Creative project outline

For my creative project, I have chosen to write a screenplay based at a music festival. In an attempt to re-create the festival atmosphere, I will be using my own experience to shape the location description and sound, as well as an extent of the dialogue. I have chosen to do this as recently, I have felt that too many music festivals are being attended by punters so that they can get what they think is 'the festival experience' as seen on broadcasts by the BBC, where they present live coverage and highlights from the likes of the Glastonbury, T in the Park and Isle of Weight Festivals. These programmes, I feel, show nothing more to the viewer than snippets of audience members having 'fun' (i.e. bopping along to bands on-stage) and the presenters deal with incidents, such as lateness, casually, revealing no nature of the actually atmosphere in front of the stage. For example, at 2010's Reading Festival, headline act Guns'n'Roses took to the stage an hour late, during this time thousands of punters began booing, shouting and chanting a number of foul language soaked comments. Does the BBC chose to broadcast this? No.

Coming back to my point about people attending festivals for the wrong reasons, I used this thought to create my central characters, Gary, Andy, Will and Dave. Gary is a festival novice, while Andy, Will and Dave have a few years worth of festival experiences under their belts. Here, I found the opportunity to add elements of comedy to my screenplay. E4's hit comedy series 'The Inbetweeners' was an ideal influence for my novice character as I based him on the show's Will McKenzie, a character who easily loses his temper when something does not go as he has planned it to (series 3, episode 6, in particular). With this in mind, I hope to create a character who's dialogue and actions trigger comic applause form an audience, while at the same time presenting a teenager having a miserable time. He does not enjoy the atmosphere of the festival campsite (loud chants throughout the nights, burglary from tents, heavy fires, the toilets, mud ect. - again based on my own personal experience of festivals) and thought it would be something quite different, as shown by the BBC's coverage of festivals in the past.

Another influence on this project will be Kevin Smith's 1994 debut film, 'Clerks'. This is because of it's tagline - 'Just because they serve you...doesn't mean they like you.' To me, this suggests that customers in any form of shop think nothing more of the people who served them than, well, the people who served them. Little do they know, however, is what the shop assistants are really thinking and what really goes on while no customers are around. While my screenplay will not be set in a shop, the subtext of this tagline will have a heavy impact on my screenplay. As I mentioned above, broadcasters such as the BBC present little of what actually takes place at a music festival, so my idea is to present the truth, based on my own experiences, once more. A day in the life of a festival goer, more or less.