New Idea For Piece 2

I have decided to change my idea for my second piece. I am going to channel the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and take the child's fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and merge it with zombies. Snow White escapes her evil stepmother who sends out her zombie minions (the dwarfs) to trap Snow White. Snow White manages to beat the dwarfs in combat with the help of a passing prince and he takes the diamond eye out of one of the dwarfs and proposes to Snow White with it! I will be writing in the style of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the original story-tellers.

 

The diamond eye!

My First Style Model

My first style model for my second piece is an article written by Charlie Brooker for his column in The Guardian newspaper, Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn. It was published on 16th January 2010 and was titled That's Snow Business, a play-on-words from the well known quote 'That's show business'. I chose this because i liked the attitude and presence that Brooker manages to express in his articles and i also liked the way he mocks and creates humour at the expense of others. He plays on words a lot and and his use of long to short sentence structure makes some phrases seem blunt and no-nonsense. His lexical choice is very entertaining and it is the main contributer to the humour found in this people of writing. I also like the hypothetical situations and the ridiculousness that he expresses in the outcomes of these hypothetical stories.

Charlie Brooker's Screen burn

This week Charlie's been watching the endless rolling snow-news

Guardian Saturday 16 January 2010

 

 

That's snow business.

Oh, how it snowed. It snowed like a bitch. It snowed so hard you could be forgiven for thinking God had decided planet Earth was naught but an embarrassing celestial typo and was desperately trying to Tipp-Ex it out of existence. The build-up was unrelenting: everywhere you looked a compacted strata of white powder looked back at you. It was like being trapped in one of Shaun Ryder's nostrils circa 1992. But colder. Much colder. It was so cold your breath hung in the air before you, then froze, plummeted and broke your foot. And icy. Did I mention it was icy? It was so icy that if you lived in a south-facing house in Edinburgh and slipped outside your front door, you'd slide all the way to Plymouth and fly off the edge of Britain without passing a single frictional surface along the way. Not that you'd drown: the sea was frozen too, so you'd simply carry on skidding, all the way around the entire circumference of the globe, eventually ending up back where you started. Where you'd find a news crew waiting to interview you.

 

You may think I'm exaggerating. So do I. But I've been watching the saturation news coverage of Britain's cold snap and consequently it's hard not to view the snowfall through apocalyptic eyes. The thick layer of snow received, quite literally, blanket coverage. As far as the 24-hour rolling networks were concerned, this wasn't a freak weather condition. This was war. Death from the skies. Earth versus the Ice Warriors. Snowmageddon.

Actually, "Snowmageddon" would've been a good name for it. Every news crisis needs a snappy name. The BBC initially christened it "Frozen Britain". Sky opted for "The Big Freeze", and everyone else eventually fell into line. The minute the government started issuing guidance about not making journeys unless strictly necessary, the reporters hit the road. Every five minutes we had to go live to some poor sod standing outdoors in Benson or Brome or Bromsgrove or Birmingham, shivering like a man with a vibrator in his pocket, telling us how cold it was through his chattering teeth. Not that you could actually see him: chances are he was obliterated by an alabaster flurry.

Presumably at some point the British climate had promised to behave and then unceremoniously reneged on the deal, because everyone kept referring to the weather as "treacherous". The phrase "treacherous conditions" was repeated like a mantra, like a catchy tune the news couldn't shift.

Every witch-hunt has its victims, and before long the accusing finger pointed at roads and pavements: the reporters screamed that these too were "treacherous", and presumably had been in cahoots with the weather all along. Icy patches on pathways provided the news with chucklesome footage of people falling over and agitated soundbites in which aggrieved pratfallers complained about the lack of grit on pavements. You can't please some people. One minute they're whining about the mollycoddling nanny state, the next they're insisting the council employs a man to walk directly in front of them, shovelling grit beneath each potential footfall.

 

Not that there was grit to spare for the pavements. The news was neurotic about dwindling grit. When they weren't throwing live to a man with snow up to his armpits they were linking to a woman in a Puffa jacket close to tears at a gritting depot.

 

Gritting depots don't usually get this much prime-time TV exposure. There's never been a rough-and-tumble comedy drama starring Jimmy Nail set in a gritting depot, or a Live From the Gritting Depot variety hour. Why? Because gritting depots are unbelievably boring, a fact the news did its best to prove for several thousand hours.

 

At the time of writing, the Big Freeze began to thaw – or at least it did in the south, where the news is – and consequently fell off the running order. Still, it was fun while it lasted. But only if you prefer gazing into a snow globe to actually watching the news.

 

Coursework Piece 2 Idea

For my second piece, I would like to write an editorial in the style of Charlie Brooker. It would be about gingers and would highlight the typical stereotypes surrounding people with ginger hair and bring to light the ridiculousness of many arguments and rumours about people with ginger hair. I am going to explain some of the rumours/ stereotypes and then look at the point of view of those who have ginger hair themselves. It will be very sarcastic and possibly insulting but hopefully in a humorous way!

19. Commentry 1st Draft

Commentary- ‘Disorientated’ Monologue

I wrote a monologue, including stage directions and realistic speech patterns. Other genre requirements, like anecdotes and personal opinions, ensure that the listener feels like the speaker is speaking spontaneously and with authenticity. My monologue is intended to be spoken in a theatre and is aimed toward older theatre-goers. The purpose is to entertain and inform the audience of the strain and stress experienced by the soldiers in WW1. I want the reader to feel the soldier’s pain, disorientation and desperation and think about the many lives that were taken. I also want them to know that their last thoughts were thoughts of love, not of hate.

I had four main style models for my first draft and added another for my second draft. I used the novel Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo, the script of the movie War Horse directed by Steven Spielberg, the end monologue from the film American Beauty (1999) and the play Journey’s End by R.C. Sheriff. For my second draft, I added a monologue written by Alan Bennett called Her Big Chance.

My mind-map helped me create my first draft; however that draft wasn’t formatted correctly and was written more for theatrical purposes, like the War Horse script. I rewrote my monologue using my new style model as a template and my 2^nd draft was more about the speech than the visuals. After some verbal feedback, I added detail to the section in Pa’s shop, making the characters seem more real and I changed the ending in order to include a reference to disorientation.

I started with an idiom that was frequently used at that time as well as a contraction of the dysphemism ‘toffee nosed’, meaning posh. My lexical choice reflects the period, for example ‘Blighty’, and also the grammar and vocabulary used by each social class. A few words, like ‘dis-disory-tation’ are spelt out phonetically, the way a child would say them and indicating the individual sounds and complicated pronunciation. By using prosodic features, like ‘(sigh)’ and ‘(getting louder)’, I am giving emphasis to certain points. The change in volume shocks the audience and shows them how the soldiers tended to go mad with ‘shell shock’. To highlight this, I have also included cross-cutting between anecdotes to represent the muddled nature of their thoughts and feelings. In the last paragraph, I included direct address that was directed at other characters, but as though they were in the audience. I think that this makes the audience more emotional, like they have a more personal connection with not only the speaker but also those he is speaking to. By talking to his wife about their wedding day, the audience is looking into their intimate memories and can feel the emotion.

My final result was very different to what I had originally planned but I think it was still successful in meeting my aims for the monologue. I managed to stick to my proposal sheet for the majority of my points and I am happy with the finished result.