Find ideas around you - Independent study

Find ideas around you
Ideas for film scripts can be found all around you. Here are five different places to find inspiration and ideas that you may not have thought of. 

Task:
Choose three to kick-start an idea and then develop them using the 5 Ws.
Bring in your written up developed story idea and the original piece of inspiration. 

Deadline: Start of the lesson, Tuesday 18th of Dec.
Any issues? deh@thomasadams.net

Rewrite a scene from a story that you like.
Choose an unimportant and certainly not ‘iconic’ scene from a favorite book, comic or video game. Make sure that you adapt the story and characters so that it suits the tone of your film or genre but also add new elements or unique changes that make the scene that little bit more important.

Be a spy.
This one might not be for everyone, but a classic movie-trope, a spy trying to find out information. When out in public be mindful of people around you. Can you see someone who looks interesting or looks like there might be more to them than what you can see? If they were a character in your chosen genre, would they be the protagonist, a love interest or maybe a classic villain? Keep an ear out also; being respectful and polite, conversations of other people can be fascinating starting points for ideas. Catching the middle of a chat could be an interesting prompt for your story as can a group of people chatting away. Being respectful and polite is key here though. 

Check your emails.
Find junk or spam email. Use it to form the basis of a story by imaging that you are the person sending the email and that it’s a genuine call for help or advert for a miracle product. Or, you could consider what happened if you replied and it turned out to be genuine, or if replying to the email did something to you or your computer.

Use Facebook.
Have a look at Facebook, choose a photo of someone you don’t know well and imagine them as a character in your chosen genre. For example, if you were creating a science fiction film for example, could this be the last photo they took before trying a time travel machine for example? If you’re creating a teenage film, maybe this is a photo they used for their school year book-why was this photo so significant? The idea here is to not use your ‘friend’ and their real life, instead to use your imagination in the chosen genre and to use the photo as a spark of an idea to develop a story from. And make sure that you don’t use their real name.

Rewrite the news.
Find a news story, it could be about absolutely anything. Now twist the details so that it fits the generic conventions of the genre you’re working in. Changing the setting is probably the easiest way to start; a story about a robbery in a bank might not be that interesting, but it becomes a story about a robbery of a fuel storage facility on Mars, it suddenly becomes the basis for an interesting science fiction story for example

Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ method - Independent Learning Task

William S Burroughs on writing and cut-ups

Chance and random elements often jog our creativity. That’s why many writers who have writer’s block Google ‘story generators’ or ‘writing prompts’. The American author William S. Burroughs would take a text and cut it into strips of individual words and phrases, then rearrange them at random to create new sentences.

Aleatory (using chance and random elements to find new ideas) techniques have yielded interesting results throughout literary history. The French group of writers, OuLiPo, used made up constraints to write inventive novels. For example, Georges Perec wrote his novel La Disparation without using the letter ‘e’ (the most common in the French language). This constraint forced the author to find ideas and phrases beyond habit.

Task:
Get an old, battered second-hand book. Cut up a few pages into strips of words and phrases with a pair of scissors. Jumble these up and place some at random on a page (or choose your options more carefully). Does a line or phrase (or strange pairing) spark a story idea? Do a load.

Bring in your stuck down lines of inspiration and evidence of at least one that has been developed into an interesting story idea.
Use the 5W's to help develop your ideas fully. 

Deadline: Start of the lesson, Tuesday 11th December