Inspiration Week...

In the first lesson, we were put into groups to create ideas for short films gaining inspiration from poetry, photographs, newspaper articls, song lyrics and art. Whilst some sparked some good ideas, some inspiraed crazy ideas. Albeit, this helped us broaden out horizons, and open out minds up to a more creative and crazier storyline.

One of the stories we came up with was based on a Jack Johnson song Banana Pancakes.

This sparked off a quirky storyline that was going to be the journey of a boyfriend getting ingredients to make pancakes for his girlfriend...it would be a comedy so it would have some really random things go wrong along the way. All seeming quite normal until the next day the man wakes up and instead of his girlfriend there is a giant egg. It was a basic concept but from lyrics we branched out and made up a random quirky idea for a short film.

Another idea we had, was of an image of a round table, of which sparked Louis off - reminding him of his own dining table. He then went on to say how every Friday his family all play cards, get drunk and eat pizza etc. Just have a really good time. The short film was imagined it to be similar to Festen in the way that it was shot - using the "Dogma" rules, enhancing its authenticity, yet being completely different side to a family: a whole one. This idea was especially great to me, as there was something so heart-warming about it, after seeing so much corruption in the News and even in TV dramas and short films today, having the close family unil feel like the film "Together" by Lukas Moodysson; not having a care in the world about anyone else, just having fun in the moment!

The next lesson...we had to do a task where we wrote down a sentence each and folded the papoer down, passed it on and wrote another...This formed some quirky and slightly random stroylines. For example, mine was:

- Steve was an investment broker...

- Heidi is a bird watcher...

- They met when they had an accident in the suprmarket car park. She reversed out without looking and hit him.

- "Ouch, you bastard" she said

- The mnale fell over and cracked his skull

- They had IVF and made a baby that turned out to be siamese twins

This general outline opened my idea to a whackier storyline, with lots of extra details and crazy plot points. Although having said this, our group still wanted a basic storyline, not wanting to overcomplicate things yet still 'dressing' it up a bit to add our slant to the storyline.