For our next project we’ve been put into groups to work on a film with a message, which everyone came up with an idea for and the staff decided on the best ideas. My idea was to make a comedy sketch raising awareness of autism and my idea ended up being chosen. I wrote the script for this sketch over a year ago and have been waiting for the opportunity to adapt it and that opportunity has finally come.
Yesterday one of the students in my group worked on the storyboard for the film which was apparently very exhausting and stressful and I can definitely see why. It would probably drive me mad and I feel sorry for people in the film industry who have to do that for a living. Storyboarding involves things like drawing a picture of every single camera shot that would be used in the film.
The script has changed since I first wrote it. I actually shared the original script on my other blog which you can view here. I would highly recommend reading the original script before continuing with this. We had to make the script longer so that’s what I started working on. It’s now a little bit different from my first script. For one thing I changed William’s name to Chad and there’s an extra character who will serve as a peacemaker between the two main characters. We also decided to write it so that James isn’t the only character with a neurological disorder. The original script makes out Chad (who at the time was called William) to be very arrogant and kind of a bully, but what if (like James) he was just misunderstood?
We decided to write it so that Chad suffers from anxiety, depression, anger issues and low self esteem so the reason he gets frustrated with James is that he’s getting stressed out of the fact that he feels James is poking fun out of the way he talks and his anxiety is really clouding his judgement. So our plan with this film is to raise awareness of both autism and anxiety and it will be done from n angle that I haven’t seen very often. We quite frequently see ketches of an autistic character being judged by a neurotypical but we have’t seen it from the angle of the antagonist also having his own share of problems so hopefully this will make it more unique.
We’re hoping to start recording the film next Tuesday.
The Film Student Diary 