Applied 2: Rewriting the Script

After meeting with Sara and Martin, they advised me to redo the whole script and change the entire structure because the other one was too long and had too many characters. They advised us to just stick to three, and have a three part structure. But because this module has to be a documentary animation and not one that is centred around story telling, I did struggle a lot with how to have a three part structure. Hayley and I had used the farmer as our way of introducing topics to then delve into sub topics, so without him, I was slightly lost in constructing a script. 

What I did was, I wrote freely, what I felt could be a potential script. I stuck to three characters that Hayley and I had agreed on (sheep, birds and newts), and then thought about what they could say. I still kept the theme and the narrative idea the same, having a set of animals answer the question of "How has climate change affected you personally?". I decided on the three parts, the first having the characters begin to open up to the interviewer and start their conversation, the second, make the topic of climate change a bit more concrete, including a heavier topic, and then the third part is the least obscure and actually reveals the subject matter.

I then gave each characters some dialogue, but mainly focussed on direction and establishing shots as this was something Martin and Sara also brought up in our one to one. I used some dialogue from our previous script and then thought of some more to connect everything together.

I then asked to meet with Hayley to show this to her and I told her I really was struggling with the script, but she actually gave me some positive feedback and said that it was fine. She then told me to perhaps think of how long each scene will take, so together we sat and said each line out loud but used a stop watch to see how many seconds they took. We then wrote them down and added the seconds up, adding some more establishing shots and removing some dialogue, to gain a fair animation duration.

After that, I went home and created the final script, really focussing on the scene description and moments to establish our characters. Our animation is heavily dialogue based but we also want to have some shots without any dialogue, just to illustrate subtle movements, for instance, blinking or fixing hair. This will just help the audience engage with the animation more, especially our family audience, as well as make the animation feel natural and conversational.