Hello pilgrim.
Wow! I just realised I haven't got my character ideas up! What's wrong with me? Wha' happen'? WTF? And various other strange exclamations...
I must precede these descriptions with the statement that these are all some form of extension of myself. (I know, right? What a self obsessed wanker. A twat. A right cock. And various other expletives...).
Also, they must all be flawed in some way. I hate perfect characters. Hence my love for Tony Soprano, the Bluths and Wes Anderson's characters.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel March
What's in a name?
At this early stage, all these names are working titles. And are likely to change. As the male protagonist, I wanted this character to have a strong and memorable name like so many great literary characters (eg Holden Caulfield, Raoul Duke, Nick Carraway [whom I have on pretty good authority looks exactly like Scott Baio]). I may end up coming up with something better, but it has a certain poetry about it.
Character:
OK. As I mentioned, Daniel is my male protagonist. He follows in the tradition of the Holden Caulfield character, or Anthony from Bottle Rocket - that being, a tragic rebel. He is lost. He realises that his whole identity is based on other peoples opinions and expectations of him. He doesn't know who he is. So he throws everything about himself out the window and starts again.
Daniel was 6 months from completing a teaching degree. He was going to be a High School Science teacher. Why did he choose this? Probably because someone told him he'd be good at it. He's never really thought for himself.
One day at University, whilst lining up at the cafe he suffers some sort of existential crisis: the girl at the counter asks him "What do you want?". Daniel takes this as a philosophical question and breaks down then and there. The same day, he drops out of Uni, and tells his family he's moving out.
Once in the share-house (a place for him to shed his past and discover who he really is), Daniel is open to any new experience that will push him from his comfort zone. In many ways, his "blank slate" persona serves as a surrogate for audience members to live through him.
As a final note, I'm a tad obsessed with the idea of a character who is possibly somewhat mentally unstable (once again, like Anthony in Bottle Rocket). He always has the potential to explode again. I have an idea for a running joke in which people constantly refer to his breakdown, and he appears in denial:
Character #1: Hey Dan, I heard you had some kind of breakdown?
Daniel: It's fatigue.
Variations on this exchange could appear throughout the show. Possibly concluding with one like this:
Character #1: How's your fatigue?
Daniel: It was a breakdown. OK? I had a breakdown.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Francis
This character is less well-formed, however I'm coming up with a few ideas for him.
I see Francis as a local musician. He's part of a band who have achieved minor success on radio. They were off to a good start. However, the past year has been slow, and he feels that his bandmates have lost interest. They seem more interested in making money than being creative.
Aside from this, he feels like the butt of the joke to many people. It seems as though everyone feels he is wasting his time. Anytime he is asked how his music career is going, it is laced with condescension. They imply that he should be looking for a "real job". He is always compared to other successful Australian bands. Eg:
Character #1: How's your band going?
Francis: Good man, good. We're getting there.
Character #1: Not famous yet?
Francis: I suppose not.
Character #1: How about Powderfingers last record? It kicked ass. You hear it?
That sort of thing. He is starting to think that maybe he should give it all up and start to grow up. He's understanding that maybe just having good songs isn't enough.
I also like the idea of him being tied to the arty/cool scene, which his housemates are infatuated with, however he hates the whole thing and dreads going to each Gallery opening/Play/Gig.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joel
This guy could be fun. He is Francis's best friend. He is a business student. He is incredibly dry, and has a surreal sense of humour. He is blokey. He has no fashion sense to speak of, however, his quirky style along with his looks and personality makes his extremely attractive to women.
He is also homosexual. He is more masculine than the other two guys. I like the idea of a gay character who doesn't conform to the "camp queen" that we're so used to seeing on TV. It could even be fun if we didn't reveal that he was homosexual till a few episodes in - however, there would be no "coming out", as all the main characters already know he's gay, however, the audience was unaware.
He has a few other homosexual friends who call him "faux-mo" due to his masculine behaviour. He's not closeted, he's just comfortable with who he is.
This guy is based on several people I know, and respect. He'll also be styled somewhat on Simon Amstell as he is further developed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyway, that's enough for now. I have more brainstorming to do.
Be good to yourselves and each other.
-C
Friday, February 26, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
What's the Story (Morning Glory)?
I know, I know, not the best name for our posts thus far. But it's been a crazy week, and I'm too tired to care that I'm openly quoting one or both of the Gallagher brothers. Though Noel rises in my estimation whenever he praises Johnny Marr. Ahem.
We have our manifesto, if you will. We have some vaguely drawn characters and we have a quite frankly utterly compelling justification for the chosen setting and basically the entire series. In the spirit of random thoughts and (in my case) colour-coded handwritten notes in small notebooks, I have endeavoured to share my thoughts on some story ideas.
Flying High
The ideas I have for the pilot are being heavily influenced by shows like Spaced and Freaks and Geeks (I like to think I introduced Spaced to the world down here - shhhh, people who told me about it my first year of uni in 2001), but also the Wes Anderson film Bottle Rocket.
