Day 5 Assignment

[Lori Lance]

Lori’s Three Gradients

What I learned doing this assignment is… by finding these answers, I’m starting to see the possibilities for my story.

Emotional Gradient: FORCED CHANGE

DENIAL – The Pastor pretends everything is fine. – C: He tries to make Christmas special for everyone else. W: He’s in over his head.

ANGER – The Pastor gets angry when forced to engage in Christmas traditions that used to include his wife. – C: He has trouble keeping up the charade. W: He doesn’t consider other people’s feelings.

BARGAINING – He crosses boundaries as he tries to fix one family’s Christmas. – C: Helping someone that doesn’t want help. – W: He does not have control of other people’s feelings.

DEPRESSION – The Pastor spirals downward. – C: Finding hope and joy by Christmas. – W: He doesn’t have all the answers.

ACCEPTANCE – The Pastor gives his problem over to God and his congregation. – C: Letting others help him. – W: He needs his faith renewed.

[Lynne Heatley]

What I learned doing this assignment is that I needed to choose one transformable character to flesh out when I have two, whose stories weave in and out over three decades. I also learned that I can see weak bits in the journey of this character.

The emotional gradient I will use is Desired Change.

Emotion Excitement Ros meets a man she wants to marry.

Action She marries him.

Challenge/Weakness Disquiet that a scathing comment made about unmarried mothers during their engagement means Ros must keep her son’s birth three years prior a secret.

Emotion Doubt The marriage remains childless after ten years. Ros has realized the problem is with her husband.

Action Ros determines never to reveal her son’s existence. Continues with her teaching career.

Challenge/weakness Becomes a people pleaser and support for a controlling, ambitious husband.

Emotion Hope A background hope that one day she may know her son.

Action Throws a party for a new male staff member who has joined her husband’s business.

Challenge/weakness She realizes she’s been recognized by the man’s wife, from the time she gave birth. She wonders whether to confront her later to beg for her silence.

Emotion Discouragement Ros faces her husband’s fury when he is told by new staff member.

Action Ros finally confides in another person -her friend of many years. Moves several suburbs away and continues her career.

Challenge/weakness She has little to fill the void that the marriage papered over.

Emotion Courage Ros supports a teacher on her staff whose child has looked for, and found her when the law is changed to allow previously sealed information to be accessed by natural children/natural parents.

Action Ros’ twenty-nine year old son finds her also. They meet.

Challenge/weakness Having to fill in the missing years. Fear of ‘putting a foot wrong.’

Emotion Triumph The void inside her is filled.

Action Ros meets unknown extended family, including two grandchildren.

Challenge/weakness Sorrow that her son’s adoption had become a loveless match and that he’d been originally wanted, but then rejected. There is now the challenge of living some distance apart.

[Jeff Reynolds]

Jeff’s three gradients- The Desired change.

What I learned from this assignment is a lot. I have the action in my story but I didn’t show the emotion in my three characters. All three main characters and a couple others are going through desired change.

Excitement-Einstein is on his way again and shows us by making positive changes. Dude is afraid to talk to people but gives it a go and has tremendous excitement after hitting his low point just the day before. Jen is excited about a new opportunity.

Doubt- Dude stumbles with his words and forgets what he wants to say. Jen says this is all too perfect and she thinks the real Jen will pop up and be angry.

Hope- Dude has a goal and sets out. Jen has a dream and starts. Einstein is thinking Big.

Discouragement- Someone makes fun of Dude and he fails, Jen has a breakdown and fears she will never change. Einstein has trouble finishing up his big crazy room.

Courage- Dude has a business idea and has the perfect sales pitch to a possible customer. Jen has started reaching out to new clients and has a big dream. Einstein is involved in dude and Jens startups and develops a huge dream of his own.

Triumph- 6 months later the lives of all three characters do not look the same. They do not look the same, act the same, or behave the same. Working together changes all three of their lives and all three have a huge dream that the audience will participate in……..

[Dale Griffiths Stamos]

Dale’s Three Gradients

What I learned from this assignment is how to look at the relationship between the emotional gradient and the action gradient.

DESIRED CHANGE GRADIENT:

A. Emotion: Excitement

B. Action: Antonia gets a job at the Harvard Observatory as a “computer”

C. Challenge: Taking on her first science job after college / Weakness: Hubris

A. Emotion: Doubt

B. Action: Is disappointed to learn she cannot work in the observatory, wonders if her skills can properly be used as simply a “computer”

C. Challenge: To make use of her current position / Weakness: Resistance to the tedium of the job.

A. Emotion: Hope

B. Action: She begins to find interesting things in the work she’s doing – in particular levels of a classification system that have heretofore not been discovered.

C. Challenge: To convince her boss, Pickering, of the value of her discovery / Weakness: Caught between wanting to please/placate him and wanting recognition

A. Emotion: Discouragement

B. Action: Leaves the Observatory, taking her data with her – not sure she will get the credit she deserves

C. Challenge How to continue her important work on her own or whether to abandon / Weakness: Pride

A. Emotion: Courage

B. Action: She returns to the Observatory, insists and get the credit she is due for an article that features her research. However, her classification plan is not adopted.

