Creative Practice Portfolio

To get a clearer idea for my presentation, I thought and researched the true feasibility of my proposed project.

I feel its true strength is in its focus on one long scene at one major location: the street.  The only other locations required would be the interior of a standard terraced house, for which we’d have a good range of options, and wouldn’t necessarily have to be shot in a house on the same street as the exteriors.  This would, however, be preferable.

It also benefits from having only two central lead characters - Michael and the Ice Cream man, with all others being minor characters who have no longer than 2 minutes of screen time.  In total the film would require no more than 6 cast members and a crew of 4 or 5.

Major limitations of the project come in it requiring night shoots in its entirety.  This could be an issue for getting child actors, and would mean having to apply for a Local Authority license specific for night shooting, which could prove quite a drawn out and difficult process.

The night shoot also creates the need for low-light specific kit.  We would need to ensure the cameras being used will pick up clear and sharp enough detail in the absence of all natural light.

Van hire also proves a potentially difficult issue.  However, as Ice Cream vans are naturally seasonal, and certainly not nocturnal, it should therefore be quite likely that we could find a van available for use at this time.  It would just depend on the cost of hire.

To attempt to better visualise my project I took some models from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse, and after manipulating them in SketchUp, brought them through RealIllusion’s 3DXchange software into iClone for animating a short sequence.

I chose to focus on the opening, as this is where I really want to draw out the tension, using complex framing and camera movements.

On closer inspection of the software, I could not find a pre-loaded character who looked young enough to stand in for how I imagine 6 year old Michael, and instead decided upon using correctly proportioned animatic wooden dummies.

This gave me the leeway to focus on the important aspects of the previsualisation: the framing and timings, instead of getting hung up on the particulars of the character’s appearances, which could dramatically change in the casting process anyway if this project were to be put forward.

In all I am quite proud of a few of the shots: some with very cool camera movements (challenging, but in all achievable on a real shoot), and also a shot in which the Ice Cream man opens the hatch on the van - as this way incredibly difficult to construct and choreograph in the software.

The process of drafting continues!  I have now amended some aspects to the advise of various tutors, friends and family I asked to read it and give me their thoughts.  These particularly fell under three key areas:

1) The child had too great a vocabulary to be realistic.  I have simplified it, with the hope of still having kept the heart of those lines.

2) The climax is not tense enough.  I have added in a moment of far greater potential for peril in the hope this spices up the stakes of the climax.

3) The explanation of the Ice Cream man’s real reasons for being there should be kept from us longer.  The phone call between the Ice Cream man and the group coming to collect drugs should be only heard from his side, and not fully explain what is about to happen, other than establish that it may well be bad for Michael.

My first draft was handwritten, and for the most part not in master scene script format.  Terry Pratchett was quoted as once saying that the first draft of any writing is just the author ‘telling themselves the story’.  This was exactly how I chose to approach it, and in just ’telling’ it, it gave me a far greater appreciation of how I could set up, deliver and reveal key elements of the narrative, and I know will directly determine the structure of the final typed piece.

I also decided not to permit anyone to read these first draft notes, but instead asked anyone interested if they’d be happy for me to read it to them.  Those who humoured me (to whom I am hugely grateful) found that as I was reading, I was also adding and subtracting words at will, and sometimes even bringing in whole descriptions and conversations that seemed to flow with what I’d written, but had not been included.

This was a particularly helpful in fine tuning much of the dialogue in the piece, that required a fair level of conversational/slang styling to make sense of the characters, their social standing, and above all, their age difference.

After doing a little research, I realised the Ice Cream Van I was imaging was a converted Ford Transit Diesel with ‘Mr Whippy’ marking its front and sides.  A similar van is included in the photo above (via Google Images).

The writing of my screenplay also called for at least an approximated knowledge of how one goes about actually making a soft-serve ice cream, and as such, I took to YouTube to find a how-to tutorial on the topic.

What I found was this...

Which although covering the topic in far more depth than I needed, was at least good to get a feel of all of the separate components and processes of a Whippy machine.

My focus then turned to finding the correct teddy for Michael.  I decided upon something a little abnormal, to make it more believable.  The image of an actual teddy-bear is highly overused, so I instead chose for him to have a plush llama instead.

Meet Lars...

A key consideration whilst developing this work is that of who it is intended for, and perhaps further still, how it is suppose to get the its intended response. Many elements of my story require a certain core knowledge to be able to understand the story as a whole.  Even though the piece is titled ‘The Ice Cream Fairy’, and told largely from the perspective of a six year old boy, the weight of the piece comes from the preconceptions of the audience, and the dramatic irony that generates.

Because of this, I perceive the target audience base for this film to be ages 15-24, although 24+ should also find it enjoyable.  This range most directly mirrors all the characters in the film, apart from Michael, and is the age range I am most interested in pushing my ‘innocence is powerful’ message to.

