Creating a Character

• name: John Lee White
• Job: officially works for the E,P,A but actually is a CIA agent
• hobbies: likes extreme skydiving, and playing baseball
• likes: enjoys Red Robin and late night gaming
• dislikes: can’t stand when people make noise when they eat or eat with their mouths open
•  secrets: He got into the CIA by hacking the system

What if?

you’re at the grocery store… what if  the cereal starts to fly off the shelf? a portal to another dimension opens in the meats department. the floors start melting? then you start hearing voices that start telling you to ride a cart through the cereal section? what does he do he listens to the voice gets hit by flying cereal and falls through the portal and gets trapped in another dimension. (note he is insane)

• Students can play the “What if?” game, where they think of an ordinary situation or location and ask each person to come up with the craziest “what if?” scenario.
• It is important to remove logistics and parameters from the original brainstorm for this game.
• For example: You’re at a bus stop … what if: a bird flies into your head? the man beside you has a heart attack? a dog starts speaking to you? a dinosaur sticks its head out of the bushes? … From the list generated, which could make the most feasible starting point for a film?

Story Plot lines

secret CIA agent John Lee White is taking his once a year vacation on new years eve in hawaii oahu. He attends a luau. His vacation gets interrupted when he gets a call from work warning him that the island is about to experience a hostile takeover. He soon realizes that he is the one that needs to save the island and that this will no be a typical vacation.

Students research one of the following story plotlines (we see these in films all the time).

• Using one of these plotlines, students bring in their own experience and adapt it to fit the provided story arc.