Star Wars: Visions Memories 05

Looking back, I’m still amazed at how close the final story of Screecher’s Reach is to that first 3am pitch. That almost never happens. At least for me. 

Some great things came from the work we did together. The big one for me was the introduction of the medal device. That showed that this girl, who would become known as Daal, had been groomed over time and it told us how this happened without ever needing it to be explained. The medal idea came from Will and, for me, that was a huge part of pulling this story together and making it work. 

One part that was there in the scripting phase that didn't make it into the short was a little village outside the cave. I imagine I'll bring that up again later. But mostly, the story came together very well.

Except for that opening.

Oh man, that opening. How many times did we rework and rewrite that? Honestly, I don't know. But we really struggled with it. Here's the pitch version:

“Some kids are up to no good, gathering their friends. They found the haunted cave! One young girl is sitting at the top of a piece of equipment as they come to get her. She climbs down with ease but she doesn't believe it. “There is no haunted cave!” But they say they heard of someone who found it. People even say it's what drove Old Henson mad! 

With an excited spirit of adventure, this bunch of kids sneak off to see the haunted cave.”

So farm kids on an adventure. But how best to set up our main character? We thought about the fact that she is Force sensitive. So would she be ostracised? Had she done things before that had people thinking she was weird or a threat? Hated by her parents? Yes, she had at least one parent at one point. 

But very quickly we realised that a core emotional beat would be Daal leaving this group of friends for another life. We likened it to someone leaving their small town to go to Sith University. For that to have any emotional weight, we needed some kind of attachment. With most of the short focussed on Daal and the ghost, how do we give weight to her leaving this group? And we tried so many versions of the opening in order to set up this group of friends, with our main character clearly being the outsider wanting to get out of there. 

We had a version where we began with Daal being neglected by a parent and so she bands together with her friends to steal speeders from outside a cantina. Then we dropped the parent and decided to make them orphans and, instead, we had an opening that was a whole breakout sequence as the kids try to distract the lady of the house so they can escape from an oppressive orphanage to adventure – Daal, Baython, Quina and Vivi. Yes, those last two names are from Final Fantasy IX (not the reason we changed the names – see if you can guess why). The orphanage became an oppressive workhouse, inspired by Ireland's dark past, and we were getting closer. 

Except for one thing... our opening was way too long.

It was a whole short film in itself. Like a prequel to our main story. We were introducing each character, who they are, what they do, how they interact with the group and doing so in action (isn't that the best way?) as they band together to escape the workhouse where they were doomed to be workers… or maybe just kids with no other choice. What was happening is that we were overthinking it. We could get to our story quicker. And by just showing our characters together in that situation, even for just a couple of minutes, we would have to trust that people get them. And that they understand this world.

The workhouse essentially became just a single shot. That's all we needed.

From there, we get straight into the premise and out to the adventure. And I'm going to make it sound easy, even though we tortured over it, all it actually took was the tiniest of moments – Quinn kicking Keena up the arse, Keena on Daal's shoulders and so on – to tell us everything we need to know about this group. Sometimes you just have to trust your characters and your audience.

So we did. And it worked. 

More on that visual storytelling soon...