FMP - Film Narrative

After a lot of research and experimentation I started to develop on my idea and create the film narrative. I already knew I wanted to create a story around a group of teenagers that discover the first file sharing website, as I wanted to capture the roller-coaster someone goes through from having nothing to having everything. However when talking to my tutors, Tom said that it is too nice and reminded me that needs to be obstacles for this character to overcome. I needed to discover what the character was and what he wanted to get too and then make him come across things that make it difficult to get there. The books 'Story' by Robert Mckee and 'The Writer's Journey' By Christopher Vogler reinforced this.

There I got to work. I wanted the character to be no one incredible special but no one too under privileged to make him relate-able to the mass majority of the audience, as there are times in all our lives where we just fit in. I wanted him to be the "crowd of the hallway". One of the things my tutors told me was to harness from past experiences to make the work and subject more authentic. Therefore I based the story around One boy in a group of closely knitted friends. He wasnt the most popular person at school, wasn't overly rich, didn't have a cinema worthy social life and like most teenage boys is unlucky with girls. This gave him plenty of things that he could improve upon. Things he would naturally aim for then; increased popularity, wealth, partying and obviously a beautiful girlfriend. These were all my end things that I wanted my character to have, and the way he would get there is through the development of this online business. The story was rapidly growing at this point and I had all the foundations to build the structure of my story. 

All I had to do then is link in characters to these objectives, build a chronological path for these objectives and then add in obstacles or 'oh fuck' situations to make the film entertaining. The hardest thing was creating the obstacles. After talking to my tutor the idea sparked of having something threaten to not only bring down his business and chances of the 'high life' but actually reduce him to having a worse life than previously. I didn't want him to die so something unlawful that could leave him in prison.

I started to experiment with ideas and situations that would mess about with his chances, but none stuck out as being thrilling and dramatic enough to shock the audience and produce that 'oh fuck' situation. I then started looking at taboo subjects that really pushed the boundaries of morality and hit a light bulb (metaphorically). As the business is built around file sharing, what if a file was to go trending that was so sick and shocking it would attract the attention of the police and force them to do something about it; child porn. Child porn is not a popular topic to speak of, even when mentioning in public to friends involving this project I could physically see them cringe. There have been cases of child porn on social networks such as Facebook and twitter and caused a debate on the whether the site should remain circulating. So imagine what would happen to the owners of a site already pushing the law by breaking copyright agreements and making money off that.

Not only was this a big obstacle to overcome but it could potentially spark other problems within the film/obstacles to overcome. Characters getting in accidents etc over the paranoia of thinking everyone knows they own the site such as car crashes or fights. I then wanted to mess up the relationship that the main character so desperately wants. Looking back at the friendship interviews I conducted with people one of the main things that repeated said to push the boundaries of a friendship is cheating. A friend going or getting with a another friends 'partner'. This was easy obstacle then, have character A's girl cheating on him with one of character A's friends. 

This causes were disruption with the storyline and the relationship strings that are built between people. Once I had the ideas fully developed, I began to produce a flow chart of scenes and ideas. After several attempts I managed to complete one, which I went to draw a timeline from.