A man obsessed with his dead wife kidnaps a young boy and takes him to a mysterious land where they encounter a strange and possibly dangerous creature and find themselves in a fight for their lives.
Assignment-
The assignment I chose was TV Guide Remix. For it, I needed to create a new synopsis that, while factually correct, makes the storyline feel as if it would be something drastically different. This assignment looked like a lot of fun. In the end, however, it was a lot harder thinking of a good fake synopsis than I originally thought. I chose Up because I felt as if there were various parts of the movie I could work into the synopsis to make it seem like a different movie.
This writing assignment requires me to take the synopsis of a T.V. show, movie or book and rewrite the plot in a way where the plot is still factually the same, but feels very different. Here is my take:
A young man named Marty gets into a pretty cool looking car but when he gets out, he ends up in a world in which he hasn’t been born yet. As he tries to find a way back to his time, Marty attempts to stay away from his young, hot mom hitting on him and to help his nerdy dad get a date to prom. If his parents don’t dance together then Marty dies. Marty enlists the help of a crazy old guy and they decide Marty needs to ruin a perfectly good clock to generate the power he needs to make that cool looking car to run correctly again. Will Marty avoid losing all of this body parts and still make it back to where he came from?
As you may have guessed, this is my attempt to remix the plot from Back to the Future. This is one of my favorite movies from the 80s and I thought it would be fun to remix considering how strange it already sounds on it’s on. There is obviously a lot of detail I was forced to leave out considering the nature of the assignment as a synopsis, but I might use Back to the Future for a different assignment later in the semester because I love it so much. I tried to be as dramatic as possible. I thought the thumbnail featuring The Wizard of Oz for this assignment was hysterical, so check that out if you’re interested.
This assignment is 2.5 stars which puts me at 6 stars so far. Until next time!
A father lets his son get kidnaped and put in a prison colony in Australia. After tricking a girl with memory loss into befriending him, she finds out the father’s really just a selfish prick.
For my first Writing Assignment, I chose to complete a “TV Guide Remix” (http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/tv-guide-remix/). The goal of the assignment is to approach an existing film or show by shifting the characterization of the story and plot as significantly as possible with a TV/movie synopsis of one to two sentences. In generating my initial idea, I limited my potential movie options to animated films (as details and scenes could more easily be referenced online to remind myself of each plot). From this idea, I became interested in “The Little Mermaid”, a hugely popular film which was nonetheless critiqued throughout the years for having the lead character be too focused on her potential love-interest. This gave me the idea of changing the genre described in the synopsis from a romantic, family-friendly, and musical fantasy into a psychological thriller. Below is the film synopsis I created:
The Little Mermaid:
After falling in love with a wealthy stranger while he is vulnerable and unconscious, Ariel decides to leave her home and undergo significant cosmetic changes; after allowing her to room in a building he owns without Ariel saying anything about herself, Eric notices increasingly strange incidents start to occur.
This synopsis clearly contrasts with a two-sentence synopsis of comparable length displayed below.
I found this assignment to be an enjoyable writing puzzle of sorts, with larger amounts of rewriting and sentence restructuring necessary to complete my goal than I had expected. I’d recommend this assignment as an easy-to-intermediate experiment in creative writing. I found that I was able to inject thriller tropes into my synopsis to mislead the reader using actual facts from the movie effectively, after doing some story research again. It’s not immediately identifiable to me why I chose to darken the context of a lighthearted story instead of the reverse, but I found the finished product to be both creepy and amusing.
Tired of the army, a soldier escapes with one of the prisoners and teams up with a warrior and her robot to destroy a planet.
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens
__________
This prompt was super fun to think about. What would a movie look like if it was only given one sentence of description, and that sentence was horribly misconstrued? Originally, I wanted to make this blurb western-themed, but going for a more recent and widely known film sounded more appealing in the end. After lots of speculation, I decided to go with the latest addition to the Star Wars films, since so many people have seen it and the references would be easier to get. A lot more happened in the movie than a group of misfits going to destroy a planet, but once you remove the context the whole plotline sounds like a terrible idea, which I enjoy quite a bit.
Despite my final blurb being so small, I spent a lot of time making sure it sounded right. I took the time to pick out the right words so it would flow like a brief movie description as opposed to a joke. The exercise here came with a lot of word choice and brevity practice. Making a short joke that sounds entirely serious is a writing task worth spending more than a few minutes on. Hopefully it sounds convincing enough!
Take an existing movie or television show and change the writing of the synopsis in a way where it’s still factual correct, yet the story line feels drastically different.
After a whole afternoon of thinking, I came up with a couple ideas for National Treasure, How to Train Your Dragon, and TURN: Washington’s Spies, but I found myself just repeating the plot, and not remixing it in any way. It wasn’t until I bounced a few ideas off of my roommate that things actually started to click. It was then that we came up with twisted plots for Annie, The Walking Dead, and Aristocats, but I eventually found an alternative and came up with my own. Can you guess which movie this twisted plot belongs to? (I might have given it away in the title… Oops)
Animate kitchenware plot to entrap a young maiden for their grotesque master.
The title actually sounds a bit horrifying, doesn’t it? What if you were captured and held hostage by animate cups and plates? What would you do?
Do they still have TV Guides? I haven’t looked at one since the 90s. The cable people I know all use the on-screen guides, and the rest of us out here in the wilderness are lucky if we can get two channels, so what’s the point of a guide?
