I have found the narrative theory aspects of the module to be the most interesting and the most useful to me. I've always been fascinated with how things work and how they're made and being given the tools needed to analyse films and scripts and break them down into their components and study how they fit together has been a massive boost to my writing abilities.
Studying Todorov, Propp and Strauss came easier to me than the rest of the module, particularly when breaking down 'The Spongebob Sqaurepants Movie' during our first assignment. The movie turned out to have a much more complex application of Todorov and Propp's theories than I had expected. However I ended up highly enjoying breaking down the film and the way the theories applied. It taught me a lot about how to alter and adjust the way different theories can be used to improve a film without limiting it.
Writing scripts themselves has proven more difficult, however learning proper research and character profiling technique has made this much easier than before, though during the third assignment I had less passion for my script idea's than I would have liked. However this was a good thing as the challenge of writing for a script you are not passionate about is likely to be a part of the industry and proper application of theory, idea and research still results in well written and thought out scripts, even if they lack passion.
The small exercises performed in and out of class; single character break downs, quick script analysis and short research tasks has been very useful in cementing the idea's and techniques in my head and teaching me how to apply these to my own ideas both quickly and more thoroughly.
The technical formatting of the script has also been very easy as it is constant, ordered and sensible and suits the way I work.
I have found some difficulty finding the passion to write the scripts I want, though I enjoy writing, writing a script is very thinned down compared to story writing in terms of what you write on the page and creating scripts that clearly tell the story with the limited information than be put into the script has been a little more difficult. From the second and third assignments I learned how important it was to consider the length of your story and how quickly an idea can be formed and represented in a script.
I used the 'Amelia the Acorn' short as a 60 second script and ran into the problem than my original idea for the story would have involved a script closer to 5-10 minutes in length.
Though I was able to re-tool the story to work in 60 seconds it was still difficult to achieve and I wasn't happy about doing so, so in future careful consideration of an idea and how well it scales to different film lengths is important.
I also had some difficulty with the researching, character profiling and mood board type tasks as, although I have learnt well the importance of these things, before I started I had never really used them before when writing or painting, and I still feel I have a lot to learn about how I am best creating my own mood boards and research profiles to suit the way I work and to improve my ideas.
Overall I feel I have been successful int his module, the work has been enjoyable and interesting to me and I feel I have picked up on many of the important elements of how to write a successful script and have created, what I feel, are examples of work that show that slow growing of my understanding.
I still have some areas to improve my understanding and practices in but for now I feel greatly improved in my ability.
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