Wave Your Arms

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Vivid. WYA's first screenplay, finished.

The one sheet used to pitch the screenplay in Cannes. Designed by Tony Allen of Big Time Pictures

I finished my first Screenplay this year.  We often use film clips and allusions to stories and storytelling techniques in the sessions we run at work.  One of the best is the clip from the end of Shawshank Redemption where Red talks about “HOPE”.  We used the clip with a leadership group of senior bankers just after Lehman collapsed.  The SR story about a banker who goes to jail for a crime he did not commit... somehow resonated with some of our audience.  Anyway, VIVID is the screenplay.  105 pages.  A killer to write as after wading through Robert McKee, Syd Field, Save the Cat and half a dozen other books on screenwriting there so much of science to the art of telling the story that sometimes form and structure and process take over the joy of simply telling the tale.  Still rules are rules, and no one will read it if the rules are broken.  Which reminded me of some of the feedback we hear from our business leadership teams.  Organisations are human - somehow made unnatural by bureaucracy, process, risk frameworks and procedures manuals.  Sometimes creativity and imagination feel squeezed out completely.  Organisations need to find an outlet for this. Not everyone wants to lock themselves in a bunker for three months and finish a screenplay - but music, comedy, writing, photography, singing, art, drawing, poetry... seldom if ever are things of the workplace.  But often these are the ways people express their souls.  It seems a shame if the soul gets left at the door when we show our security pass in the morning.  I will let you know how we get on with VIVID.  The chances of ANYTHING happening with it are considerably less than ZERO...but you never know.