Synopsis Draft 3 + Discussion Notes

Synopsis 3

Luke is standing at his slightly beaten locker, he slowly opens the door, revealing band posters and folders, he looks at his favourite poster, then Alice walks up to the locker next to him. He sees her out of the corner of his eye, she opens her locker, slowly revealing similar band posters, a smile smile appears on Luke’s face, as he scrutinizes her properly now. Her hair covers most of her face, but through the gaps in her hair, he notices small things, bright eyes, small nose, nice smile. Then quickly Alice shuts her locker and moves away.

Luke is staring blandly at the bright computer screen, lifelessly tapping away at the keyboard, watching text appear on the screen. He hits print and moves across the room, on his way he notices a group of so called ‘norms’ sitting on the bright green sofas. As he passes, they notice him and start pointing and whispering. Luke is standing by the printer and hears them but pays no attention. 

Then one of the group sits back and smugly yells; ‘Oi you fucking pussy shouldn’t you be at a hair and beauty course not here!?

He sits back, and the rest of the group burst in to fits of laughter with occasional bouts of backup insults; ‘Haha he looks like a ugly girl!’, ‘Where are your boobs woman? Late bloomer?’, ‘Why aren’t you defending yourself?’ ‘Proof he has a pussy!’ 

Luke just shakes his head, and strides back past the group back to his seat, the group die down and returns to their chat.

A few seconds later Alice enters the room. She still has her head down and headphones in, muttering to herself incoherently under her breath. The group look round and notice Alice, they instantly crack up in to laughter, then one of the group, grabs a sandwich that was sitting next to him and throws it straight at Alice.

A slight thwomp resonates around the room as the sandwich hits Alice squarely in the face. Alice is shocked and startled, as the sandwich drops to the floor. She shuffles across the room briskly, with short strides carrying her to a seat by a computer in the corner of the room. She sits down at speed, placing her bags gently on the table, and creating a wall between herself and the group.

The group move slowly around to the computers near her continuing the abuse, with any object near them such as food, pens, crumpled bits of paper and combined with verbal abuse. 

Luke continues watching this abuse from his seat, fidgeting and wanting to move. The alpha male of the group yells out at Alice; ‘Why don’t you go and kill yourself and be done with it! You emos drive me insane!’ Luke’s eyes light up at this and he grabs a penknife from his bag and strides meaningfully towards the alpha. ‘Is this what you fucking want to see?!’ As he drags the knife down his arm, drawing blood. Before the alpha can say anything or move to react Luke slams his bloodied arm up against the alphas throat, and holds out his hand to Alice.

Alice, now in even more shock, slowly takes Luke’s hand. He pulls her gently and leads her out of the room.

Discussion Notes

From the second draft to this draft the beginning had to be changed to adequately fit my characters in and to establish a link for these characters. Milgrom’s point that applies here is that; ‘Each scene needs to move the story forward.’ which to an extent this new beginning does, purely for the fact that it creates and establishes that there will be a link between these two characters later on. 

Plus with the action in the second draft to this it has been toned down slightly but it’s still too much action for it to be believable, which relates to another point Milgrom made where she said; ‘Audiences instinctively know when something is pretentious or dishonest.’ 

Furthermore there’s the fact where i am still not happy with the ending because i personally believe that it is ‘cheesy’ and has been overused by previous texts across multiple genres, so i would like to rework the ending to fit mine better, once again relating to Milgrom's point about the audience instinctively knowing 'when something being pretentious or dishonest'.