In particular, it's the opening of Bottle Rocket that I'm most enamoured of. It begins with Anthony (Luke Wilson) leaving a mental health facility with his friend Dignan (Owen Wilson), who has coordinated the escape. Unbeknownst to him, the facility is one you can choose to leave and Anthony doesn't have the heart to tell him that leaving was his decision and plays along, doing the whole 'bedsheets tied together and thrown down the window' trick. Dignan craves adventure and as his friend, Anthony doesn't want to spoil it.
I feel as though Samantha's decision to leave home will ultimately stem from what she feels is a sense of crippling ennui. Her parents and their indifference, and their realistic attitude toward life makes it difficult to be creative, or to freely explore the ideas given to us by the arts.
In Bottle Rocket escape from reality feels like an anticlimax and rebellion seems like it needs to be done in an extreme or outlandish fashion, with the risk that it leads to a person feeling even more confined than they were before. With this in mind, I feel that Sam will forever be trying to escape reality by entertaining her more artistic ideals of what life should be like, which will make her defeats and her crashes back to Earth all the more crushing. I don't want this to be a constant thing, and I don't want it to be too depressing, either. This isn't Party of Five. Think of it more like The Mighty Boosh or the IT Crowd - the characters never get anywhere but you enjoy watching them try. And try to remember that things like this aren't really a reflection on real life, but more a reflection of a particular time in a person's life, when everything is stunted and everyone else seems to move forward except you.
Sam and initially her sister Lauren as well are struggling these issues - their recognition of their place in the real world and their desire to escape it using their knowledge of pop culture as their tools. You need to escape reality, but then you also have to go to work or school.
I think this could be more of a running theme than just a way to kickstart the series and I think it works for all of our characters, not just Samantha.
On a more structural level, I think the premise of the pilot will be Samantha and our male protaongist's entrance into the house. I think we should start by researching a lot of pilot episodes of sitcoms and try to work within a set of rigid conventions - like Spaced before us. I also like the idea that everyone is watching the pilot episodes of tv shows throughout our pilot - super reflexive, man!
And back to the opening of Bottle Rocket. Atfer watching it, I got the idea of perhaps opening with Samantha leaving home. While she silently takes in the house she has called home for the better part of 25 years, she sees bedsheets thrown down the window. Then her sister begins climbing down them, landing gracefully at the bottom. Her sister walks casually over.
Sam: Mum and dad aren't home, you know.
Lauren: yeah, I know.
Sam: well, I'm going.
Lauren: alright. Facebook me when you get there.
Sam: sure. Where are you going?
Lauren walks over to a tree by the house, picks something up and walks back over. It's a backpack.
Lauren: School. Where else?
She checks her watch.
Lauren: I better go or I'll miss the bus.
She walks away. Sam waves halfheartedly.
So it's not in proper script form - I'm lazy. But you get the idea.
I feel that Sam and her younger sister Lauren are both trying to have the experience of life that they feel was promised to them by film and television, but unfortunately they seem to be just like their parents. So one moves out in an attempt to have the sharehouse experience seen in film but exists almost exactly as they did before, and the other sneaks out of the house, but still goes to school. Anyway, I feel like I'm repeating myself.
The Kids Are Alright
Another theme I feel our series will cover a lot is the internal struggle between the anxiety about growing up and the desire to feel grown up. There's this feeling that we're not real people until we get a career as opposed to a job, we move out of home, and we meet someone and get married and/or have children and everything else is merely an apprenticeship, or a simulated environment.
In an episode of my favourite music quiz show (sorry Spicks and Specks, you're second, but only to episodes Simon Amstell presented) Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Simon Amstell, my favourite music quiz show host (again, really sorry Adam Hills), fluffed some lines on the autocue, to which his former cohost on Popworld Maquita Oliver said, 'Come on Simon, you can read.' He said something like, "I can read, I'm a real boy!" And this line has stuck with me ever since, because sometimes you feel like that - that you aren't real until you can do grown up things. I feel like this could be a recurring line for the characters whenever they struggle with small tasks, or attempt to grow up.
In the vein of this anxiety about/desire to grow up, I like the idea of some or all of the housemates participating in a challenge - to act like children for a week. After lamenting the freedom of childhood and the pressures of adulthood, perhaps Samantha (remembering that she will resemble Daisy Steiner in her creative avoidance of work) suggests that they all start acting like children again and the challenge begins. I really just want an excuse to have an adult dressing like Spider-Man to go to the shops, and dropping to the floor and having tantrums in McDonalds, and asking the elderly insanely inappropriate questions and getting away with it.
Ultimately, however, it fails. As Where the Wild Things Are reminds us, childhood can really be awful - lonely and even more restrictive than adulthood.
The Great Goldstein
So Goldstein is a working title type name, but I needed a name starting with a G and sounding almost as great as, well, erm, Gatsby. Because if the title didn't already give it away, I want to steal the plot of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece for an episode.
Again, this may already be obvious, but we're fascinated by the character Nick Carraway (note: he doesn't look like Scott Baio in Charles in Charge). In the novel's opening paragraphs he reveals himself to be a man who has had the darkest secrets of other powerful men revealed to him. He supposes it's because of his nature as a man who is not outwardly judgemental. He's someone who seems to attract confidantes without trying - there seems to be something so appealing about a person who gives nothing away. Sometimes, people are attractive to others for reasons unknown to themselves.
