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.
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