Pitch ideas

Our first unit is 'Story-telling' and our first part is to come up with an idea for a screenplay from the starting point of 'The Meeting'. It has to be fictional but we can choose if it is going to be a Drama, Thriller or Comedy genre. It has to focus on the meeting of two main characters and have a main location. This then has to be presented as a 25 word pitch.

To try and get some ideas I looked at a few newspapers and online news but nothing really stood out at me. I also spoke to my mum to see if she had any stories and she told me about her friend who had cancer. This story stuck with me but I wasn't 100% sure to whether I should stick with it. I was also inspired by a Facebook video of a son and father who has Alzheimers singing in the car; his dad normally can get quite angry and does not remember things but as soon as this song comes on he starts singing away to all the words. This led me to looking more into Alzheimers and people's stories which I found really interesting and it gave me an idea of a daughter who has to care for her father with late set Alzheimers and the daughter thinks she has lost him to the disease; The daughter remembers all the good memories she has - one that sticks out is her and her father dancing to a song and towards the end of the screenplay the song gets played and the father grabs her and starts dancing with her like when she was young. My other idea I thought about was sourced from a missing child case that has come back to light. I would have two detectives, one who is the best detective in the field and another who is just starting out, new evidence has come up on a missing persons case that was very big an publicised at the time and they retrace over all evidence and try to seek out the missing person. A few smaller ideas I had was a drunk interviewer host where it all goes wrong, somebody being left for dead and meeting the boyfriends parents.

rough ideas

Whilst coming up with ideas I wanted to pick one that an audience can really connect with. I have been reading 'Crafting short screenplays that connect' Claudia Hunter Johnson (2000) which talks about how connection is really important in writing but it also isn't mentioned much and it's not just connection with the audience but between the characters themselves. I felt that with a story of a young girl about cancer people can connect with this and the characters. I also thought I have never written a screenplay like this before, I usually write Comedy's or about serial killers, nothing so serious and sensitive and I think this will be a a new experience for me. I have started to think about how I will film this and have a idea where it will go between shots of footage of her filming as the girl telling the story but also to a director's camera of me telling the story.