For those unfamiliar with the novel, The Great Gatsby is the story of a man who recounts one summer when he moved to the city and with his strange gift of attracting dark characters, gets involved with a group of selfish, amoral rich kids, with it ending in tragedy. More than simply wanting to write down the details of this summer, he wants to tell the story of a man who attracted him as much as he was attractive to him. Gatsby is a man that everybody knows about but doesn't actually know - they come to his house, attend his lavish parties and speculate on his character. Indeed, most people don't even know what he looks like - Nick talks to him at one of his own parties without knowing who he is. And yet this man's nature is appealing to Nick and he spends the rest of the novel trying to decipher the meaning of Gatsby's actions.
I like the idea of one of our protagonists sharing the qualities of Nick Carraway and I feel he should meet his very own Gatsby. We've discussed a character who would make the perfect Gatsby, or Goldstein, but I would prefer to leave the description of this character to my good colleague. I think it also provides the perfect opportunity to do something that is also integral to our series; poking fun at pretentious wankers. Art Gallery opening, fashion show previews, obscure bands playing at the new flavour of the month venue, cafes aimed squarely at posers seem like the perfect world in which to set this homage to Fitzgerald and his Gatsby. Nick reveals that he secretly hates most of the people who feel compelled to befriend him, and so will our Nick Carraway.
Watch this to tide you over until we unleash hell on your preconceived notions of Australian drama.
- S
We have our manifesto, if you will. We have some vaguely drawn characters and we have a quite frankly utterly compelling justification for the chosen setting and basically the entire series. In the spirit of random thoughts and (in my case) colour-coded handwritten notes in small notebooks, I have endeavoured to share my thoughts on some story ideas.
Flying High
The ideas I have for the pilot are being heavily influenced by shows like Spaced and Freaks and Geeks (I like to think I introduced Spaced to the world down here - shhhh, people who told me about it my first year of uni in 2001), but also the Wes Anderson film Bottle Rocket.
In particular, it's the opening of Bottle Rocket that I'm most enamoured of. It begins with Anthony (Luke Wilson) leaving a mental health facility with his friend Dignan (Owen Wilson), who has coordinated the escape. Unbeknownst to him, the facility is one you can choose to leave and Anthony doesn't have the heart to tell him that leaving was his decision and plays along, doing the whole 'bedsheets tied together and thrown down the window' trick. Dignan craves adventure and as his friend, Anthony doesn't want to spoil it.
I feel as though Samantha's decision to leave home will ultimately stem from what she feels is a sense of crippling ennui. Her parents and their indifference, and their realistic attitude toward life makes it difficult to be creative, or to freely explore the ideas given to us by the arts.
In Bottle Rocket escape from reality feels like an anticlimax and rebellion seems like it needs to be done in an extreme or outlandish fashion, with the risk that it leads to a person feeling even more confined than they were before. With this in mind, I feel that Sam will forever be trying to escape reality by entertaining her more artistic ideals of what life should be like, which will make her defeats and her crashes back to Earth all the more crushing. I don't want this to be a constant thing, and I don't want it to be too depressing, either. This isn't Party of Five. Think of it more like The Mighty Boosh or the IT Crowd - the characters never get anywhere but you enjoy watching them try. And try to remember that things like this aren't really a reflection on real life, but more a reflection of a particular time in a person's life, when everything is stunted and everyone else seems to move forward except you.
Sam and initially her sister Lauren as well are struggling these issues - their recognition of their place in the real world and their desire to escape it using their knowledge of pop culture as their tools. You need to escape reality, but then you also have to go to work or school.
I think this could be more of a running theme than just a way to kickstart the series and I think it works for all of our characters, not just Samantha.
On a more structural level, I think the premise of the pilot will be Samantha and our male protaongist's entrance into the house. I think we should start by researching a lot of pilot episodes of sitcoms and try to work within a set of rigid conventions - like Spaced before us. I also like the idea that everyone is watching the pilot episodes of tv shows throughout our pilot - super reflexive, man!
And back to the opening of Bottle Rocket. Atfer watching it, I got the idea of perhaps opening with Samantha leaving home. While she silently takes in the house she has called home for the better part of 25 years, she sees bedsheets thrown down the window. Then her sister begins climbing down them, landing gracefully at the bottom. Her sister walks casually over.
Sam: Mum and dad aren't home, you know.
Lauren: yeah, I know.
Sam: well, I'm going.
Lauren: alright. Facebook me when you get there.
Sam: sure. Where are you going?
Lauren walks over to a tree by the house, picks something up and walks back over. It's a backpack.
Lauren: School. Where else?
She checks her watch.
Lauren: I better go or I'll miss the bus.
She walks away. Sam waves halfheartedly.
So it's not in proper script form - I'm lazy. But you get the idea.
I feel that Sam and her younger sister Lauren are both trying to have the experience of life that they feel was promised to them by film and television, but unfortunately they seem to be just like their parents. So one moves out in an attempt to have the sharehouse experience seen in film but exists almost exactly as they did before, and the other sneaks out of the house, but still goes to school. Anyway, I feel like I'm repeating myself.
