From Script to Screen #2 - Outline

Our idea was ambitious – it needed to be witty, silly and genuinely funny, while at the same time fit within our £100 budget and the locations available to us. It would be a challenge to pull it off, but with the right story and the right script, it could be done.

As all of us were enthusiastic about the prospect of our creation, we held a meeting to decide more of the details and come up with an outline for the script. This resulted in a bombardment of ideas being vomited out into the open, and while most were genuinely  funny or exciting, they all mixed together to create a big stinking puke cocktail. We wanted a skit with a dog and a skit with a tent and a skit with ghillie suits and a hundred other things. Fortunately for us, our prop master was able to provide us with some of these items but even then, putting it all together was no easy task. By the end of the meeting we had a number of great ideas, but nothing tying them together, so the writing team, our creative agitation satisfied, agreed to meet again.

This second meeting was much more productive. We came up with a title - ‘A man’s manly guide to being a man’ - as well as agreeing on a silly, surreal tone for the film. We also went deeper with Wolf de Danger’s character, detailing that his dad left him at an early age, resulting in a deep fear of fathering his pregnant girlfriend’s child, hence the survival show to prove that he is worthy. Furthermore, we decided on a climax for the story – Wolf would suffer a cut to his leg early on, which then becomes infected and leads to vivid hallucinations, a howling mental breakdown, and a sudden fainting.

After working this out, fitting the pieces together seemed to get a lot easier. We got a full treatment written, consisting of 14 scenes, and allocated the scenes between the writing team, choosing to split the actual writing of it into three acts.  I took responsibility for the first act, the first five pages. It was time to put pen to paper.