But I liked the TV Guide remix assignment anyway. It might be fun to try to put a different spin on things.
The Postman Always Rings Twice – A kindly gentleman takes in a wild animal, with disastrous results.
I’m not sure if that feels drastically different, but bringing the predatory cat metaphor into the synopsis makes for a little verbal sleight-of-hand.
Chinatown – A private detective leads an eye-opening expose on corruption in the Los Angeles Water Dept.
OK, that was bad. I read a commentary on Chinatown many years ago which pointed out all the foreshadowing of the final scene that goes on throughout the movie, and that’s all I can see when I watch it now.
The Wild Party – White queen takes black pawn. Black pawn takes white king. It’s all in the game.
After Wire106, that couldn’t be helped, sorry. I don’t think any of these lives up to the Wizard of Oz example given in the assignment, but there the best I could do in the time frame I gave myself. In each case I looked for a less than obvious angle to take on the stories.
Star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, meet at the funeral of both there parents, who had died over a great battle that all started when their mothers were wearing the same designer: Shouks Pearuttion. When their fathers got word of the petty fight, they too consumed themselves in battle over snotty comments aimed at against each others tennis abilities. The attacks became violent, and ended when both parents fell off the cliff they were fighting on. As a result, a love forms, but Romeo and Juliet have trouble finding their own paths when their daughter dates a Maroni, Romeo’s first girlfriend’s family.
The Assignment Bank is FULL of such creative things to do! For this post, I’m focusing on TV Guide Remix which I found to be challenging and extremely fun. I’m a very big Disney fan, so I thought the best movie I could pick for this assignment was Frozen! (Did you automatically think of Frozen when you read the title? Because when you think about it, that is really what happened.) If you haven’t seen this movie, then you are totally missing out! The Disney workers have definitely outdone themselves this time. If you do fall into this category, which is lame, here is a synopsis about the movie, according to IMBd.
“When the newly crowned Queen Elsa accidentally uses her power to turn things into ice to curse her home in infinite winter, her sister, Anna, teams up with a mountain man, his playful reindeer, and a snowman to change the weather condition.”
Now there are a lot of other details that didn’t make it into this synopsis, which may make my remix a little strange, but I am just going off the hunch that EVERYONE has seen Frozen. So here is the GREAT TV GUIDE REMIX AS CREATED BY ME!
In a movie where things aren’t what they seem to be, come watch three orphans save the city from eternal turmoil. Anna was told she wasn’t allowed to get married by her manic-depressive sister-queen, Elsa, who ends up running away because she doesn’t know how to love. Come follow Anna as she stomps through an ever-lasting blizzard with a man she doesn’t know, and the help of unorthodox methods of survival. Will Elsa’s creation of life be the end of Anna? Or will an uneaten carrot be the most important part of the story?
Now, I had a little bit of trouble when I was trying to write the remix. It is actually hard to come up with a new description of something that you know so well AND make it sound completely different. One thing that really helped me was the Honest Frozen Trailer.
If you haven’t seen this youtube series, you are missing out. They basically take movies and make trailers about them that are hilarious AND accurate. It is basically this same assignment, but in movie trailer form. (Also you should watch the Lion King one if you have some free time). Anyway, I was really inspired by some of the things they mentioned in this trailer, and it actually helped me in writing the rest of my synopsis. I honestly felt like I was in second grade again, going through the 5 stages of writing. I had the prewriting stage where I decided what movie I wanted to use. Then I went to the drafting stage, where I decided what part of the story I wanted to tell, and put down ideas on paper. I mostly wrote individual sentences, and then pasted them together where I felt they fit and made sense. Then I moved on to the revising stage which was really me taking what I had already written and changing it completely. I made sure to stay organized and keep the words I felt made the biggest statement. Then I moved on to the editing stage… AKA now which is me writing this entire post. I’ve been going back and changing things and making sure it all makes sense and flows nicely. The last stage is publishing…but I’ll get there when I get there.
I chose this assignment for a few different reasons. For one, it sounded like fun, but it also sounded like a challenge. I like things that make me think. I don’t get a lot of time to do creative things like this as a Math major, so this assignment AND this entire class is basically a whole new world to me. I also felt like this was a great way to step outside of my comfort zone. I usually like things to be quick and to the point, but this assignment made me have to use more detail and thought. Movies are going to be a huge part of this class, and while Frozen may not be a piece of Noir, it still has some of the features of Noir, especially when you focus on Elsa and the repression of her feelings. Talk about deep. I also made this because I felt as though I could really transform Frozen into something else while keeping it exactly the same. (That sounds really abstract, which is so exciting for me and my math brain). I wanted to do something that would interest me and make the assignment more fun.
As a future teacher, this assignment is definitely something I would want to do with my older kids (4th – 6th grades). I feel as though you can do so much with just this one assignment. It really gets you thinking about perspective, and how one thing can be said in so many different ways. I think that this is something important that we should be teaching children. Everyone tells the same story differently, and as long as the facts are the same, does the way we tell the story matter? I definitely would say that it does. My synopsis of Frozen and what most people would tell you Frozen is about are COMPLETELY different, but they both tell the exact same story. It is amazing how much words can change things. This assignment really opened my eyes to that. It is definitely something I am going to consider as the semester goes on.