The Kids Are Alright
Another theme I feel our series will cover a lot is the internal struggle between the anxiety about growing up and the desire to feel grown up. There's this feeling that we're not real people until we get a career as opposed to a job, we move out of home, and we meet someone and get married and/or have children and everything else is merely an apprenticeship, or a simulated environment.
In an episode of my favourite music quiz show (sorry Spicks and Specks, you're second, but only to episodes Simon Amstell presented) Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Simon Amstell, my favourite music quiz show host (again, really sorry Adam Hills), fluffed some lines on the autocue, to which his former cohost on Popworld Maquita Oliver said, 'Come on Simon, you can read.' He said something like, "I can read, I'm a real boy!" And this line has stuck with me ever since, because sometimes you feel like that - that you aren't real until you can do grown up things. I feel like this could be a recurring line for the characters whenever they struggle with small tasks, or attempt to grow up.
In the vein of this anxiety about/desire to grow up, I like the idea of some or all of the housemates participating in a challenge - to act like children for a week. After lamenting the freedom of childhood and the pressures of adulthood, perhaps Samantha (remembering that she will resemble Daisy Steiner in her creative avoidance of work) suggests that they all start acting like children again and the challenge begins. I really just want an excuse to have an adult dressing like Spider-Man to go to the shops, and dropping to the floor and having tantrums in McDonalds, and asking the elderly insanely inappropriate questions and getting away with it.
Ultimately, however, it fails. As Where the Wild Things Are reminds us, childhood can really be awful - lonely and even more restrictive than adulthood.
The Great Goldstein
So Goldstein is a working title type name, but I needed a name starting with a G and sounding almost as great as, well, erm, Gatsby. Because if the title didn't already give it away, I want to steal the plot of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece for an episode.
Again, this may already be obvious, but we're fascinated by the character Nick Carraway (note: he doesn't look like Scott Baio in Charles in Charge). In the novel's opening paragraphs he reveals himself to be a man who has had the darkest secrets of other powerful men revealed to him. He supposes it's because of his nature as a man who is not outwardly judgemental. He's someone who seems to attract confidantes without trying - there seems to be something so appealing about a person who gives nothing away. Sometimes, people are attractive to others for reasons unknown to themselves.
For those unfamiliar with the novel, The Great Gatsby is the story of a man who recounts one summer when he moved to the city and with his strange gift of attracting dark characters, gets involved with a group of selfish, amoral rich kids, with it ending in tragedy. More than simply wanting to write down the details of this summer, he wants to tell the story of a man who attracted him as much as he was attractive to him. Gatsby is a man that everybody knows about but doesn't actually know - they come to his house, attend his lavish parties and speculate on his character. Indeed, most people don't even know what he looks like - Nick talks to him at one of his own parties without knowing who he is. And yet this man's nature is appealing to Nick and he spends the rest of the novel trying to decipher the meaning of Gatsby's actions.
I like the idea of one of our protagonists sharing the qualities of Nick Carraway and I feel he should meet his very own Gatsby. We've discussed a character who would make the perfect Gatsby, or Goldstein, but I would prefer to leave the description of this character to my good colleague. I think it also provides the perfect opportunity to do something that is also integral to our series; poking fun at pretentious wankers. Art Gallery opening, fashion show previews, obscure bands playing at the new flavour of the month venue, cafes aimed squarely at posers seem like the perfect world in which to set this homage to Fitzgerald and his Gatsby. Nick reveals that he secretly hates most of the people who feel compelled to befriend him, and so will our Nick Carraway.
Watch this to tide you over until we unleash hell on your preconceived notions of Australian drama.
- S
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
A House doesn't make a Home...(?)
Hello traveller.
I have been fascinated with the concept of a "share-house" since I was a hyper-imaginative 9 year old kid. The idea of creating a new family... Not being bound by any parental authority... And especially the dynamics between housemates as they eventually fall into the roles of a sterotypical "family".
I guess it's somewhat a vicarious fantasy - I have never lived in a share-house. And as a result, I am compelled to write about one. To create a life that I would want for myself. That, selfish as it may seem, was the catalyst for this Pilot concept.
The house itself was born from several sources, which I will now demonstate:
1)Heartbreak High
Anybody who grew up in the 90's will testify: the house in this show made you want to leave home. It was part wharehouse, part art space - all cool.
This was probably the genesis for my obsession. The house had a revolving door of renters - but the awkwardness was always soon replaced by a familiarity and jocular atmosphere that was comforting and exciting. To this day, I want to live with Drazic!
2)Richard Lowenstein
This guy is the brains behind two of the greatest share-house films in Australian history: Dogs in Space and He Died With A Felafel In His Hand.
In different ways, these films fill out the emotional longing and distance that can result from being away from your biological family, and stranded with these new people. You aren't always going to get along. You may fall in love. You may have your heart broken. Sometimes there's nobody to talk to.
Dogs uses the barrier of constant noise, mess and clinger-ons to establish this house as anything but a haven. Felafel, contrastly, uses more silence than anything - as most feelings are bottled up, and words left unsaid, can ultimately do more damage than good.
