It struck me this morning that one of the things I wanted to do after waking up was to grab the phone and check the news to see if it had budged. There are thousands (or more) people around the world glued to this same ongoing news item.
The “Ever Given” container ship.
It's stuck.
All 400 meters and 200,000 tons of it lodged sideways, in the Suez canal.
"Pah! And?"
Well, it's an international shipping lane and billions of dollars an hour are at stake. Five days on, and there are around 300 other ships waiting to take passage. Then there are concerns as to the immense ship under strain with both ends fixed on sand banks and causing stress to the structure, which ships are not built to withstand.
Furthermore, although the Covid pandemic is getting tiresome in the news, there are other breaking stories!
On the left, above, we have more mass killings of protesters in Burma/Myanmar in one day by the military, and on the right we have a suicide bombing at a church in Indonesia, wounding 14.
And yet we are fascinated by the stuck ship.
So, Screenwriting Relevance?
Well, people are glued to this.
Why?
It's quite simple. Story!
It has the very basics of a plot, with an outcome yet to mature. There's a ship. But this protagonist is no ordinary one. It is a mega-ship, one of the largest container ships on the planet. It is longer than the canal is wide and following high winds during a sandstorm, it turned and got wedged.
So now there's the "want" and the "antagonist." The ship wants to get free from both sandbanks. There is the added antagonist of "time." The longer it remains stuck, the greater the chances are of its hull being compromised. There's also the financial fallout, not just for the Ever Given, but all the hundreds of other ships waiting to get through.
As a story, it gathers an audience because we “Just gotta know what happens next!”
There it is! Intrigue. A care for the outcome. It is because the components of the situation are large enough and carry threat. Questions are posed, and curiosity is King in the world of story.
The point here is to illustrate the simplicity of an idea.
If you have a story you think you want to tell, break down the idea and see if you have the basic components as you see above. Once you have all that in place, you have a good structure on which to build upon.
If the “Ever Given” container ship was to be transposed to a cinematic worthy movie, then the screenwriter would take the solid structure of the news story and pepper it with further layers of plot and sub-story. An option would be to have illegal immigrants being transported in one of the containers, but the unexpected delay of a week means that the supplies provided for them won’t last. This idea could be compounded by the fact that there’s a gang back in Asia putting pressure and threatening families of the shipping company, to force a result and get the “sex workers” to Europe.
With a container ship full of boxes, there’s a host of potential scenarios as to their contents. If you look hard enough, there’s always scope for story. It may take lateral thinking or a step into fantasy.
The bottom line is that there’s a solid structure there in the first place.
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