Screenplay Research Dossier

Competitions

One of the competitions I could enter my script in would be the online competition bluecat. Bluecat is mainly an american competition but they also accept international screenplays in their main competition, they also have a special award aimed at feature length screenplays from the UK. My screenplay as a 10 page short would fall under the main short screenplay competition. There are a few Eligibility requirements that relate directly to my screenplay. These are that the script must be entirely mine (and or my co writers) sole property, short screenplays must be between 1 & 49 pages in length and the screenplay must be in English. My screenplay follows all of these, so there is no reason I would not be able to enter into the bluecat competition. If my screenplay was to win the competition the prize would be $10,000 (USD) for 1st place or for the next 3 runners up $2000 (USD).

Published Script Example

This script excerpt is from detective crime drama Death In Paradise Episode 3 "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" which I got off of the script archive page on BBC's Writers Room.

Research for Theme

After Act 1 of my screenplay my protagonist Marty has been struggling with depression for 2 years. He feels overwhelming guilt, he has no self- confidence, he thinks hes worthless, is in constant despair, is easily agitated and irritated, and isolates himself from those around him. These are all symptoms of Depression according to:

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/depression/symptoms/#.WRuCSWgrKp8

In act 1 he fails to stop 2 deaths due to his ego and over confidence. This started his decent into a depressive state. In between Acts 1 and 2 his wife leaves him due to the strain he was putting on their relationship, he gets quite seriously demoted due to his now lack of self confidence which causes more incidents, after this he then loses access to his daughter after not being able to keep up with child support payments due to both his drastic demotion and alcoholism.
According to:
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/depression/causes/#.WRuEMWgrKp8
These are valid causes  of depression as causes include life events such as: Losing Job, End of relationship and Major life changes.

Audience Research

To see if there would be interest in the idea I had for my screenplay I created a survey on Google Forms and put it out on social media. Straight away I need to say that the data I've collected is flawed as the majority of recipients to my survey were in the 18-20 age range so it only shows a small percentage of peoples responses to my screenplay idea. Also some of the responses I received were not serious answers, those that were not serious I deleted from the responses as they did not have any relevance to the data I collected.

 This information tells me that the majority of the respondents to my survey were in the age ranges 18-20. As I mentioned above I only planned to send this survey out to people I knew which is why I only had a small range of ages focused on. The results also tell me that most respondents don't really watch films much, just the occasional ones, and that non of their favourite film genres are crime films. However the majority would watch a crime drama short film (see Q6 responses) and that one of the films topics, depression, would not influence whether they wanted/ did not want to watch the film (see Q8 responses). Finally the majority of respondents thought my chosen film title, Believe, was a good name, and fit the idea well. (see Q10 responses)

Research of Existing Media

For existing media I looked at a handful of TV crime show episodes that feature negotiation. This included NCIS Season 3 episode 18 "Bait". This episode was relevant to study as it involved a young man taking his class hostage. In the episode NCIS Special agent Gibbs acts as a negotiator/mediator between the young man and his team after gaining entry to the classroom.
I also looked at the Die Hard film series as it uses the recurring theme of how the demanding job of a cop strains/destroys the cop's personal life. In the first Die Hard film the protagonist's aim at the start of the film is to try and reconcile with his estranged wife. In the third Die Hard McClane has been suspended and has fallen into alcoholism. In the 5th Die Hard, McClane's relationship with his son, Jack, is showed as strained as they've not spoken in years and Jack outright refuses McClane's help due to McClane never being there when he needed him when he was a child.