3)Spaced
Finally, a Brit-Com! And not just any Brit-Com - arguably the best written, produced and acted British Comedy in recent history. (At least on par with The Office and Nathan Barley).
This show relied heavily on the chemistry and dynamic between two relative strangers (Tim and Daisy) who over time developed a strong bond that one could only equate to that of a soulmate. They have ridiculous personal jokes. They are indelibly tied up in each others lives. It's quite beautiful, really.
And it is in this series that the whole mantra for the series can be found:
Tim: Marsha, they say the family of the twenty-first century is made up of friends, not relatives. If that's true, then you're the best auntie I've ever had.
Aww.
I do not want to create a show that is insular or clique-ish. I do not want to create a show that is centred around the house itself. But rather, the show must be inviting, fun, energetic and honest.
The house isn't just a setting, it's a character.
-C
I have been fascinated with the concept of a "share-house" since I was a hyper-imaginative 9 year old kid. The idea of creating a new family... Not being bound by any parental authority... And especially the dynamics between housemates as they eventually fall into the roles of a sterotypical "family".
I guess it's somewhat a vicarious fantasy - I have never lived in a share-house. And as a result, I am compelled to write about one. To create a life that I would want for myself. That, selfish as it may seem, was the catalyst for this Pilot concept.
The house itself was born from several sources, which I will now demonstate:
1)Heartbreak High
Anybody who grew up in the 90's will testify: the house in this show made you want to leave home. It was part wharehouse, part art space - all cool.
This was probably the genesis for my obsession. The house had a revolving door of renters - but the awkwardness was always soon replaced by a familiarity and jocular atmosphere that was comforting and exciting. To this day, I want to live with Drazic!
2)Richard Lowenstein
This guy is the brains behind two of the greatest share-house films in Australian history: Dogs in Space and He Died With A Felafel In His Hand.
In different ways, these films fill out the emotional longing and distance that can result from being away from your biological family, and stranded with these new people. You aren't always going to get along. You may fall in love. You may have your heart broken. Sometimes there's nobody to talk to.
Dogs uses the barrier of constant noise, mess and clinger-ons to establish this house as anything but a haven. Felafel, contrastly, uses more silence than anything - as most feelings are bottled up, and words left unsaid, can ultimately do more damage than good.
3)Spaced
Finally, a Brit-Com! And not just any Brit-Com - arguably the best written, produced and acted British Comedy in recent history. (At least on par with The Office and Nathan Barley).
This show relied heavily on the chemistry and dynamic between two relative strangers (Tim and Daisy) who over time developed a strong bond that one could only equate to that of a soulmate. They have ridiculous personal jokes. They are indelibly tied up in each others lives. It's quite beautiful, really.
And it is in this series that the whole mantra for the series can be found:
Tim: Marsha, they say the family of the twenty-first century is made up of friends, not relatives. If that's true, then you're the best auntie I've ever had.
Aww.
I do not want to create a show that is insular or clique-ish. I do not want to create a show that is centred around the house itself. But rather, the show must be inviting, fun, energetic and honest.
The house isn't just a setting, it's a character.
-C
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
What's My Motivation?
David Bordwell is a cool dude. When people say that some such person wrote the book on some such thing, it's figurative. But Bordwell is different. That sucker literally wrote the book on the classical Hollywood cinema. Seriously. It's called The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Style and Mode of Production to 1960. And he observes that the primary function of the classical Hollywood style is to support the narrative. And the thing that drives the narrative is the motivation of the characters. So in order to keep that going and make it believable for the audience, you have to develop characters in order to make them more, real. And so their choices within the film, television series, whatever, have to support the narrative and keep it going and keep the audience engaged.
As mentioned in the previous post, the series will centre around six principal characters; 3 guys and 3 gals. Being a gal myself, I gravitated toward writing the gals. And being a frustrated writer, I gravitated toward writing a gal who's a frustrated writer. I've got some ideas for 3 gals, but one is much more developed than the others. And yes, I know their names are sort of standard, but everything's subject to change, yeah?
Ok, so the strongest character I've developed so far is Samantha, the frustrated writer. Can't explain why, but she's always been Sam to me. I suppose she'll need a surname eventually...
Samantha
Samantha, so far, is 25. I haven't decided yet if she's employed or not. I'm thinking that if she is, then it's something casual. She has a Bachelor of Arts with a major in English, but she never stood out as being a particularly remarkable writer.
Sam is the eldest in her family, with a younger sister named Lauren. Sam has a complicated relationship to her family. She's ten years older than Lauren, meaning they're almost a generation apart, so they've never had much in common. It's not that they don't get along, it's more that they don't have much in common, apart from a yearning for a typical upbringing. Their parents are not so much strict or bad as they are indifferent and practical. They were so realistic that they subtly crush your dreams without making you feel like you want to rebel.
Her biggest act of rebellion so far has been her dream to become a science-fiction writer. However, because of her upbringing and her own nature, she seems to lack the capacity to imagine alternate worlds or futures. She's quite good at writing realist fiction, obviously, and yet she has no interest in it - she's sick of her life and her upbringing and her own nature, but she feels like she can't. She's working on a novel about time-travel, but she can't write anything takes place in the future, and she keeps wanting it to be like an M. Night Shyamalan film with the twist being that it's not the future at all, which she knows is stupid.
