Entry #2: Drafting A Drama

Mood: Ecstatic

I’m super excited! Today, Srishti (my partner) and I needed to come up with a basis for our film and we did! We have been having a difficult time trying to both stay on the same page, but we came to many mutual agreements on the important elements for our film intro such as genre, gender of the lead character, and general storyline. I really enjoyed how we came up with our baseline idea; we sat together and wrote down every idea we could formulate, whether simple or elaborate, and talked about them together. As we discussed different elements of the film intro, we discovered a few things that we wanted to stay away from, such as voiceovers. Our film idea is not fully developed yet, but our creativity if definitely flowing and I feel confident in our ability to create something that we can be proud of. I’m not going to lie, I was anxious that we would not be able to come up with a solid idea that we could both agree on, so I’m glad that we could.


Our idea is still a drama, but it now contains a few other genres like mystery and coming of age mixed within. The story revolves around a group of teenage girls who are all close friends and attend school together. A few settings that we have considered are my house, Srishti’s house, a park, and school because there is another important character that attends the girls’ school (but shhh, it’s a secret). As for casting, we know a few girls that we could recruit to be our actresses; we are not focused on this part as of yet though because we want to establish the personalities of each character.

As we created our film idea, I had a few examples in mind. The first was The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a film about a socially-awkward boy who meets two outgoing teenagers and befriends them. They go through all sorts of real life drama and learn about themselves and each other through crazy midnight drives and deep conversations. I want to create something that can be relatable to teenagers because, just like every one else, they want to feel understood, something I felt when I watched that film. Our teenage cast is a result of this goal.

After adding a mysterious element to our plot, I was also reminded of a TV show on ABC called Pretty Little Liars (PLL for short). PLL is an extremely popular show among my demographic, and I would say its because it’s a mix of mystery, teenage drama, crime, and romance. Similar to our story, there is an overarching mystery with subplots filled with drama between the characters, their families, and their teachers. Unlike PLL, our idea is for a film so there will be much less going on at one time and the focus is on one main girl rather than four.

Overall, we are making progress. I am excited to update again later with more ideas after researching further into the conventions for mystery films as well as how to smoothly integrate more than one genre into a film. Bye! 

ABC Family. Advertisement. Fansided. Ed. Taylor Rios. Fansided, Sept. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2016. <http://prettylittleclues.com/2015/09/08/pretty-little-liars-6x20-spoilers/>.

Summit Entertainment. Advertisement. Tomahawk Beat. Ed. Faith Branson. Tomahawk Beat, 25 May 2015. Web. 9 Mar. 2016. <http://tomahawkbeat.org/2015/05/moviebook-review-perks-of-being-a-wallflower/>.