A Sketch of a Character

This is the documentation of a "letsmakeamovie" workshop as part of the movie programme called Free Cinema on Tilos Radio Hungary.

Participants of the 3rd edition: 15/10/2009

Editors: Killa Köllő (Trillian), Csaba Toth

The movie in only one sentence

From now on, we will try to evoke in all editions what our film in the making is about. That is to inform our audience: we haven't just left the microphone on. As we were accused on the chat at a given moment of the edition.

The sentence of 15th October that took even our breath away sounded like that: A zombie movie, a horror movie, but also a coming of age-story, a story of growing up, which is also a little bit about that when one grows up, she becomes a zombie and she gives up her dreams, she becomes only a cog in the machinery.

We brought 2 and a half elaborated characters into the edition, but we were able to finish only one. This character is one of our mains. Let's just quote here the sketch itself of the character, along with the problems and reaction that arose:

Name: Andris (Andy)

He is the one who survives, the absolute protagonist

Physiology:

- Gender: boy

- Age: 11

- Height, weight: 145 cm, 39 kg. Here comes the first challenge of writing a screenplay: how tall and how many kilos is a healthy eleven year old boy???

- Hair, eye and skin color: maroon, light brown, white

- Posture: straight

- Look: spiffy, not in the height of fashion, but orderly clothed into nice and clean clothes. A little bit short and slim for his age, the sudden growth typical to the adolescence hasn't started yet for him.

- Flaws: There are no physiological flaws, except some birthmarks on the body, but not one on the face.

- Heritage: slim built, from his mother's side.

Sociology:

- Class: middle class. The father is a sales representative, and works very hard. The mother is a part-time QA representative.

- Occupation: student

- Education: 5th grade

- Family life: The parents live together, but the father has to travel a lot because of his job, he spends only a few tie at home, so the boy is mostly with her mother. The mother is 36, who works as a QA representative, the father is 38, who works as a sales representative. He has a sister who is 7 year younger than him: he loves her, but they cannot play a lot together. The parents met each other by a mutual friend. It was a great love, and they got married after half year of acquaintance, because Andris was on the way. Seven years later, the little sister was born, and fixed a little the soon-to-be-disaffected family life. The father is kind of stressed nowadays, he has to work harder and harder to maintain the comfortable life of the family, but the signs of disaffection star to be shown again. The job of the mother is poorly paid, but is safe, she has the time to take care of the children, the job is without stress, and she is afraid the crises is on the way again in her marriage. She has a nice colleague, who would anytime be disposed to comfort the uncared-for wife.

Andriska seems to have a strong family background. The question arose whether the lack of the father figure is a serious problem in the case of boys as well, or not.

- Religion: none, the family is ignorant of the question.

- Race, nationality: I cannot understand that. Hungarian.

- Position in the community: blatant, he presumes too much, he plays soccer quite well, he is taken seriously by his peers. He doesn't know what would he like to become: maybe a soccer star, but he is likely to consider his father's advice as well, that is to take on an ace job, but he doesn't know yet which one should he prefer: doctor, jurist or economist. Or an architect. He would likely to be a CSI representative in New York, but this he hides from his parents, since he is not allowed to watch the series. He doesn't really like to learn, but he does his duty. His results are a little above the average, but he really likes to go to school because of the community. He and his sister have a rabbit at home, they often talk to it, and he looks after it fairly.

- Political relationships: ignorant of politics.

- Pastime and hobbies: he plays soccer, Wii, and he also likes fencig which he is urged to practice by his parents.

Psychology:

- Sexual life, morality: no sexual life

- Personal premises, ambitions: to play soccer and games a lot, to spend time with learning as few as possible. To know everything better than others, even more than now.

- Frustrations, delusions: It already happened to him a few times, that nothing came into his mind when he was in the center of the attention. He succeeded covering that with humor, but he strongly reclines on his reserved friend, Peti (Pete) when he has to come to a decision.

- Temperament: heated, quick-tempered. When he gets angry, he shouts. He knows that if he swears, ha gets punished by Anna (Anne), and he tries to keep himself to it, but he sometimes looses control and swears, so he gets punished regularly. It doesn't follow from his character that he is quick-tempered, so we should change either the description or this attribute. Maybe he should be sanguine.