I see her as the female protagonist, because she's the clearest character in my mind, and probably because she's an extension of myself, I guess.
She has her source in a few television characters, but the two main characters that have influenced or inspired Samantha are the following:
Lindsay Weir - Freaks and Geeks
We were talking about how the show should have a centre, but characters we could move away from and follow other storylines without feeling like the show's strongest characters were missing. Freaks and Geeks was mentioned immediately, because the show does exactly that. You can see that Lindsay is the show's protagonist, because her desire to rebel at school is what starts the series and prompts her discovery of the 'cool' kids, and her decision affects several different groups within the show; her brother and his friends, Daniel, Kim and the others and her old friends. And she's such an interesting character because while it's her actions that make her the show's protagonist, she's also the kind of person that things happen to, around her - she attracts people for odd reasons, and it is just as unclear to her as to why this happens.
Daisy Steiner - Spaced
Spaced is such a profound influence on my life, and this show (we basically want to make a modern, Australian version of it.
As the female protagonist and Tim's soulmate, Daisy is the female version of Tim in a lot of ways and in others, she's his opposite. They're essentially two sides of the same coin. Like Tim, she's a frustrated artist who feels like they're not where they should be in their career or their life. They've both experienced a break-up and don't know how to form a more healthy relationship. They're torn between their youth and the feeling that they have to start growing up.
Unlike Tim, though, Daisy is much more willing to experiment and try new things. She's more creative when she's trying to avoid work, whereas he likes his job and is constantly working on his graphic novels, but suffers from a crippling fear of rejection.
I think Sam will be a perfect complementary character for our male protagonist, too. Just like Daisy, her avoidance of issues will be more creative at times than her actual artistic pursuits, and that feeling that she's meandering through her 20s without doing anything important. She needs to distract herself from actually taking the time to question her choices and to keep those awful questions of inadequacy and talent at bay. I just saw the first two episodes of Bored To Death and thought it was brilliant - yet another inspiration, and I feel that Sam is a lot like Jonathan Ames as well. Writers can be the perfect expression of frustration and anxiety for a writer, but some advice I got from my screenwriting tutor George Merryman was that writing about writing can be really boring. But hello, Wonder Boys? Adaptation? And he didn't like Ned and Stacey...but possibly wrote on it? Thomas Haden-Church should be a national fucking treasure by now, thanks muchly, MERRYMAN.
My other characters aren't really that developed. We're writing about people roughly our own age, or people in our position in life, and whether you're working or unemployed, or you're still doing your 'I'm just doing this to earn cash while I go to Uni' job a year after you graduate, you're probably experiencing post-Uni blues - that time when you feel like you're standing still while everyone else is moving along and growing up. And chances are a lot of the people working in their chosen career so suddenly after Uni are so overwhelmed at being thrown into the real world before they feel ready that they are probably feeling exactly the same anxiety. So I'm thinking we should have someone who has what Samantha thinks she wants.
Rebecca
I sort of conceived Rebecca as the opposite side of my character, along with Samantha. The frustrated artist who feels like they're floundering, versus the grown-up, full time worker feeling overwhelmed by the fact that my undergraduate career is well and truly over. I feel that now she should be even more like the ideal that Samantha thinks she's striving for, the thing that all of us think we want.
The phrase 'the job's not what I thought it was' sort of rings in your head, and this is certainly true for Rebecca. Where Uni was stimulating because you were learning practical things and also more interesting theories and concepts, and got to participate in debates over the new direction your industry was heading in, you just do admin, get the manager a coffee and get excluded from anything interesting.
She consoles herself with online shopping and pretends she's happy with her uni friends, but she tends to take things out on her housemates in strange ways. I suppose her office is the perfect place to poke fun at office politics, Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant style, too.
The main influence for her character is definitely more Tim Canterbury than the chick in The Devil Wears Prada.
The Freudian textbook fight inspired me to write about someone who was still a student - sort of like Marsha's daughter Amber in Spaced in the Housewarming party episode. She's still the idealistic uni student they used to be, only slightly smarter, cooler, prettier, and more social. And has the perfect name to be a psychologist quoted in fashion magazines.
Cleo
All I have so far is that Cleo is a Psychology student, and at the moment she was a vehicle for the argument between students about Freud, and this idea reminded me of a writer that one of my favourite lecturers, Kelli Fuery, mentioned in one of her classes, about the transitional object which allows children to develop and discover that they're not attached to the mother and that they won't have instant gratification anymore. I feel like if there's any basis for that theory, then we spend our whole lives trying to go back to that state and enjoy instant gratification and that things like iPhones and iPods and laptops and wireless internet is our new transitional object. Could this perhaps begin the argument? Because whenever technology moves forward it's blamed for some crisis in society that's happened before the technology was invented. It's always funny listening to other uni students arguing stuff and just regurgitating what they've heard in a lecture without a hint of irony, because you inevitably do exactly the same thing. No one actually reads the books put out by the theorists they study - we all just read someone else's analysis or the lecturer's notes.