In my opinion, the pressures of modern society force children to do away with innocence as quickly as possible, as if it is something to be ashamed of.  My hope is that, on some level, the story of Michael breaks down this barrier, by adding innocent humour and child-like desires to the seedy world of a drug deal, exposing it as something trivial, and puerile.

It has been important for me, this time around, to just get writing.

But nonetheless, I have been making note of the many themes and ideas at play in my screenplay, and thought I would make use of a blog post to organise them a little better in my own mind.

To use the ‘shortoftheweek.com’ format for labelling film topics, my screenplay is a DARK COMEDY about THE POWER OF INNOCENCE.

From what I have found in writing another screenplay ‘A Face for God’ in another module, children are incredible vehicles for creating meaningful narratives.  This ability is born from a child’s lack of preconceptions about much of what they experience around them.  They actually see things for what they are, and not what they think they could or should represent.

For Michael in my story, there is nothing particularly weird or sinister about the ice cream van appearing at night, as he only associates it with ice cream.  We as the viewer do, however, formulate a whole list of other assumptions, and end up unnerving ourselves.  I feel this is at the heart of how the uncanny nature of the piece actually works.

The innocence of Michael is his shield to the unknown.  Because he is willing to confront this unknown, without any evident fear of it, that ‘unknown’ struggles and ultimately fails to harm him.  For Michael, ignorance is bliss.

It was in the knowledge that this ‘power of innocence’ was the driving force in my film that lead me to choose the title of the piece: 

‘The Ice Cream Fairy’

There’s an ice cream van that chimes in the middle of the night...great.  Now finish the story...

Well it became immediately apparent to me that for this uncanny image to work properly, we would need the central lead of the film to be a child.  I made this child, Michael, a six year old, light sleeper who likes soft-serve ice cream and has a llama teddy called Lars.

Similarly *SPOILERS*, it would only be natural to assume the the ice cream van would not actually be there to sell ice cream at 2am on a winter’s morning.  The more logical explanation would be a front for a drug deal. In his screenwriting handbook ‘Save the Cat’, Blake Snyder advocates irony as one of the greatest tools in a writer’s arsenal for creating intrigue in a story.  Applying this to my scenario, Michael, unsurprisingly, doesn’t understand ‘drug dealing’, and thus continues assuming that he should be able to get himself an ice cream, even if it is 2am.  This dramatic irony forms the heart of my story, and is the core of the tension, drama and comedy as it unfolds.

I’d effectively binned months of work.  Months of research.  Months of creative effort.  It needed to be worth it.

In my usual fashion I decided to lament this whole situation to a poor, and unsuspecting housemate of mine.  The conversation, thankfully, made a pretty swift turn from me feeling sorry for myself, to tackling how one actually goes about getting inspiration to write something in the first place.  We determined it to be an unfortunately vague and open question...right up until suddenly our train of though was cut off by an ice cream van chiming the Match of the Day jingle on the road outside the front of the house.

It was 7.30pm, and almost dark.

Now that I’ve had time to think it over, it did actually make some sense.  The day had been one of the hottest of the year so far, and there was a big Rugby Game on at the Headingley arena only a few rows of houses in front of ours.

I won’t make any illusions to the fact that this is not where I started out at the beginning of the COMM2800 Creative Practice module.  If you are interested to see my initial project ideas, please hit this link to go to my archived portfolio, which I have now separated from this one as not to confuse the two.

My initial project, a modern take on the ‘Dracula’ story set in a modern-day Whitby Bed & Breakfast, was great fun to work on, fascinating to research and I do firmly believe there remains a great story within it to be told.  However, putting it to one side was perhaps the best decision I made, as with all these great attributes, I could not make it a story.

From further consideration I have worked this out to be due to a few pivotal factors:

Milieu not Story

My ideas for the Whitby B&B project are based around a setting, a landscape, a milieu so to speak, but not a story.  Whereas I did appreciate this fact from the off, and a good milieu can shape an excellent story, the deeper I was digging into the context of Whitby, and Bed & Breakfasts, and vampirism, the less my project seemed able to produce a story worth telling.

Too Constrained

Another major issue was the confines I had set myself were too limiting.  Deciding to set the piece in Whitby, with all its ‘Dracula’ and vampiric connections and connotations immediately posed a framework of folklore and historical context that I had to at least acknowledge throughout my own writing.  The piece was further constrained again by the setting of a B&B, which again, comes pre-loaded with its own rituals, imagery and audience expectations.  In attempting to have all these elements at play I ended up finding myself creatively trapped.

Reliance on Pre-Existing Works

When I would talk to others about the idea, I also found that people already, naturally associated all of the major story elements with pre-existing and well-established narratives.  Whitby for most, is inseparably linked with ‘Dracula’.  This considered, even with exploring ‘Dracula’ in new contexts was the point of the project, it did also come with the weight of feeling like I was attempting to write a sequel to a Gothic Horror classic.  B&Bs are similarly linked, by most, with ‘Faulty Towers’.  This further meant that most of my own ideas for B&B scenarios had distractingly noticeable connections to the classic sitcom.