Evaluation of my script:

When I began this project I gave myself a challenge, having never written a script in this depth and detail before I found that to begin with the process cannot be approached without copious amounts of note making.
My main aim whilst carrying out this project was to write a short film that would entice the intended audience and create a form of escapism for them. I also wanted to produce a piece of creative thinking that paid homage to the films that influenced the idea.
What I wanted to do was produce a mixture of two similar but quite different films, ‘The Warriors’ by Walter Hill and ‘A Clockwork Orange’ by Stanley Kubrick.

While writing my script I tried to focus on keeping my style of writing quite surrealistic and putting in every detail to make sure that what I saw in my head was conveyed into words so that my vision would be clear to everyone who read my script.

I think that if I was to make this film it would be marketable in the cult films niche as it is paying homage to two cult classics, in my opinion if marketed correctly and aimed at that niche audience it would do very well. Linking this thinking in with other film studies projects where I wrote about contemporary and cult films within Britain, we in this country have seen films such as kidult hood become instant hits with the youth of today as it focuses on real issues that youth in Britain have to face everyday. If I was to extend my script and make it feature length I would add back stories that would deal with the reality of everyday life and some of the issues faced by the people I am trying to portray.

When writing about my characters I tried to write as if it was myself who was in the situation that they are in, in the narrative. The point that I wanted to get across was that although the characters world may not of always been like that, with gangs and violence disrupting everything they do the only way he was going to survive the changing world in which he inhabited was to not beat them but join them.

Trying to create a constant question within the narrative was not hard for the genre that I had chosen, because the action/thriller genre creates constant situations where the audience question if the characters will make it.
Creating a mysticism and atmosphere about the characters was what I found difficult, the model I tried to work with was to make the lead character ‘Harry’ very abrupt and charismatic and leave most of the explaining to the narrator which is ‘Harry’ later on in life looking back on his youth.

Tying in the mysticism I was trying to create with music was another challenge, as I didn’t think that many contemporary songs would go with the atmosphere I was trying to create so I decided to introduce a little nostalgia and incorporate songs from the sixties onwards that I thought would best fit the surrealistic style of the script.
The use of the song ‘End of the world’ by Skeeter Davis at the end of the second scene was one of these nostalgic songs that I used. I decided to use it as it as the lyrics ‘Don’t they know it’s the end of the world’
Gave the effect that somehow in that evening the characters lives were going to change forever, along with the world as they knew it.

Envisioning the camera shots and angles and which each scene and action would be filmed was relatively easy as I already had scenes written in note form, so it was a case of developing those scenes to include more detail, sound and dialog.

The hardest part of writing this script came at the end when I had to write the fight scene. The reason why it was so hard, was that if I did it wrong the script would lose pace and fall at the last hurdle. The way in which I countered this was to watch a similar scene in the film ‘The Warriors’ where the gang is attacked in the toilets of a subway station.
I noticed while taking notes on this scene that the use of slow motion and reaction shots really get the audience who are watching involved in the action, the reaction shots allow the audience to emotionally link to the scene as they do not want to see their favourite characters being taken out of the film already.
This links back to the constant questions that I was trying to set whilst writing, the question ‘are they going to make it?’
Overall I believe that I have produced a good script, which has pace and atmosphere to keep an audience hooked into watching the rest of my film. I found some parts hard and others easy, but I have learned a lot and can now fully appreciate all the work that goes into making a film before it is even put into production.