Week 1: IDEATION
Monday 8/28 - Sunday 9/3
This week was the official first week of classes, and as of Monday, August 28th, the official assignment of the Second Year Workshop Film(TM) was finally delivered. I knew it was coming; I’d had ideas throughout the summer ranging widely in depth and quality, and on Wednesday I got to share some of the stronger ideas with my peers. With their feedback and more musing on my part, I’ve settled on an idea and have started putting things together: a mood board/research, concept art, a treatment, and a rough early schedule.
The current treatment of this film goes something like this:
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A young girl of around six or seven stands, looking sorrowfully upwards, in a heap of mud and snow-slush that clings to her sneakers. Her face is red and her eyes well with tears. Her mother looms over her, arms crossed disapprovingly. The girl stomps, turning on her light-up heels, and bolts out the door, slamming it behind her.
She runs, gasping and sobbing, over a snowy landscape that runs alongside a dense forest. She wipes at her face and eyes and nose as she runs, and as she runs out of steam she begins to trip over her own feet. She looks over her shoulder and, having run far enough away from her woes, she falls weakly to her knees in the snow at the edge of the woods and cries into the ground.
After some time she gets up, wet and shivering, tensely holding her arms and balled fists at her sides. Her face contorts with an angry determination, and, throwing a last defiant look over her shoulder, she stomps forwards into the forest. She kicks at the dirt and stones as she goes, at first half-heartedly and then more passionately. She bends down to pick up a stick by her foot, and scribbles into the dirt with it, before hurling it against a nearby tree with an angry yell. It cracks against the trunk and thuds, splintered, to the ground. She finds more ammunition and throws sticks and stones with vigor. Between throws, she shivers and rubs her numbing fingers together, her breath clouding in front of her.
She snaps a longer stick in two over her knee and throws the pieces into a pile of brush at the base of a tree, and it ignites. She jumps back, shocked, and looks down, mystified, at her muddy palms as the little flame crackles. She gingerly takes another stick and tosses it into the fire, which gobbles it up and grows a little larger. Determined, she pushes up her sleeves and sets off to find more sticks.
She returns to the fire with some sticks and rocks fashioned into a little makeshift figure, which she shakes around angrily before hurling into the flames. The fire doubles in size this time, and she roars her approval. She reaches out and warms her hands over the flames, and the fire beckons as if to ask for more. She obliges, circling the fire and feeding it sticks and rocks and fistfulls of dirt. The fire responds not only to the sticks but also her grunts and shouts and shrieks as she picks up speed, angrily firing off frustration and debris into the flames that now rival her size. She stands before it, the cold forgotten as she waves a stick above her head like a magic wand and the flames respond, lurching back and forth wherever she points.
She hurls her wand into the fire and takes off around the fire at a run, yelling over the roar of the flames as they reach out to lap at sticks and trees of their own volition. She closes her eyes and lets out the wildest scream that echoes through the forest, startling deer and shaking birds from their perches. While she’s screaming, the fire grows tenfold, dwarfing her.
She opens her eyes at the intensified heat and is startled by the fire’s sudden growth and now-malevolent shape. She backs away, afraid, as she tries to calm the flames with her hands, but to no avail. The flames lunge at her and she jumps back. The fire chases her back the way she came through the forest, and she runs blindly until she is somehow surrounded by massive walls of fire.
She’s flushed and breathing heavily and scared, but she steels herself, swallowing hard. She digs her light-up sneakers into the dirt to steady her, and she breathes in and out deeply, letting her eyes flutter closed. Her fists are clenched up tight and then they release as she breathes, and the flames start to ebb. She peels an eye open to peek, and when she sees it’s working, she lets out a relieved giggle and the fire shrinks back even faster. It returns to a size slightly smaller than her, and she gestures to it to follow.
She laughs and shrieks as she runs through the forest. She and the flames bob and weave through the trees, taking turns chasing each other, the fire shrinking all the while, until the girl bursts through the final layer of trees out into the open snow. The fire doesn’t follow, so she turns to wave at it as its final flame wiggles a goodbye before snuffing out.
She flops back into the snow, making a snow angel and giggling as snowflakes land on her face and extended tongue. She closes her eyes with a sigh and a smile.
Ideally from reading that out loud things should come in at around 2.5-3 minutes, but I’ve already made cuts and changes to the original idea (there was a cubicle concept with a distraught adult woman and the main girl being her inner child, but at this point I’m looking for ways to keep the scale of the project as tight as possible while not losing the poignance) so I wouldn’t get attached to any of this if I were you. And now, the fun part! I’ve done some research and assembled a mood board, some notes, and a few pieces of original concept art to get me started on the project.
And lastly: the schedule! This is really loose at this point, and in fact is mostly directly borrowed from the provided example timetable. At this point, when I don’t have a shot list, a complete asset list, or anything like that, it’s hard to guess how long certain things will take. But for the time being this will keep me honest in knowing what things I need to be starting and wrapping up each week, and once I have a tighter sense of what exactly it is that I’m making, this will see some major upgrades.
Here at the end of week one, I feel pretty good and I’m really looking forward to working on this. I think the onus of the idea is something I’m really passionate about and I’m hoping that this semester I’ll learn some new technical tricks and execute something I’m proud of at the end. I guess this would be my sophomore film, because I’ve only ever made the one before, and I think I’m well-equipped with lessons learned from that process last semester to make something bigger and better. If you have thoughts I’d love to hear them, and if you made it all the way to the end here—thanks for reading! More next week.
-Deanna
