Crystallize Your Objective

In screenwriting class, we are focusing on non dialogue scripts. Non dialogue scripts are literally just that - no dialogue. These films have no dialogue and use visual images with music to tell the stories that the creator wishes to tell. One of the assignments that we have been given is to write a non dialogue script, so we have been doing exercises in class to help us with this.

Objectives - The wee figure wants to get to the platform eith objective written on it!

As a group, we all came up with locations where a story/film could happen. We each chose a location - I chose a funeral. Each person in the group was instructed to come up with a character giving them an age, a gender, profession and three personality traits. The next step was to give the character an objective. These were my choices:

CHARACTER: Jimmy Cameron
GENDER: Male
AGE: 12
PROFESSION: Junior High Student
PERSONALITY TRAITS: Low attention span, devious, prankster

OBJECTIVE: Catch the rat that has just stolen his ipod

Look out obstacles ahead!

The next instruction we were given was to pass our piece of paper with all these details to the person sitting to the left of us. It was now up to that person to come up with an obstacle that prevented that character from carrying out their objective. This obstacle had to be well thought out as some of the ideas within the group were not immediate obstacles and became long term obstacles that needed to be overcome eventually. The rules of these story ideas were that the entire thing had to happen at the location that was chosen and each person had to decide whether the obstacle was a person - antagonist, physical, mental or a time factor.

Obstacles

We worked through each person's obstacle idea to make sure that they immediately worked against the objective. The reason the obstacle needed to be an immediate problem was to create drama and make the story interesting for audiences because without this drama, a film becomes boring. We also had to wrap our heads around how to show things in a visual nature without characters talking (no dialogue). Sometimes it was not the obstacle that needed changed but the objective needed to change for the obstacle to work.

The objective of the character needs to be well defined, as well as the obstacle that stands in their way (no matter what that may be) to create drama and so the audience can clearly define what is going on. If these lines are too murky then the audience will lose interest or become confused and then nobody will want to watch your film. So, this weeks lesson in screenwriting was as simple as this: "Crystallize your objectives and obstacles."