Shortly before the pandemic, I wrote a ten-minute play for ScriptWork’s Out of Ink Festival. This festival has been incredibly creatively fertile for me, spawning Small Steps, Piper, The Disappearing Rose Trick, and the ten-minute play that I recently workshopped at ATHE. So, when the pandemic knocked the festival off-course, I was lucky enough that B Street Theatre could still do a reading of it and that an old friend found the script interesting.
He turned it into a film, which did quite well on the film festival circuit.
You can now watch that video HERE.
What I find interesting about the film versus the script is that the play is nondiegetic. The play is supposed to be performed by two adult dudes (and a relatively adult-ish woman) because when young people spend time playing in a garage, they are often pretending to be adults. We are inside their imaginary world. A film, however, is far more representational, so you have to have two kids playing these roles. It is diegetic. The film is the reality as it requires a greater suspension of belief for the audience.
When teaching a directing class, I brought in the film to compare it to the play to unpack diegesis.
Briandaniel Oglesby 