Through the term, we learned a plethora of different screenwriting techniques from different professions applying them in 3 different scripts, with this skill development we created a script for the auteur project. In my group, we all wrote a collective script with each person contributing to scenes - for this reason, our script is around 7 pages.

 

One such professional we learned from was Andrew Saton, American animator, storyboard artist, film director, screenwriter, producer, and voice actor based at Pixar. I employed several techniques advised by Saton through the writing process. For example, write stories in the spirit to“deepen the viewers understanding of who we are as humans”, Throughout the writing me and my group centralized Ana, the lead, writing the film as a study of her character, hoping with this to illustrate a queer experience navigating internalized homophobia, guilt, and hetero normativity. Examples you can find of this in the script are in the call scene in which Ana “slightly winces” as her mother enforces a heterosexual narrative upon her. Saton also talked about his work on Wallie and using non-dialogue actions to fill in context, from this I wanted to explore using non-dialogue to establish or provide character information. We put this into practice with the first scene in which Ana is seen nervous and reclusive- hiding when “someone walks past breaking her space and {making her} retreat into her hoodie” from this we establish Ana's timid nature and suggests she's feeling secretive or guilty.

 

Though the term we also took time to look at different forms of scriptwriting, I utilized our lesson on action-based scripts where I learned the significance of mise-en-scene in creating atmosphere. An example of when we put this into practice in the script is in the descriptions of lighting using binary oppression of the dream sequence being described as blue and dark in opposition of Brighton warm and bright is effective in drawing a line between Ana’s mental states.

 

We attempted primarily throughout to mimic our auteurs' storytelling and screenwriting methods. For example, Barry Jenkins writes from the perspective of the character for example in the moonlight scene i annotated he uses “breath” as a unit of time placing the reader in Chiron's perspective. We used this very technique in the call scene to use a pause. Barry Jenkins is minimalist in his scriptwriting which we tried to replate with a straightforward description of the action. To improve I would have used more capitalization to highlight important details.