Over the past week I have been writing my script and on Monday I had completed my first draft. I found that the lectures, workshops and my own research helped greatly towards this first development helping me to minimise the challenge of it. Developing my characters was the first thing I did. By exploring the depths of their layers I felt like I knew who my characters were in my head. I could visualise them and know what they would do in normal situations so when it came to writing my script I could picture them and describe their actions to how they would react from normal to extreme.
Once I knew my characters I needed an Idea. I already had in my head that I wanted to do it surrounding an affair but I needed more substance. The first thing that I learnt from Steve Coombe's talks was to come up with an ending. I pondered on a few but decided to go with the fact the husband was dead and she felt like she was having an affair because she never got over the grief and loss of him. I felt this idea was exciting and would give viewers an unsuspecting twist, an element of surprise that could not be predicted until the revealed moment.
I wanted to create a big change in my story. I managed to achieve this by playing on the layers of my characters. Harriet is strong and together, she has a good job and always looks nice. Lewis is charming, flirty and magnetic, he's pleasant. As soon as we hit half way through the story this completely flips. Harriet is weak, crying, scared and fallen apart. Lewis is anything but charming, he is vindictive and nasty making the audience retract from what they felt before. I wanted to do this to create a virtual alarm that people aren't always what they seem, people have fronts and can be someone completely different deep down. It also is entertaining and helps create tension when viewing this.
When it came to writing the script it was a lot easier than I thought. I knew my ending, I knew my characters, I knew my change and all I needed to do was play it out on the page. As I started it seemed relatively normal to what I had imagined. I could briefly describe Harriet but also show her characteristics through her emotions and actions. I already embedded the false idea that she was married by her shouting up the stairs to someone called Adam. I was also able to hint at the fact that she was having an affair by use of body language and the way she was doing herself up. As I wrote on to after the affair, the change happened. It was quick, sudden and a lot more of a change than I intended. Lewis became more horrible the more I wrote but I enjoyed writing a mean character so I stuck with it.
I had never thought about Lewis following Harriet home but as the writing flowed this is what happened. By doing this it worked out well as I was able to go beyond the twist for my ending and create a really tense and thrilling climax. The unplanned ending was unexpected but in a good way. I am very pleased with the progress that I achieved when writing the first draft.
When printing it out and proof reading over I noticed there was a considerable amount of grammatical errors. My grammar has never been amazing so I had to go back and correct as much as I could see. I also left the story open ended as although I quite like it this way, part of it was due to the fact I didn't quiet know how to round it off.
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