Year 3 - Pre-writing materials and development

Pre-Writing

For the first step of my pre-production, as deciding on my idea for a screenplay, and luckily for me, I had had the idea of a Fantasy drama in my head for a while. For me, Fantasy has always been an exciting genre as it can really show the creativity and imagination people have, being able to create your own world, monsters, and characters, it’s a genre here anything can happen and anything is accepted.

For me, I wanted to create a story that went against the norm of nearly all genres, a twist on ‘Good vs Evil’. Victory is always written from the perspective on the winners, so I decided to go with that in mind, but make it so, who the audience see as the ‘good’ side are actually the evil ones. And also unlike every genre, I decided from even before I began writing to not include romance. Not only am I not a fan of romance in films, and to be truthful I don’t feel it is needed, I decided to do some audience research on Twitter and Reddit to gather opinions on it, and here are some below:

Because my initial idea was inspired by the story of The Legend of Spyro, where the hero goes through trials to rescue his ‘teachers’ and eventually defeat the final boss to save the Realm, I decided to be different with it. Instead, I decided to make it where the hero was actually the evil one and needed to be defeated. In the long run for the three seasons I would wish the series to go for, I decided to ultimately have it where evil is defeated, but the ending overall isn’t necessarily a happy one. Evil may be defeated, it always has a price to pay, and this is a heavy cost.

I believe this to be interesting and I feel too many films end on a happy NOTE and while a lot of this comes down to “… relying that little bit more on their escapes and on the big screen, where anything is possible. So when our lives are falling to pieces, we pray that the roles that have captured our hearts and minds for those two magical hours can make everything better.”  (Rodrigues, 2017) and especially with Fantasy, where you can suspend your disbelief more, I personally want to see more films that won’t give characters constant plot armor, and show that even though things can end happily, there are consequences to that ending.

TV series name change:

I also decided to change the name of my screenplay, from ‘Lies of An Angel’ to ‘The Illusion of Truth’. While both titles explain the premise of the tv series well, I wanted something with a bit more ambiguity, something that could make audiences more interested, there’s a mystery within this story, and I feel the second title captured that more.

Bibliography:

Rodrigues, C., 2017. Why Do We Crave Happy Endings?. [online] Rife Magazine. Available at: <https://www.rifemagazine.co.uk/2017/02/why-do-we-crave-happy-endings/> [Accessed 27 January 2021].


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