Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Blog #13: Script Reflection


When I first heard about the script frenzy project I thought it would be really interesting and fun to do. I had never thought about trying to write a script before especially not in thirty days. It seemed like a cool thing to know how to write. I was excited to start working on it although I found the idea of having only thirty days to write a little difficult to manage.

            Now that the project is over, I felt like I grew tired of it sometime during the middle. Erin and I were starting to lose interest in the script and it was becoming difficult to write. Even though I liked the idea of writing a script, I also wish we could have done other things too instead of spending most of the semester working on it. For example, I wanted to do poetry or short stories and improve my skills in writing those types of things.

            While we were planning the script, I found that the character description pages were really helpful because it laid out so many aspects of the characters and made it easier to develop a clear, 3-dimensional character. I also thought that the pages helping with dialogue helped me understand what to include in our dialogue. It pointed out how dialogue should be able to move the story along, develop the characters and reveal things to the audience.

            After taking on this project I learned that I have difficulty working under time constraints. The thirty day time limit really seemed to slow my thought process because I was too worried about making the deadline. I usually take a while to sort out my thoughts and develop them into a story or even to plan out one.

            Our final script has about twenty two pages and it isn’t completely finished yet. We only managed to get through about 10-15% of the storyline that we had in mind. I feel like we could have managed our time better since we didn’t have a set schedule of how much we should write every day. We merely just started writing at the start of class and then stopped when class was over. Sometimes we wrote a lot and other times we hit a few bumps and didn’t write as much as we would have liked to.

            I think that the strengths of our script are our usage of dialogue to really show the characters’ personalities. Each character has their own distinct personality that is expressed in what they say and do towards one another. For example, our main character is Gabriela who is a very strong protagonist.  She is rebellious and sarcastic which is demonstrated through her witty comebacks and insults she throws at everyone.

            One thing that our script was lacking was description and action. We didn’t include nearly enough description then we should have. I think that our script was 90% dialogue when there should have been a balance between the two. I think if we had more time we could have developed a clear depiction of all the settings that our characters were in like how the school looked like or what each classroom was like.

Blog #12: Scene Reflection


For this scene, the main character Gabriela is late for class. She rushes in and her teacher is definitely unhappy with her. Gabriela acts as snarky as ever and takes her seat without a care in the world. Her friend, Logan, wants to know the real reason why she is late. They end up in a tiny argument and Gabriela storms out of the room at the end of the scene.

            I believe that the better part of this scene was the characterization of Gabriela through dialogue. It’s easy to see Gabriela’s personality by the way she speaks to her teacher, Mrs. Nelson, and Logan. Another thing that makes this scene more appealing is just Gabriela’s strong character. As the protagonist, she is tough and doesn’t back down. Another strength in the scene was how we transitioned into Gabriela’s dream sequence. It changed up the mood of the scene smoothly and was important to the development of the story.

            The weak part of this scene would be Logan’s characterization. I think that we didn’t show his personality well enough in the dialogue and it made him seem like a flat 2-dimensional character rather than a 3-dimensional one. I also think that we could have had more description and action during the scene instead of mainly dialogue.

            If we had more time to work on this scene and improve it, I think we would have added in more description. Since a movie is mostly visual, there needs to be a lot of description in the script but we didn’t add any and made it mostly dialogue.