September 27th, 2015
For the story idea, we are really behind schedule. It’s been about a month since we wanted to have the story we were working on, but we still don’t know what to do. Over the past few meetings, Jack and I came up with a series of small ideas and things we would like the see. We wrote them out in a Google Document called Story Ideas.
Eventually we narrowed it down to three ideas (I was glad all the ones voted up were the ones I suggested). We called them:
The Rules of Story
Two of Everything
(We didn’t have a working title for this one, but we knew it would involve a substance increasing motivation and productivity. For the sake of the journal entry, I’m calling it Monty’s Medicine.)
I decided we should come up with a simple plot for each of the suggested items and make sure we had an ending to each of them. That way we weren’t going around in the dark trying to find a place for the story to come to.
Jack was on top of it. He was able to roll out notes for Monty’s Medicine. I didn’t however because I was swamped with schoolwork at the time. I was having trouble with an AP Chemistry Lab Report.
He couldn’t think of anything for the The Rules of Story and suggested we delete it. I agreed with him because we didn’t have much in it anyway. We just liked the title. My favorite one however was Two of Everything. I don’t know what it was going to be about except I knew it would involve a greedy teenager with a duplication machine. I keep telling myself that I need to work on it. I hope I get around to it.
September 29th, 2015
Today we narrowed down our two story ideas down one. The one we finally went with was the titleless one: “the drug the enhances motivation.” I was a little disappointed at first because my favorite story idea was Two of Everything. However, I unfortunately was not making any progress on the story ideas for either of them. I was too busy with other school work like APUSH and AP Chem Lab Reports that it fell a little by the wayside. We needed to go ahead and move on instead of hoping we would get inspired soon and further extend our timeline.
So we went through our Story Ideas Google Doc. I read Jack’s notes for Monty’s Medicine and it turns out, he was able to put a spin on one that I didn’t consider. My original idea for the story was that there was a drug created given to lacking students that increased their motivation and, subsequently, their productivity and work ethic.
Here are Jack’s notes for this version of Monty’s Medicine:
Jack Notes:
The drug, causes different effects in different people. However, about half of students get “worked” to death.
- Examples: A football player would get extra strength to increase productivity in the football field, a star students brainwave electricity would increase to the point that the electricity courses to the outside of his/her/others body, etc.
After the accident where half the school dies, the whole staff points fingers at each other for who gave the order to spike the water and the staff realizes, who gave the order?
The order was given by the person who created the drug. This, a fellow high school student, wanted to do everything that they possibly could in high school, but simply couldn’t. So he created a drug that allowed himself to do everything. However, the student got lonely doing everything by himself, so he gave the drug to other people so the student could have friends to do stuff with.
The creator of the drug does not mean to kill so many people and goes into a deep depression, that leads to uncontrollable bursts of the student’s newly found “work habits”.
The few kids who are semi-stable after the intake of this drug, are forced to stop these bursts of power, or else the rest of the city could be killed by the costs of too much motivation.
In the end, the creator of the drug just wants the other students to kill him/her because the creator couldn’t handle the need to do everything anymore. The other students have to oblige, because if they didn’t, the student would have destroyed the city/town.
The students asked about a cure first, though the creator didn’t have one.
End Notes
I thought that he was on to something, the drug making people more productive, even adding a super power element that would fit our quota for visual effects and production value. The thing I didn’t like. however, was the death and darkness. I didn’t mind it conveying a darker undertone (though I would prefer it to be a lighter movie), but I didn’t want to include any death.
We decided that the main character would be the one to create the potent potion. I quickly named him Monty Morrison (Jack didn’t like the name and promptly went to the name generator to find some new ones, but we still refer to the main character as Monty.)
We started to create the character, since we had the basic idea of where the story was going to go. The next step was to come up with characters. I thought that if we gave the character personality and history and knew who they were, the story would fall into place around him/her. We know that he is an overachiever that’s nervous about college. He creates the drug so he can be more competitive in running.
We have assigned ourselves to coming up with more ideas about the character, personality traits, etc. We still haven’t come up with a logline yet however.
I’m really starting to like this story because it keeps some of the elements I liked in my Legend of Captain Hero story such as workaholism and super powers. The Legend of Captain Hero is a screenplay I created over the summer in hopes of doing it for the sophomore project. (I’ve gone through 1.5 drafts.) Unfortunately, we abandoned it because of feasibility issues, but I like the story a lot and I hope to return to it one day.
End Notes
Started to create the character. Super stressed about going to college and fills his schedule with academic and extracurricular activities. He feels pressure from home and successful siblings to be the best. He wants to get into the best school in the nation (College University), which is also hyper competitive. To do so, he creates a formula that dramatically increases his productivity, but at what cost?
Haven’t come up with a logline as of today
Thinking about calling the substance Vocelyne. It also will have side effects of electricity coursing through your body that steadily increases as you get more productive (like conductive.)