I would like Cleo to be something of a cliche, someone representative of some of the things we want to poke fun at, but I want her to have an endearing quality as well. Otherwise, why would the others like her?
If you're going to write something character-driven, you have to know exactly who they are, what they want, what they think about, their entire life up until the events of the show, even if none of it is ever explored in the series or film. So we still need to figure out stuff like this:
Samantha:
Does she work?
Is she from a small town or is she from a city?
Is she just writing novels?
Rebecca:
What is her job?
If she hates her job, what does she really want to do?
And if she doesn't know, how will this affect her character?
Cleo
Is she a housemate?
If not, what's her relationship to the housemates?
If she is, how did she come to live in the house?
I'm sure I'll have more than that. I hope I'll have more than that.
Until then, watch this
As mentioned in the previous post, the series will centre around six principal characters; 3 guys and 3 gals. Being a gal myself, I gravitated toward writing the gals. And being a frustrated writer, I gravitated toward writing a gal who's a frustrated writer. I've got some ideas for 3 gals, but one is much more developed than the others. And yes, I know their names are sort of standard, but everything's subject to change, yeah?
Ok, so the strongest character I've developed so far is Samantha, the frustrated writer. Can't explain why, but she's always been Sam to me. I suppose she'll need a surname eventually...
Samantha
Samantha, so far, is 25. I haven't decided yet if she's employed or not. I'm thinking that if she is, then it's something casual. She has a Bachelor of Arts with a major in English, but she never stood out as being a particularly remarkable writer.
Sam is the eldest in her family, with a younger sister named Lauren. Sam has a complicated relationship to her family. She's ten years older than Lauren, meaning they're almost a generation apart, so they've never had much in common. It's not that they don't get along, it's more that they don't have much in common, apart from a yearning for a typical upbringing. Their parents are not so much strict or bad as they are indifferent and practical. They were so realistic that they subtly crush your dreams without making you feel like you want to rebel.
Her biggest act of rebellion so far has been her dream to become a science-fiction writer. However, because of her upbringing and her own nature, she seems to lack the capacity to imagine alternate worlds or futures. She's quite good at writing realist fiction, obviously, and yet she has no interest in it - she's sick of her life and her upbringing and her own nature, but she feels like she can't. She's working on a novel about time-travel, but she can't write anything takes place in the future, and she keeps wanting it to be like an M. Night Shyamalan film with the twist being that it's not the future at all, which she knows is stupid.
I see her as the female protagonist, because she's the clearest character in my mind, and probably because she's an extension of myself, I guess.
She has her source in a few television characters, but the two main characters that have influenced or inspired Samantha are the following:
Lindsay Weir - Freaks and Geeks
We were talking about how the show should have a centre, but characters we could move away from and follow other storylines without feeling like the show's strongest characters were missing. Freaks and Geeks was mentioned immediately, because the show does exactly that. You can see that Lindsay is the show's protagonist, because her desire to rebel at school is what starts the series and prompts her discovery of the 'cool' kids, and her decision affects several different groups within the show; her brother and his friends, Daniel, Kim and the others and her old friends. And she's such an interesting character because while it's her actions that make her the show's protagonist, she's also the kind of person that things happen to, around her - she attracts people for odd reasons, and it is just as unclear to her as to why this happens.
Daisy Steiner - Spaced
Spaced is such a profound influence on my life, and this show (we basically want to make a modern, Australian version of it.
As the female protagonist and Tim's soulmate, Daisy is the female version of Tim in a lot of ways and in others, she's his opposite. They're essentially two sides of the same coin. Like Tim, she's a frustrated artist who feels like they're not where they should be in their career or their life. They've both experienced a break-up and don't know how to form a more healthy relationship. They're torn between their youth and the feeling that they have to start growing up.
Unlike Tim, though, Daisy is much more willing to experiment and try new things. She's more creative when she's trying to avoid work, whereas he likes his job and is constantly working on his graphic novels, but suffers from a crippling fear of rejection.
I think Sam will be a perfect complementary character for our male protagonist, too. Just like Daisy, her avoidance of issues will be more creative at times than her actual artistic pursuits, and that feeling that she's meandering through her 20s without doing anything important. She needs to distract herself from actually taking the time to question her choices and to keep those awful questions of inadequacy and talent at bay. I just saw the first two episodes of Bored To Death and thought it was brilliant - yet another inspiration, and I feel that Sam is a lot like Jonathan Ames as well. Writers can be the perfect expression of frustration and anxiety for a writer, but some advice I got from my screenwriting tutor George Merryman was that writing about writing can be really boring. But hello, Wonder Boys? Adaptation? And he didn't like Ned and Stacey...but possibly wrote on it? Thomas Haden-Church should be a national fucking treasure by now, thanks muchly, MERRYMAN.
My other characters aren't really that developed. We're writing about people roughly our own age, or people in our position in life, and whether you're working or unemployed, or you're still doing your 'I'm just doing this to earn cash while I go to Uni' job a year after you graduate, you're probably experiencing post-Uni blues - that time when you feel like you're standing still while everyone else is moving along and growing up. And chances are a lot of the people working in their chosen career so suddenly after Uni are so overwhelmed at being thrown into the real world before they feel ready that they are probably feeling exactly the same anxiety. So I'm thinking we should have someone who has what Samantha thinks she wants.
