For myself at least, I'm always more interested in stories with female leads. Not only are action stories featuring a granite-jawed man's man as a hero a dime a dozen, but when written properly female characters have a fascinating aspect to them: the way they adhere or fight against the societal roles they are forced into. A male hero shooting up a bunch of bad guys? No-one would blink twice. A female hero doing the same? That's different. While the technique of just writing a lead who happens to be female works well enough (e.g. Ripley in Aliens, Sarah Connor in Terminator 2), it's more interesting to explore that character being treated differently, like the age-old "don't hit a girl" rule, the notion reinforced by child-focused media that the boys go off on adventures and battle evil and such while the girls go shopping and groom themselves, the fact that thought society is slowly becoming more open there's a long way to go before there's no more people insisting that girls doing anything other than gossip and have tea parties is "un-ladylike". All of these things are real issues, double standards and prejudices that women face in real life, and seeing how a character reacts to them can add a massive amount of depth to a character.
Sadly, though, this is a five-minute intro starring what turned out to be a male lead actor, so that's all just hypothesis and plans for the imaginary rest of the film at this point. While we're on the subject of the rest of the film, the vague idea I had while brainstorming with Sam was that it would be a sort of Men in Black with werewolves and vampires. Of course, when you say that, it sounds rather unoriginal to just copy a popular movie and just replace one popular imaginary concept with another. However, Night Shift is Men in Black with supernatural creatures in the same way that Alien is Jaws in space. While the general idea is pretty close, there's no scene of the Xenomorph attacking a tourist resort on a desert planet, no argument with a Weyland-Yutani exec about evacuating a colony in the middle of tourist season, and upon sighting the creature no-one exclaims "we're gonna need a bigger space ship". My point is that while our project might be structurally or conceptually similar to Men in Black, we're not attempting to mimic it or rip it off. The connection isn't a creative one, but rather a marketing one. You need a good tagline when pitching to executives, and "[popular movie] but with [popular cultural element]" is one of the most effective. "Jaws in space" worked for Alien, and if Night Shift were a full feature, "Men in Black with werewolves and vampires" is a damn good marketing ploy.
And that's about all I have to say on the script. The entire thing is reprinted below.
With the storyboards, this was the first time I had to produce some digitally. Although the drawing of them was easy with the ArtStudio app for iPad, creating a storyboard with them was hell. The only way to insert text was with text boxes in Word, and I could not figure out in time how to get it so I could place the storyboard template (an image file) in the background with a text box above without it moving the background images around, let alone fitting in all the text without it being so small as to be unreadable. Thus, while I understand the storyboard fine, a) it was made before I knew what the locations looked like and thus had to be largely scrapped anyway, and b) to anyone else would be unintelligable. However, to prove that they do exist, here are some random pages.
"Night Shift" is © 2012 Ashley Watts. Unauthorised reproduction or distribution is prohibited.
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