Unfortunately I have not been keeping up with my blog for the past few weeks however I have been hard at work and in this post I will summarise the rest of my scripting experience in this one post by recapping what changes were made in drafts 5, 6 and 7 of the scripts.
Draft 5
I had a lot of work to do in draft 5 of the script. In draft 4 I didn't feel like I had changed that much and that came to light when receiving feedback for it. In turn I put a lot of effort into reworking this draft. One of the more concerning parts of the script was the Toby's dad scenes, in draft 4 I tried to make him this "mentally unstable" character in order to create more comical situations however as this was pointed out to me it doesn't really explain why Toby became what he is today. Toby's reclusive habits come from his father and having his father come across as a "nutter" doesn't add anything to the story. So to correct this I made him a more of a reclusive character who seems reluctant do do anything social, much like Toby but on a more extreme level.
One more worrying thing about draft 4 was the fundamental screenwriting techniques which came across pretty poorly. This included bad spelling and grammar, not capitalising characters and sound, thin scene descriptions and poor character introductions. These mistakes were simply caused by overconfidence in my previous drafts and were simple mistakes which were overlooked. I went through these and made sure to correct all of my mistakes in order to make the script read better and appear more professional.
One last part which need changing to add more comedy value was the appearance of the youths which are now schoolkids. Though I was very reluctant to change the appearance because of the original idea in my head, I decided to make the youths appear younger and more childlike whilst also giving them the appearance of "wannabe gangstas", by changing this it did make the scene funnier and more fucked up which was needed since the tennis club scene towards the end is one of the best bits in my opinion.
Overall with Draft 5 I believe that this is the draft which has made the most progress in my experience of this project. In this I corrected all the mistakes that I missed out on in the previous drafts and made some huge changes to the characters which was needed to make the story flow more easily.
Draft 6
When receiving feedback for draft 5 I was very pleased to hear that the amount of corrections I had to do was below half of what I had to do from draft 4. This meant that I was definitely making progress and the script and story was flowing a lot better. Out of the few corrections I had to do there were some which were still essential for the story.
One of the things that needed changing in draft 6 was the club scene. Though it was the biggest scene which would reveal all it was a 10 page long scene, regardless of the output or format this was a huge scene by any standard. It was my job to make sure that this was cut down as much as possible without affecting the story. This was tough since I've fallen in love with this scene so much and every piece of dialogue in it and it felt like a shame to cut it down, but nether the less it had to be done to make the whole story flow better. In total I managed to cut down 2 pages of the scene, though it doesn't seem too much I had to consider what was going to be included in that scene, I had to take into account the introductions, the crappy tennis game, the punching of schoolkids and everything else including the humorous dialogue which was the last thing I wanted to cut. But by cutting this all down it fit into 30 pages and I'm pretty happy with that.
Another major change that needed to be made was Bobbers' backstory. I changed this in draft 5 but it didn't seem clear enough and didn't give a proper insight into what made Bobbers start up the club. So what I did was include Bobbers' home life at the end of the script where we find out that Bobbers is doing all this to show his verbally abusive father that he can make friends. This also links Bobbers and Toby together somehow since they both had issues as children to do with fathers and friendship. This scene also gives an insight to the audience as to who Bobbers is as a character which is needed for the audience to keep people watching.
Draft 7
This was the final draft that I would receive feedback for so it was key that I corrected as much as possible before hand-in. Luckily there wasn't too much to correct in this final draft, I had to make sure that my spelling and grammar were on point and the ending was cut down and made less dramatic. These were easy corrections to make, I had someone proof read my script for and spelling errors and mistakes before reading it once more myself and edited the ending (Bobbers' backstory) to include one or too more jokes whilst cutting down a few more lines of unnecessary description.
Overall my experience of writing the script has been a crazy one with a lot of ups and downs, but throughout this whole process I have made sure to always make as many corrections to the script as possible whilst understanding why the changes were needed. This is by far the most effort I have ever put into a script and am pretty pleased as to how it has turned out.
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