Endoh’s Dungeon

Last year, I revealed my first secret. This year, I thought of revealing my second which not even my closest friend knew. I developed a liking to writing screenplays, and did so for four short films. I never really understood how it turned me on to be writing screenplays but for two short years I was doing that. Thinking back on those two years, I’m pretty spurred on that only two scripts required further editing by the senior writers. The remaining two, were used just the way I wrote them.

It all started when I was pursuing Mass Communications more than 10 years ago, where I had to work on a short film as a final project for TV & Radio Production module. I was encouraged greatly when my screenplay scored the second highest in the class. Funnily, my script never got back to me because my lecturer kept it. To get that kind of ego-boost, how can I not try my luck with writing more screenplays?

I always felt writing screenplays adds a whole new element to the expression with words. No doubt it’s often the eventual on-screen visuals that get into the audience, most of the final products still roots back to - words. Perhaps that is why working behind desks from 9am to 6pm was never really my cup of tea. It’s just like running an event, from mere words in a proposal to the physical aesthetics. It’s even more challenging when we’re trying to project human emotions. For a while, I reckon trying to act loving is much simpler than trying to sound loving on paper.

I think my most satisfactory project was writing “After Five”. The story depicted of three friends with very different family backgrounds, all night workers. The concept basically outlined peer’s influence, emotional occurrences and unique life experiences each of them went through. With each minute, their “fake frontages” were stripped down with detailed exploration of their true personalities. The last - personalities - is what I felt was the hardest.

There’s very little action like speeding cars or bursting guns of course, since it’s was a short film targeted at young adults, parents and more importantly… social workers. The satisfaction came about because I had the opportunity to explore various categories of mindsets. Don’t forget, there’s families and their environment too. That’s a very very very… *cough* … very difficult thing to achieve considering that I was still relatively young back then. How experience can I be in life to explore such topics?

Ironically, my greatest love wasn’t about writing an idea that popped out of my head. There was something that I once dreamt of doing, which is adapting novels into visual arts. The tricky part about novels is, how do we summarize a lengthy 500-700 pages of written story into 100 pages of screenplay? That was when I started to observe various films that were adapted from novels. Frankly, there will never be a film that can do that fully. A good average of a page of screenplay is anything between 30 seconds to 1 minute worth. If I have to use the full novel, I think the film will be at least 6 hours and the audiences eventually dozing off.

The other difficult thing about novel adaption, is the projection of the first person or second person role. I realized that most novel-adapted films tend to be filmed in the direct opposite of how the novel was written. If a novel starts with “He did this…”, the film is likely to start with “I did this…” instead. As I discovered, it’s not any easier.

The worst part to me, is having to read through a novel several times and each time it gives you a different feeling.

How can we actually squeeze that much information into a film then? Well, I know films usually plucked the essence and spirit of the story and project just that. Special attention is paid to the characters in the film, because these are the people who bring the story alive. Long before the filming starts, all these have to be translated on papers. It’s unfortunate, that I didn’t pursue writing screenplays professionally.

Live my dream? Maybe… maybe… too much dreams. Haha!

Don’t even talk to me about creating storyboards, I can’t draw for s***! I’ll rather stick to paper.