1. All scripts must be set roughly in the present day. This means that we don’t have to change scenery and costumes are easier.
2. They must take place in an unspecified small suburban town in England.
3. There is no prescribed genre at all.
4. The story has to take place roughly over six weeks but don’t be specific about the time period. In order to be able to have the stories running simultaneously it would be a good idea that there are regular points where the story jumps forwards an unspecified number of days or weeks (but not years) in order to be able to go to another story and then back again.
5. We all have to have at least one scene that features the Eric Morecambe statue in Morecambe (which probably makes point 2 a little redundant).
6. We can film in any screen ratio that we want and the finished film can jump between whatever we choose to film in. We will probably set it up to 16:9 but if anyone films anything different we will put black bars on the screen (down the sides for 4:3 or at the top and bottom for 2.35:1 or you can make up your own screen ratio if you can figure out how to film it)
7. You can shoot in colour or black and white or any combination of the two that you want and they’ll get mixed together in the finished film.
8. We didn’t set any limit on how many actors you can have in each script but as each actor can only play one part in the overall finished film (not just in each script) and we will probably all be picking from the same pool of Film co-op actors, they will run out fairly fast so after that you will have to find actors from elsewhere.
9. Whatever you write and choose to film you will have to cast, find the locations, dress the actors and basically be responsible for getting it all on the screen (Probably with lots of help from the film co-op members) so don’t make it any harder on yourself than you have to.
10. The deadline for the first drafts/treatments is the 16th February. After that we’ll start trying to make them all work as a single script which will undoubtedly mean that they get warped and changed somewhat.
11. The working title is Exquisite Corpse (which is based more on the way we’re writing it than on what we expect the finished film to be about. In case you don’t know it is a dinner party game where someone writes a line of a story and folds the paper over and hands it to the next person who writes the next line without reading the first one and so on until everyone has had a go and then you unfold the piece of paper and read the story). We felt it not only summed up the way we’re writing this but also it was a bit like Magnolia/Short Cuts/Love Actually in that it sounds meaningful but doesn’t tell us anything about the story we’re about to see. Anyway it may change when the film is finished.
12. Finally, all these guidelines are to help us make something roughly coherent. Don’t get too hung up on them. Just be sensible and realise that we can’t easily suddenly jump back to Jerusalem in Biblical times or something like that and if you write this it’ll probably not make it into the finished film. We didn’t discuss what will happen if people want to tell a story that has flashbacks or have a complicated non-linear structure (or something else), so again I would say that you can use them but just be realistic about it and be prepared for them to be changed when they are fitted into a finished script.
Well....good luck with that.
