused on finishing off any outstanding college work so that I can fully focus on the FMP but I was able to find the time to do some research:

Now we are getting somewhere…

Last night I developed my first concrete idea, it is quite long so I think I’ll just explain it in a video:

I went into college the next day and Ryan explained his idea to me, here it is written down in his notes:

Ryan will be the first to admit his notes are a little hard to understand but the basic premise is that a psychopathic boy falls in love with a girl so he kills her boyfriend and is then left to deal with the consequences.

I took this idea with me over the weekend and did a lot of thinking. I knew it needed a lot of work but I really wanted to stay true to the heart of Ryan’s idea as he already had some great cinematography ideas.

While I was toying with that I started write my own little screenplay about a boy who is struggling with the death of his older brother and has to learn to move on in order to be able to carry on living his life. I wrote the intro down here:

Click to access trains.pdf

I really fell in love with the idea of someone learning to emotionally move on from there past in order to be able to live out there future, I think this struck a chord with me as it someone reflects me own experience of leaving my life behind in order to move to Kendal. Also I am currently reading ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ which is all about that kind of stuff. Anyway, I let my mind stew over that for a day while I watched countless videos on screenwriting and re-watched the entire first season of ‘The End of the F***cking World’ as it is mine and Ryan’s core inspiration.

Today I had a bit of a eureka moment, here’s what happened:

Talk with Simon

On Tuesday I had a discussion with Simon about my idea. The main developments from that talk were the following:

• I will focus all my attention on this project and will not spread myself too thin by trying to assist on multiple projects.
• I am going to experiment with adding more characters into the opening scene so that it feels much more like an end of school gathering.
• I won’t use flashbacks to the characters past but will instead hint at his mother’s death and his father’s struggle with alcoholism through dialogue.

Overall, Simon has given the idea the green light but we are both aware of how big a project it is and I have to be prepared to put my heart and soul into it if me and Ryan are going to pull it off. Luckily, I am prepared to do that.