Saturday 29th November - Monday 1st December - Film Story Building

This lesson proved pivotal in shaping our film's story, as we showed our plan to Seb and made what we thought were final preparations before filming. Seb liked our concept and moral premise, but also remarked that our story wasn't 'high-concept', in that it didn't exactly create a situation that would be unexpected to a viewer. To remedy this, he suggested that we look at the film from the point of view of a female-to-male transgender person, as issues with trans- and homophobia are often dealt with solely from a male point of view, thanks in part to the stereotypical 'macho culture' objections to such things. Looking at these issues from the point of view of a woman, wishing to be male and struggling to find an accepting social group, is something not addressed often in media and was our chance to make something unique and original.

Sean Penn in Milk, a film documenting the life, work and death of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to a major political position. While the film is candid and respectful in its treatment of homosexuality, for which it should rightly be praised, a predominantly male main cast fails to break away from Hollywood's standard white male leading roles (albeit in this case historical reasons somewhat justify it).

We went back to the drawing board, and during the rest of that lesson and the next Monday our group worked on recreating our obstacle grid, before creating a full storyboard and shot plan detailing the progression of events and how we would structure and record each shot. We decided to have the scene take place at the protagonist's house, having friends arrive early and force a confrontation during which the reveal that the main character was trans would take place. Planning went quite well, I thought, and though I was not able to be present during filming due to prior work commitments I felt confident that the group would be able to record good footage based on our strong planning, and looked forward to seeing the results.