Reading Light - Initial Idea

The second project I started on, with just a few weeks to go until the end of the semester, I gave a working title of 'Reading Light'.

This is the Proposal and Treatment for it:

Proposal Form


Originally it was to be about a boy who loved to read, but started reading less and less as he got older, only to rediscover his love for reading.

While I really liked this idea, mainly because it reflects my own relationship to reading, I found that it lacked dramatic effect. There is no real problem for the protagonist.

I read through the book Writing the Short Film (2005) and picked up a few pointers that would be useful to me. Among those was the direct relation between the goal of the protagonist and the problem between the two (e.g. the protagonist drops something into the water, but can't swim to retrieve it) (Cooper and Dancyger 2005). This was picked up and discussed in various chapters and in various relations throughout the book.
After reading that it pretty much just clicked into place. The protagonist loves reading, which, in a sense, is the goal. Therefore I needed something that would prevent him from doing so. The obvious, but also very diversely applicable answer was for him to be blind. A physical problem with no immediately obvious solution. The boy would have to be blind, recently blind to be more precise.
The conflict therefore is an internal one the protagonist faces.
While the direct narrative focuses on the boy's love for reading and the impact his recent blindness has on this, it is also a metaphor for the boy's overall situation, the impact being blind has in all corners of one's life.

From the beginning, there was a secondary character, a reading light. It serves two purposes. On one hand it symbolises the boy's joy in reading. Its other purpose is a direct connection the boy makes between it and reading. The boy connects his reading time with his reading light. He has to use the reading light when reading. Therefore, while the reading light serves a personal purpose to the boy, it also serves a narrative purpose as a symbol.

I will go into further detail in following pages.





References:

Cooper, P. & Dancyger, K. (2005) Writing the short film. 3rd edition. Burlington, MA, Elsevier Focal Press.