1.Please come up with three high-stake situations where (at most) two characters have to make a critical decision on a conflicting issue of varying consequences. Make the situation happen in a single location (or two locations at most) such as in the bedroom and the kitchen or the whole thing happens in the coffee shop and its parking lot. Etc. You are describing a situation and not the whole story. That means there is no span of 5 weeks and 3 different continents for the described situation. Although there might be a background story, you have to develop a single (or two) scene situation that happens within a span of 30 min at most. Describe the situation in 3-5 sentences in a brief paragraph.
I once sat in a coffee shop and spent 20 minutes doing this exercise myself. I was able to come up with the following five examples. It was not refined after the initial conception, thus these are just crude notes, but this level of writing is good enough for this assignment. Please take your story to the level of reality where you feel daring and a little challenged. Please consider yourself capable of handling realities beyond the Disney TV dramas. Notice that all of the following situations happen as one or two scenes. Example 1 would be filmed entirely in the woman’s bedroom. Example 2 would be in his apartment. Example 3 could be in a parking lot. Example 4 could be anywhere but it’s just a scene. Example 5 would be inside a moving car, and on the side of a highway, basically two scenes.
Example 1:
A woman was just physically abused by her boyfriend. She has a black eye. He is trying to come back to the apartment and apologize. She is talking with her friend on the phone to decide whether to let him back in or call the police.
Example 2:
A college student is planning to make his first drug run to pay for his overdue tuition. His friend is trying to talk him out of it. A drug dealer is getting near to drop off a stash of meth.
Example 3:
A young woman finds out she is pregnant. If she tells her boyfriend, he would insist on keeping the baby. She wants to have an abortion. She has to decide to tell him or not.
Example 4:
A man has to decide if he should take in his younger brother who fell into a gang life and is on the run for shooting a rival gang member.
Example 5:
A woman had just hit a homeless person on a deserted road. The homeless person is unconscious. There is no witness except for her boyfriend who was in the passenger seat. She has a DUI. She wants to call the police. Her boyfriend thinks they should just leave.
Post your ideas as part of the discussion. Copy and paste your three stories here. No Word doc submission.
2.Please reflect on my feedback to your ideas and choose one or if you are not happy with what you turned in, please start writing a new piece.
In this assignment, you are writing a comprehensive synopsis of this situational short story. You are writing one or two paragraphs. You must include the following information in your synopsis but please do so not answer these questions in bullet points. Please make sure the information is revealed as part of the flow of your writing that tells the story.
– Character backgrounds
– Where the situations are taking place
– Key dialogue lines
– How it ends
Please be conscious that this short film can be made by utilizing up to two locations. It should have two main characters with conflicting views on some issue. You may add more characters but they cannot play important roles. In the end, a divisive disagreement under pressure and the heated dialogue are what I would like you to focus for this short film.
