The Roughest of Drafts

As the man in charged of the script, I have the most power in the characters and their traits. This is good because it makes the mise-en-scene a hell of a lot easier for me as I can manipulate the characters to make aspects for the mise-en-scene more apparent. I decided to make the two characters foils of each other to highlight the aspects of their respective genre (detective represents noir, hacker represents sci-fi). For example: the attempt at humor with the hacker is meant to be a foil to the Detective’s depressing outlook on life to highlight the Detective’s bleak view of the world. Since they will mostly be foils of each other (the genres have some overlap such as the use of mystery), things such as costuming will be much easier (I’ll talk about this more in depth in a later post.) I’ve decided to leave out most of the camera work, editing, etc. out for now because those rely on the dialogue/story we are trying to present to our audience; I also may change some things such as the setting depending on the circumstances we come across.

Now, without further ado, here is the roughest draft of something you have ever seen.

The Script (Draft 1)

Summary: A hacker and a detective are sent into a simulation because it has been hacked by an outside party and the people who own it are not happy about it. 

Establishing shot of gas station

Cut to a man (Detective played by Fares) filling a car with gas at a gas station. Chiaroscuro is used)

     Inner Monologue from Detective: “The company that owns this simulation hired me to investigate who hacked into this simulation and bring them to justice. I don’t understand why he did it; he never does anything major: change how long a second is to give him more time to do his taxes on time  After this job, I can retire: I may be young but I’ve put in too many hours to keep working this dead-end job. My partner for this job is a hacker; once we’re done with this job, the company promised to wipe his slate clean. He doesn’t seem like much; I was shocked when I heard that he …” (Cut off by Hacker speaking)

Hacker (played by Kevin) walks into frame

H: “Can I put some color back in this world; all this black and white is making me depressed?”

D: “Sure, whatever.”

H: “And then I said, let there be color!”

Chiaroscuro gone in next cut; color present

H: “There, much better. Now, did you find any information on our culprit?”

D: “Well, we know that they’re good at altering this simulation, so they must be good with computers.”

H: “Way to go, Sherlock, I mean do we have a witness or, better yet, a name?”

D: “We do have a name: Bostrom. That’s all we have though: no face, no age, and no location.”

Cut to another establishing shot; D and H are in the same position, but at different gas station

D (as he is getting in the car): “They may be on to us, let’s get out of here.”

Title card appears with sound of the car door shutting.