Wednesday 18 July 2012

Making a story into a script


First you must have a story. The Royal Analostan is based of a short story called Slum Cat by Ernest Thompson Seton it was written in 1905 (go to http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/59084/ to read the story) the story was read to me by my grandmother, when i was little, and i fell in love with it. It came to me as a very unique story to all the other children story's that were out there. 
It was about a cat not in a fantasy land, not talking, just a simple cat set in a real world in a realistic environment. It sounds boring when you put it that way, but the cat's home is a junk yard in a dingy alley way. Which already sounds a bit more adventurous. This means the cat doesn't live a normal life (well not normal for humans but probably normal for the cats) its adventurous yet dangerous and life is harsh and cruel. But even though the story is about a cat this still relates to people, the harshness and the emotions that she has to go through every person experienced at some point in their life: A loss of a loved one, poverty, rejection, usage, sadness etc. And those are the qualities that attracted me to the story, the fact that it tells a realistic story about life but through a cats perspective.   

At first, I thought that it wouldn't be so hard to write a script from the story since its already written. I was wrong. When you hear about a script being written for months or years do not smirk at it and say the writer is lazy... Making a good script takes hard work but also breaks to step back and see what is in front of you. You cannot just simply write a script and think its finished, there are a lot of things you must look at first; structure, story-line, characters, language, rewrites, more of structure. The structure of the story is the first thing you must look at, the basic structure that every script should have; theme stated, set up, catalyst, debate, break into two, B story, "fun and games", mid point, bad guy close in, all is lost, break into 3, finale, final image. This structure really helped me to figure out the storyline for the film. I would suggest one good book that thought me this structure its called "Save the Cat" funny enough by Blake Snyder, it is an amazing book simple, everything to the point and everything you need to know about script writing. It is aiming more towards a Hollywood style films and how to make a script that you could sell but in between that it has some fantastic tricks and tips on how to write a good script.

Adapting already a story into a script was not easy. The story has a lot of details and characters that are perfect for a story but not necessarily in a film. Have you ever wondered why Harry Potter movies had never put you favourite side character or scene from the book into the film? well of course the first answer is time, and time is money... and they couldn't make a 5 hour Harry Potter, not for the general audience. But also storyline! it most likely did not flow with the A storyline, too many characters, side stories can make one big bad film. This why you have to first focus on the main characters and the main story and put it down on paper, ones you got that sorted you can add or subtract scenes and characters that wont harm your overall story and film. And it took me a long time to get that right, because in the original short story it had so many characters so many set ups that when you read it, its fine but when you try and imagine it as a film it would have been a huge big mess. So I worked with wonderful people who helped me to figure it out and we decided on 3 main locations, 2 main cats and 2 main humans. We had to keep in mind the budget, which from a producing perspective is the number one problem, there is always something that you as a director want to add but time is money and you have to adapt everything around that. 



~Maggie 


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