- Attitude toward life: Ready to fight. Let's bring justice into the world!

- Complexes: yet evolving, but he already feels to be a little more skilled than others.

- Extrovert/introvert/ambi.: ambivert, he reveals a lot about himself, but there is a lot his friends are unaware of. For example how much he cares for and love his rabbit. Should he bring it to the camp? He could return to save it by risking his own life. But the rabbit and his relationship to him is important fro the point of view of the character, so it doesn't have to appear, it will be enough to show that he is able to take responsibility.

- Abilities: He is quick in mental arithmetic.

- Good qualitites: he strikes the right note with everyone, open, nice boy

- IQ: above than average

The idea came up that we should have a "Nemecsek figure" (note of the translator: basically the youngest and smallest whose sacrifice will be recognized too late) as well. The next edition will take place 4 weeks later and we agreed that we will invite a psychologist to help us in working out the characters.

Let’s Make Zombie Film

This is the documentation of a "letsmakeamovie" workshop as part of the movie programme called Free Cinema on Tilos Radio Hungary.

Date of the 6th edition: 17/09/2009

Editors: Killa Köllő (Trillian), Yvonne Kerekgyártó, Csaba Tóth

DJ: Turiszt

Changing our direction

After the long vacation we have started again our workshop. We have changed our conception a bit: from now we do not call expert to every broadcast but we will go through the phases of filmmaking according to a chosen textbook. The chosen book is The Art of Dramatic Writing, written by Lajos Egri, which is the most suitable for our aims from the books translated into Hungarian. So we are going to make movie according to this book because our previous method simply did not work. Either we did not receive particular advice from the experts or we could not put their advice into practice. Therefore, we are going to work from book.

Lajos Egri was a screenplay writer and he taught playwriting also. The idea of his book, The Art of Dramatic Writing, can be adapted for the writing of screenplays also. It is clear and accurate. This is not the only method but for us it seems relevant so we will try it.

Our first step was that we chose our synopsis which is going to be screened: Zombie-virus in Mátra and we leave the other ideas.

About our plot: the antidote of H1N1 virus is mutated and it turns adults into zombies. So children separate from adults and they have to build up their own society, which is founded on surviving. This situation accelerates their growing up. The generation gap is an important part of the story and some characters are close to be grown-up, thus they are more endangered.

We have a main idea but we do not have any characters, only age category which is not enough outlined either.

Premise didn’t work

The book discusses the concept of premise in the first chapter, which means you need to summarize your plot in one sentence. It is also called logline, but the name does not really matter. The point is that the plot, from where to where to storyline goes, should be condensed into one sentence. E. g. the premise of Romeo and Juliet: ‘The real love defies death’.

We tried to decipher the premise of Alien. We stripped off the plot, the genre, we intended to skin it from every extra. Is it about greed our about obeying the captain blindly? This is also possible: ‘The ambition leads to annihilation’. This is not perfect because we should define what kind of ambition we are talking about. Merciless, we might say. On the other hand the simple ambition does not lead you to dissolution usually. We did not finalize the premise of Alien, we rather were just roving.

We could not define the premise of our zombie film. ‘The growing up is unavoidable’ does not seem good. We do not have character, probably that is the reason. The disadvantage of working from book is that you cannot start where the book starts. E. g. we need more to define our premise then the simple idea. The premise may develop during the writing. There is a group of kids, and it should be figured out whose fault was among them that the virus had broken loose. Which kid will be able to stand by the group and why? Does every adult will turn to zombie or do the kids have help from healthy grown-ups as well? If we leave out the adults we have to consider that there is no electricity, neither internet, nor help from outside.

We should take one more step forward because we do not have enough ideas to create our premise. The next step will be outlining the characters. But during outlining the characters we have to know more or less what we want to tell to the society.

To invent three dimension characters the following datas should be found out according to Egri: physiology, family background, affection. Even if we have more main characters some should be pick out, who should be more elaborated. (E. g. Tim Roth and Harvey Keitel in Reservoir Dogs.) We will elaborate our characters for the next time.