Synopsis Draft 2 and Discussion Notes

Luke is sitting at his worn, scribbled upon desk, twiddling his pen between his fingers, watching the clock run down the minutes. As the bell rings, he picks up his stuff and quickly shuffles out of the room on his own, leaving the rest of the class to chat and casually stroll out.

Luke is staring blandly at the bright computer screen, while lifelessly tapping away at the keyboard, doing his work, when he hears insults yelled through the tranquil room. He turns to see Alice, a quiet, introvert metalhead, being verbally attacked by a group of the so called ‘norms’. Intently he watches this abuse, while the group wheel her across the room and in to a corner on the complete opposite side of the room, he watches Alice as the group stroll back out of his line of sight, still jeering. Alice just remains, quiet, unmoving like a statue. Slowly she moves to get something out of her bag, the group start to crack more jokes when they realise that it’s blade from a sharpener. Luke listens, then grabs something out from his bag and moves towards the group. The group takes one look and laughs and questions what he wants. Luke simply raises raises one arm and runs a blade down his arm, drawing blood, that starts to run down his arm. The group are left in shock, that’s when Luke shifts his footing quickly so his bloodied arm is holding up the leader of the group by the throat against a wall. The rest of the group don’t want anything to do with it, so they bolt, leaving the leader to fend for himself.

Luke slowly runs his arm across the leader’s throat, leaving bloodstains against his neck and drops him from against the wall, goes to pick up his stuff, leaving the leader in a state of shock on the floor.

Discussion Notes

From the discussion, we decided that the predicament, dilemma, conflict and tension, is now present within the story but the story is now too over the top, it could become comical or not true to life, which relates to Milgrom's point about 'Are the stakes high enough?' in the way that in this, yes the stakes are high, but they are too high. This also relates to her point about audiences, in the way that they 'instinctively know when something is being pretentious or dishonest'.

Also we decided that the start doesn’t fit with the rest of the story and doesn’t establish the link between Luke and Alice which places a major plot hole in the unity and time of action element of the story, because his actions in the conflict aren’t justified by the beginning of the story, which relates back to Milgrom in the form of her ten point plan, that states that each scene should drive the piece forward, which this scene didn't.

Plus It was suggested that i quietly and gently introduce the link between Luke and Alice, which could also gently introduce the issue of self harm, but the main point from our discussion was that i need to make Luke more motivated before he gets involved in any conflict. From this we discussed changing the beginning interior room from a classroom to a set of lockers, so that we can establish a link that the character Luke can identify with so there is a link with Alice, through what’s in her locker and through proximity, because he can notice that she is attractive through all the mise en scene of her costume and make up, this was a useful idea because it was backed up with one of Milgrom's screenwriting conventions, in the form of telling the story with camera and as minimal dialogue as possible.