Out to Space

I have been thinking about my story for weeks but am stuck in the middle part of the story. Strategically, I need to answer these questions:

• What is the story you are telling? — It’s about depression. My partner was depressed and got out of it. But now I am suffering from it and slowly climbing out. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
• What is the character that brings the story through? — There are two main characters in this story: a depressed mother and her autistic son. I thought the mother would be the central character that was seen in the son’s eyes. On the other hand, it should be about the son who wants to help her. That is his hope that she will get out of the blues. He wants her to get to that light.
• And who is the story for? — I said it was for general audience. But on the second thought, it should be more specific. Depression is not an uncommon illness and yet to talk about. This story should speak to the people close to those who have the sunken feelings. They are the best cure even though it does not seem that way. You are the light even you don’t see it yourself.

The main conflict in this set up is the son senses his mother’s misery but he feels useless to help her. He is afraid of losing her but she is slowly drifting away.

Although the son is set to be autistic, the plan is that he is off camera all the time until the last shot to reveal that he is the narrator of the film. His monologue portrays his feeling towards the situation not how could communicate to the mother. This is hopefully expected to get a punch.

It is clearer what is to be achieved after I write this blog. There are some strategies to get those juices out:

• Personal experience — I have to sit down somewhere and bring back those down emotions and examine how I coped with them.
• Research — I have read about autism and would like to get more depth in depression.
• Metaphor — Light has been mentioned a few times. It is what I can think of at the moment. There might be something less cliché coming up.

Another issue I had was a technical one. I am a big fan of Celtx and have been using it for scriptwriting for sometime. Once I upgraded it to version 2.0, it froze. Celtx support forum suggested to clear cache. It took me many attempts to fix the problem. I downloaded from another source, deleted the old preference and re-installed the program. Now it seems to be working but still takes a while to load, though.

27 March 2009

I am still trying to squeeze what is inside me for the first draft of the final project script. The strategies have been applied but it is still being developed.

Looking at personal experience, it was very hard for me to revisit the lowest emotion. What I found that I felt so alone and fought it by myself. It overwhelmed me so that I could hardly write anything. It was to the point that I thought I chose the subject that was too close to myself.

Another approach was research.  YouTube provided an invaluable source of mental illness, especially from the patient’s point of views. Watching people with these problems for hours was quite a daunting experience. I found beyondblue, DepressionCarer were very useful for my research.

What I am doing at the moment are:

• The thoughts are organised by mindmapping technique.
• The beginning and end, which are what I have in mind in the very first time, are put in Celtx.
• The middle is the tough part for me but at least the structure has been laid down.
• I take note of a random thought and a real life quote.
• Some characters may to be added to build up a climax.

So far, this is a long process. And it is frightening too.

7 April 2009

Note: This is it! It is the last blog post on COFA blog I have on my own record. It is assumed that the next post there was the first draft of the script which I will not post it here, not in the near future anyway. However, I will post the process I can recall until it gets to the following semester when we, the Master of Digital Media, blogged about their project again.