School of Film and TV - Theses
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ItemDissenting fiction re-righting law: practice-led research into biopolitics, women’s rights and reproductive justice in Ecuador( 2017)Through a feature-length screenplay and accompanying dissertation this creative practice as research project addresses questions of biopolitics, women’s rights and reproductive justice. The research focuses on my own country, Ecuador, but alludes to a broader Latin American context. In this research, the practice of fiction screenplay writing configured my own understanding of the addressed issues. Based on this understanding, in the dissertation, reflecting upon “The Ladies Room” screenplay, I formulate an explanation around these issues. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on the legislative context of “The Ladies Room” story. The second, third, fourth and fifth chapters articulate the possible world the screenplay proposes, relative to our four protagonists, respectively. The first chapter juxtaposes Ecuadorian Constitutional and Criminal Law, and public policy, against international human rights instruments with regard to women’s rights. Through the screenplay’s character of Isabel, the second chapter interrogates reproductive coercion and access to safe abortion, the notion of potentiality (not) to, the institution of motherhood and the practice of mothering. The third chapter revolves around Marcia, and how this female character embodies forms of biopolitical power that discipline the body and regulate the population; this chapter also reflects upon the family as an institution and the differential valuation between productive and reproductive work. In the fourth chapter, I understand Alice as a gendered configuration of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and it is through her that the screenplay investigates the possibilities of speaking and been heard, the historically conflicting appearance of women before law, and contemporary forms of thanatopolitics. The fifth chapter interrogates the notion of “unwanted” children, articulated by the character of a little girl, Karlita. This proposes a reflection about a child, any child, as a being-after-birth, the pure possibility of a life, that is a life-to-be-mothered, characterized by a constitutive relationality. The dissertation’s final chapter argues for the necessity of beings-after-birth to create another form of biopolitics, one that is no longer a technology of power over life, but of power of life.
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ItemChaos, order and uncertainty when writing narrative for animation( 2017)Advocating rules for inventing stories circumvents the complete experiences of writing. How can the writer best embrace uncertainty, draw on the known and expose their work to enlivening spontaneity? This research examines four animation projects written under different conditions using different approaches to making the narrative. Each work gradually leads to a direct approach, bringing the writing experience closer to the act of animating.
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ItemOn the same page: an exploration of the co-screenwriting experience( 2014)Most commercial screen product created in the last century has been the result of collaboration between two or more writers. However, while there exists a significant body of research into the areas of both ‘collaboration’ and ‘screenwriting’, very little exists which interrogates their nexus. This practice-led thesis begins to address that gap by firstly investigating the process of co-screenwriting through my writing collaboration with John Studley on the feature-length screenplay, The Last Resort. Throughout the writing of the screenplay I maintained observational diaries, transcribed audio recordings of writing sessions and reflected on communication and collaboration patterns. Secondly, this thesis also attempts to contextualise this collaboration between two screenwriters constructing a feature-length screenplay by examining various co-authoring models used. In spite of the fact that the majority of film scripts are credited to one writer, I suggest that collaborative screenwriting within the film industry is highly prevalent, particularly in Hollywood, where it takes many guises, both overt and covert, willing and unwilling. I further suggest that historically, the rigid modern screenplay format used by many contemporary screenwriters developed as a by-product of studio-enforced collaborations during the silent-movie era of Hollywood and, therefore, this particular form of the screenplay may be ideally suited to co-writing. Through the examination of my own collaborative screenwriting practices, I conclude that a prolonged and well-considered prewriting phase may be highly desirable to the quality of the final screenplay and the health of the collaborative process. I propose that conversational collaboration (writing every word together) can be an effective technique between two screenwriters; and that conversational collaboration significantly enhances the vocabulary required to successfully co-write and strengthens what is, possibly, the most important ingredient of all successful collaborations: trust.