Fiction Adaptation - Tutorial with Helen - Ideas Development and Feedback

Today I had a tutorial with Helen to discuss my ideas to her and to see what she thought about them and what she thought was better for the story line. I started by introducing two ideas to her on what I wanted to do and showed her the pros and cons which I thought I would have for each idea. With the first idea of wanting to do, a soldier in the first world war coming back from war, back to base and thinking that everything is ok and there no harm, then suddenly he gets shot and then all the pain and theme of war come rushing back. With this idea Helen thought that it was a very interesting and good idea. However a big problem that she pointed out was the costume, she told me that it's very hard to get hold of world war 1 costume, unless you have quite a bit of money to rent out the costume. This would be very inconvenient for me as I don't have to budget to fund the costume hire for a couple of days. She went on to show me different companies and programmes which make their own world war 1 costumes, however it would be hard to get hold of them and if I did it would be sure if they would either lend or make me a world war 1 costume. When I heard all that the idea suddenly vanished in my ideas, as it would be far too expensive to pull this off. The only way Helen told me I could pull it off without getting the correct costume is by using very tight close ups of my character and nay use one or very minimal so that it would be easier to get away with the lack of costume. This idea did not attract me as I wanted to show the whole character and more people in costume. So that Idea was out!

With the second idea which was to interoperate world war 1 into a modern day life and have a guy who with a past of crime. He goes on a job and bumps into a mugging and ties to help, in doing this he ends up getting stabbed and bleeding to death. He is rushed to hospital and eventually dies. Helen again lied this idea and said it would be much cheeper to film this idea as I wouldn't need any expensive costume. However the only problem that she said was the story line, she said that it was a bit too typical with the mugging, the good guy hero and him getting hurt. She said I need to do something that makes people go "wow"(different). Helen also said that the the poem has to relate with the entire film, so if I have a paragraph on the screen it needs to rate with the film and make sense.

With these comments, I was no where near to my final idea which is what I wanted to be, however I received a lot of good info on what I need to do to make my story good.  I thought hard about what I could to adapt my story further so I made a check list of what I can do to make the story start to form a shape;

• Character Profiles

• Mind Maps

• Research for Character Appearance 

• Research for Themes

With the character profiles this will help me better understand who my charter is and what they do and build up a little background story for them. This will help me to see if I can find anything interesting with me character and use some of the information about them in the story to make the story more interesting and different from other war adapted stories.

The Mind Maps will help me expand the story into loads of different little categories and adapt them more and break the, up and look into more detail at them and piece them together and change bits that need changing or adding to. Also this will help me with the character and what to do with them and how they will react to the situation according to their own personal profile.

Researching the characters appearance will help a lot with both the profile and mind map, for the profile it will help me decide what kind of person IO want them t look like and from this I can include some stereotypes that people like that normally have, this will help a lot when trying to discover who they are.  With the mod maps this will help as again different people carry different stereotype so I could look into the ones which I want for this story and form that adapt it into a situation which could occur in the film.

This is the same with the theme research, if I knew what kind of mood, scenery and tone I want to portray that will help along with the character profiles and the mind maps and will again help me to further develop the story baed on the tone, mood and scenery which I want to show in the film.

From this feedback I found that I need to adapt my idea further with the methods I explained to more clearly see what my structure will be. I also know that I need to make the "wow" happen in my film, have something different which isn't normally seen in film.