NOW SPELL: BLOG (Pt. 2)

 Hi again!

    As mentioned in the title (and the end of last blog post), this is the counterpart to my blog post about the writing process behind NOW SPELL, my latest short film script that I wrote last week. I wanted to separate this into two posts because frankly, it would've been exhausting to write everything I wanted to talk about into one blog post, and it certainly would've been exhausting to read. Regardless, let's start by talking about how I came up with the idea.

    A few months ago I had this vivid nightmare (?) where I was in my old bedroom (from when my family first got a house in the US). In the nightmare, there was an old Speak N' Spell toy that spoke to me, using words from the sound library and communicating through the word prompts and correcting me by spelling out its reply to whatever I would type into it. It was a little weird, a little eerie, but overall enough of a memorable dream that I jot down some notes on it later in the day when I started remembering it. This image shows what I had jotted down the day I had the dream. There isn't a date on the page, but since my journal entries before and after these notes were dated, I can guess I came up with the idea originally around April 6th, 2024.

    Through these notes, you can see that I had a very barebones concept for the story, and I had instead focused on the idea of the toy's user typing in one word, and then being corrected with the spelling of another word, seemingly in response. On the bottom half of the page is where I would take notes on the words in the toy's actual word bank , so I could try to string together a chain of ominous words that could maybe hint at a narrative. I noted down a lot of violent words, a lot of religious words, and a lot of water-related words. From these categories, I came up with the idea for a religious family/ religious themes, a drowning-related incident, and the implication of violence.

    My next journal entry (also undated, grr!) fell between April 9th and April 26th. Once again, there isn't much there in terms of the overall story and plot that I would eventually develop- just a very strong emphasis on the exchange of words between my protagonist (which I named Oliver in this entry) and the ghost of his brother (who remained unnamed). There is a basic plot outline on the right with a sort of flow chart planning, but again this is very basic. It looks like I had planned for a lot more time in the story that takes before the interaction with the toy, which is surprising, since I cut out a lot of what I had planned in the chart.

The list of words and corrections show a tighter grasp of what I wanted the story to be about, since I have a lot of water-related words used early in the exchange, with some strange connections between words. You can also see my original intent for choosing Oliver's name, I wanted the way that Oliver identifies Danny within the toy to be Danny spelling out Oli, as a sort of callback to a nickname he gave him. I ended up trashing this idea, since I thought it didn't add as much tension as a slow realization on Oliver's part, rather than Danny literally spelling it out for him. This is also where I abandoned the idea to have Danny solely communicating to Oliver by giving him prompts and correcting his inputs with more ominous words. Not only would it be annoying and tired by the end of the film, but it also would have dragged out every exchange between the two as Oliver would need to react to each prompt and Danny would have to ominously spell out each word letter by letter. I think I made the right choice...

    I ended up making a lot of the creative decisions and developing of each character on Monday of last week (5/13/2024) as I sat down to fully outline and write out the basic story beats and flow for the script. After letting the creative juices flow for 3 pages, I ended up discovering a lot more that I wanted to do with the story and its characters. The most important change I made to the story was introducing the boys' father as the twist antagonist of the story, which transformed this story from being focused around the relationship between two brothers to being a story about a family moving on and healing from the trauma and deception surrounding the death of a child.

    The idea to make Abraham, their father, the villain of the story was borne out of a question that randomly occurred to me as I was writing Danny's death: "where the hell are their parents when this is happening?" Then from there, I thought it'd be a cool fucked up little twist if one of the parents was watching them, and they were aware of what was happening, but didn't save their son, for some reason? This gave me a great excuse to tie in religion into the script, since I had an array of religious words in the toy's word bank but had no idea how to fit it in beforehand.

    I wanted to use religion as the antagonist's motivation and tool (which isn't an original idea, I know) but rather than frame it as the motivation to kill a child for purity or whatever other religious villain reason, I opted to have him use it as a shield from criticism, as a cope, which is how many real-world villains use religion. By hiding behind his religion and giving up to what he perceived "God's action" to benefit his own selfish needs, I positioned him as more of a coward than a flat out evil man. I used my own frustrations with what's happening in recent politics with Israel as a framework for the kind of religious people I don't like: those who blame any criticism towards them on their religion, rather than their actions. 

    Other details came from religious inspiration, like my decision to name the father Abraham. For essentially the entire scriptwriting process, I had his character named "FATHER", both because I wasn't sure if I wanted him to be a priest (which wouldn't have worked, since he has sex) and because I didn't think a name was important. It was only towards the end of the process, during my revision of the script that I named him Abraham, as a reference to the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac, where a father (Abraham) is prepared to murder his son because God tells him to, as a test of faith. While he ends up sparing Isaac after God tells him he can, I wanted to reflect that sort of blind faith in the father character, who allows "God" to take his son's life because subconsciously, he doesn't want to have another son.

    As for why he hates Danny so much, I had to cut this motivation out of the script for time's sake. When I sent out my script to friends for reading and critiques, the number one question I got was why did Abraham hate Danny so much. Beyond "he didn't want another son", I struggled to fit my original intended reason for Abraham's hatred for his son: a birth defect / disability. I wanted Danny to have some sort of minor birth defect (like a cleft palate, or vitiligo) that would give him the impression of a "ruined" child. Not enough of a disability to have the story revolve around the perception of differently abled people, but just enough of a perceived "imperfection" to allude to the greater conversation to be had around birth defects. However, since I was tight on time and had a very tight page limit, I had to cut this detail out, since I didn't trust myself to do the message justice in such tight creative constraints. While this does negatively impact the story slightly by leaving a slight plot hole, it isn't the end of the world.

    I might be forgetting the odd detail (haha funny reference) but I think that covers most of what I wanted to write about regarding creative choices in the script. If I think of anything else, I'll make sure to update this post. Hope this was an interesting read!