Starting Again…Picking a Script

Picking a script was not an easy task. We narrowed our choices down by looking at what would be do-able accounting for actors, props and locations. In the end we picked a script called ‘Balance’ by David Fines that is about a girl who struggles to balance work and play. We picked it not only because it was suited to our resources and budget but also because the story is relatable to people of all ages. We liked the idea of alternate realities as the girls life splits into two when she struggles to find a balance, only when she finds balance do the two parts of her life fit back together. We liked the challenge of doing this.
After picking the script we started to re-write parts of the script to better suit the vision we had in mind for it. For example, in the original script the protagonist is a female office worker, we changed this to a female student so that we could shoot in the library rather than an office building, which would have been difficult to find the location and the extras for this. We also started to plan how we would show the split and the separate lives cinematically. We looked at the idea of split screen and researched films that used this and films that portrayed a similar idea such as sliding doors. In Sliding Doors a similar theme of alternate realities is explored. I particularly like the way the split is presented- as a re-wind sequence.



However we chose not to do this in ours because it is a different kind of split, for the girl in our film it is her personality that splits, where as in Sliding Doors it is simply two possible outcomes changed by the influence of something seemingly inconsequential. So instead we decided to use split screen to emphasise the fact that the girl had split.