#feltheart

i am delighted to finally introduce you guys to the characters from feltheart, the short screenplay i wrote as part of my film course during the latter part of last year. having total creative freedom, i chose to channel my love for mary shelley’s frankenstein & its related media into my own narrative inspired by it:

when a reclusive scientist intent on creating life crosses paths with a gentle tailor, a spark and some stitches soon take her project in a more hopeful direction.

i won’t explain the whole plot in detail here, but the tl;dr is that it’s a dark fantasy/romance/fairytale & an allegory for autism — specifically how finding community helps us to unlearn internalised ableism and begin embracing ourselves as we are, inspiring others to live more openly in turn. 🩷

it’s a story i’ve wished to tell for so long, and i know i’ll definitely be working on/talking about it more outside of my university coursework. so expect to see more of this silly little creature couple and their patchwork creation that they actually take parental responsibility for (victor frankenstein, take notes)!

i haven’t been hyperfixated on my own characters/writing in forever, much less been motivated to actually work on them instead of just daydreaming about them (lmao).

as mentioned in my previous post, feltheart started as a university project, but i realised that i really wanted to tell more stories in this world, so i’ve been working on expanding it!!

sam was a functional character with one line in the original screenplay, but now he’s a fully-fledged character with a sad backstory that involves his wife having passed away. his twin kids shelly and seamus go on to meet feltheart, and become its first true friends.

(sam doesn’t like flute music because his wife hana used to play, and hearing it is too painful for him. she taught shelly while she was still alive, and shelly is keen to keep pursuing it, but she has to sneak out of the house in order to practise it. seamus doesn’t like his dad because he thinks his dad doesn’t like /him/, but their relationship improves over time. these are just two of the many ways i have deeply overthought these characters.)