Casimir Effect Novella
About 5 years ago the director wrote a shot story as part of a science fiction convention competition, the story was never finished but the core of it was developed. The story of the first time traveller, as woman as yet unnamed who tried to travel into her own past to give herself advice to stop her life going to hell, she was similar to Alice, but was originally married to Bob and the time travel experiment failed. Rather than travelling through time, the plot revolved around alternate universes and ended up with several different Alice’s? A great story, but possibly not a great movie, I won’t give too much away as not to spoil the better bits which we kept.
We took some of the core elements of the story, and reworked them to make them more filmic and visually interesting. We also brought in other character from the NeuroSys setting, characters we knew well and loved who would add an element of intrigue and subtle hints to clandestine events and activates. This would also bring Casimir Effect into a bigger and more vibrant world which could be used to add depth and substance to the story. This also offers us a bigger world to use should we get the chance to expand or redevelop Casimir Effect for television.
In December 2008 we planned the core plot points or each character using index cards, we shuffled them around until we had a structure and plot development that was interesting and offered an air of mystery. The cards sat on our wall for about 2 months each few days we looked it over added or move something to make the story as interesting as possible. We then told the cards down and left it for a few more months, to give us time to detach ourselves from it so we could come back with fresh ideas.
April 2009 we began the first draft of the treatment, however we realised that to get the most out of the story we had to write it as prose rather than a condensed treatment. This enabled us to dig deeper into the characters and the subtext of the story. So we batted the Novell back and forth until we reached the fourth draft, then we let it out to people we knew and trusted to give us solid feedback about what is wrong and what is right. We then worked hard on the fifth draft to make it tight and keep the characterisation consistent.
By this time it was June and we started to look at turning the story into a script, we know we would have to change things and loose some elements but this is how things go when adapting a story.
In the next instalment, script development, revisions and read throughs.