Rebecca
I sort of conceived Rebecca as the opposite side of my character, along with Samantha. The frustrated artist who feels like they're floundering, versus the grown-up, full time worker feeling overwhelmed by the fact that my undergraduate career is well and truly over. I feel that now she should be even more like the ideal that Samantha thinks she's striving for, the thing that all of us think we want.
The phrase 'the job's not what I thought it was' sort of rings in your head, and this is certainly true for Rebecca. Where Uni was stimulating because you were learning practical things and also more interesting theories and concepts, and got to participate in debates over the new direction your industry was heading in, you just do admin, get the manager a coffee and get excluded from anything interesting.
She consoles herself with online shopping and pretends she's happy with her uni friends, but she tends to take things out on her housemates in strange ways. I suppose her office is the perfect place to poke fun at office politics, Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant style, too.
The main influence for her character is definitely more Tim Canterbury than the chick in The Devil Wears Prada.
The Freudian textbook fight inspired me to write about someone who was still a student - sort of like Marsha's daughter Amber in Spaced in the Housewarming party episode. She's still the idealistic uni student they used to be, only slightly smarter, cooler, prettier, and more social. And has the perfect name to be a psychologist quoted in fashion magazines.
Cleo
All I have so far is that Cleo is a Psychology student, and at the moment she was a vehicle for the argument between students about Freud, and this idea reminded me of a writer that one of my favourite lecturers, Kelli Fuery, mentioned in one of her classes, about the transitional object which allows children to develop and discover that they're not attached to the mother and that they won't have instant gratification anymore. I feel like if there's any basis for that theory, then we spend our whole lives trying to go back to that state and enjoy instant gratification and that things like iPhones and iPods and laptops and wireless internet is our new transitional object. Could this perhaps begin the argument? Because whenever technology moves forward it's blamed for some crisis in society that's happened before the technology was invented. It's always funny listening to other uni students arguing stuff and just regurgitating what they've heard in a lecture without a hint of irony, because you inevitably do exactly the same thing. No one actually reads the books put out by the theorists they study - we all just read someone else's analysis or the lecturer's notes.
I would like Cleo to be something of a cliche, someone representative of some of the things we want to poke fun at, but I want her to have an endearing quality as well. Otherwise, why would the others like her?
If you're going to write something character-driven, you have to know exactly who they are, what they want, what they think about, their entire life up until the events of the show, even if none of it is ever explored in the series or film. So we still need to figure out stuff like this:
Samantha:
Does she work?
Is she from a small town or is she from a city?
Is she just writing novels?
Rebecca:
What is her job?
If she hates her job, what does she really want to do?
And if she doesn't know, how will this affect her character?
Cleo
Is she a housemate?
If not, what's her relationship to the housemates?
If she is, how did she come to live in the house?
I'm sure I'll have more than that. I hope I'll have more than that.
Until then, watch this
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Exposition, in which the characters, the dramatic premise, and the dramatic situation are introduced.
Alright - stop, collaborate and listen. Not just the opening line of that extraordinary urban artist Vanilla Ice's 1990 masterpiece Ice Ice Baby, it's also perhaps the mantra of the average filmmaker. Art filmmakers maybe not, but they're weird and slightly infuriating.
At some point, writers will have to conform to this line. And at the moment, that's where we're at. The original idea for this televisions series was thus:
Basically an ensemble peice that follows the different storylines of the housemates of a sharehouse. I think it would be cool to have 6 primary characters, 3 boys, 3 girls. With 1 male and 1 female as the leads.
Not that we've set ourselves a difficult task or anything - 'This series needs to sum up our collective sense of humour and views on creativity, growing up, sex, family, fuckwits, and identity.' This perfectly sums up what the goal of the project is. I don't use the term revolutionary lightly, but you know, labels are something other people use and if that's how they want to label us, I'm cool with that, you know. Whatever.
I'd like to share the influences that are currently inspiring us, if I may, and this is a mishmash, a hodgepodge, a hearty creative stew of inspirations for characters, moments, storylines, and structure. Please to enjoy!
Oh, and The Smiths, who know your pain, especially with songs like this.
At some point, writers will have to conform to this line. And at the moment, that's where we're at. The original idea for this televisions series was thus:
Basically an ensemble peice that follows the different storylines of the housemates of a sharehouse. I think it would be cool to have 6 primary characters, 3 boys, 3 girls. With 1 male and 1 female as the leads.
Not that we've set ourselves a difficult task or anything - 'This series needs to sum up our collective sense of humour and views on creativity, growing up, sex, family, fuckwits, and identity.' This perfectly sums up what the goal of the project is. I don't use the term revolutionary lightly, but you know, labels are something other people use and if that's how they want to label us, I'm cool with that, you know. Whatever.
I'd like to share the influences that are currently inspiring us, if I may, and this is a mishmash, a hodgepodge, a hearty creative stew of inspirations for characters, moments, storylines, and structure. Please to enjoy!
Oh, and The Smiths, who know your pain, especially with songs like this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