C. Challenge How to complete her work, while not getting recognition for the true value of that work. Pouring herself into other work with the new director. / Weakness: Resentment

A. Emotion: Triumph (and some loss)

B. Action: First she gets praise and recognition from other scientists, but her system is still not officially adopted. But then, many years later, it is. And it is touted at something that would have advanced astronomy by decades if it had been adopted. A triumph then in receiving the Annie Jump Cannon Award for Astronomy.

C. Challenge: To accept that the recognition is better late than never / Weakness: Some residual resentment over the fact that she’d been right all along.

[Amanda Avalon]

Amanda’s Three Gradients

What I learned doing this assignment is you have to have your story figured out to be able to do this. It’s also a great tool in outlining the story.

1. What is the Emotional Gradient you’ll use?

Desired change

2. For each emotion of that gradient, tell us the following:

A. Excitement:

Action: Allison realizes she can make her own decisions and she won’t have to live according to her parent’s expectation.

Challenge: Having to make a life altering decisions by herself.

Weakness: She never did this before.

B. Doubt

Action: She lost her engagement the ring.

Challenge: The ring must be found.

Weakness: How is she going to be able to take care of herself if she can’t take care of a ring?

C. Hope

Action: Searching for the ring at various places and getting information on where the ring might be.

Challenge: The ring is nowhere to be found.

Weakness: Lack of self-confidence due to losing the ring.

D. Discouragement

Action: All the leads end up with nothing.

Challenge: What else can I do to find to ring?

Weakness: Self-doubt, maybe I can’t take care of my own business.

E. Courage

Action: The wedding party flies off to the venue (Miami)

Challenge: The ring is lost somewhere in Las Vegas, need to tell the groom, not only about the ring but also about her own empowerment

Weakness: Her mother and maid-of-honor are not onboard of her newfound empowerment

F. Triumph…or Loss

Action: The ring is found, she has the courage to tell her groom how things are.

Challenge: She must leave the groom to live her life.

Weakness: Her parents and the groom’s family are devastated.

[Valerie Getsinger]

Valerie’s Three Gradients

What I learned from doing this assignment is that incorporating the connections between emotion, action, and challenge-weakness will help tremendously in outlining stories.

The emotional gradient I will use is forced change.

A young woman’s identical twin sister drowns, but she believes her twin sister was murdered, and as she works at finding who murdered her, she discovers several dark, family secrets and is finally able to accept the truth of what actually happened.

Emotion-Excitement- Mary Belinda discovers a letter addressed to her deceased sister

Action-She reads the letter

Challenge-it is a blackmail letter. She believes the writer is her sister’s killer, but there is no legible signature, return address, or postmark, no clues, as to who wrote it.

Emotion-Doubt- She searches for the writer of the letter but can’t find anything out

Action- She hears someone typing in the middle of the night and follows the sounds of the typing. She ends up in the kitchen outside the pantry door.

Challenge-It is Esme typing. Esme refuses to let her see the letter or loan her the typewriter. Because of this, she isn’t able to check to see if the type on Esme’s letter or typewriter matches the type on the blackmailer’s letter.

Emotion- Hope- She discovers a locked space behind a picture hanging on the wall in her father’s study.

Action- She searches for the combination and finds it. Then she discovers some sealed documents.

Challenge-She discovers that Esme, the housekeeper, is also her father’s sister. She discovers nothing about her sister’s death. However, she didn’t have time to look at all the documents.

Emotion-Discouragement-Her boyfriend is killed in a car accident. She feels there is no point to life, as she is already so sad without her sister, and losing her boyfriend makes her life feel beyond unbearable.

Action- she attempts to kill herself.

Challenge-Esme stops her. She then has to deal with difficult emotions about her father and Esme being related and confronts her father and Esme about this. She then shares with her father her feelings about losing her boyfriend and her sister, which is very painful.

Emotion-Courage-She decides that life is worth living.

Action-To honor her sister, she wears Liddy Katherine’s dress on her birthday.

Challenge-When Esme lights the birthday candles on the cake, she has a memory of how her sister died.

Emotion-Loss- Remembering how her sister really died is very upsetting to her.

Action-She runs to the ocean. Esme and her father follow her, and they have a heart to heart about Liddy Katherine’s death.

Challenge-She must accept the truth of what really happened.

[Lauren DeCicco]

Lauren’s Three Gradients

What I learned doing this assignment:

-Finding a coping mechanism for each weakness needs to be improved upon. I think I’m getting bogged down with too many details at this point.

-How to build the change into multiple levels of the story.

-The purpose of a gradient in a movie is to take natural steps that keep an audience engaged.

-How the Emotional Gradient reveals itself:
Setup –> Emotional Journey –> Final Payoff

-Old versus New Ways: These were a challenge for me in the MSC. I’m hoping I can improve upon this aspect and create better challenges and traits for the MC, forcing the change.

1. What is the Emotional Gradient you’ll use?

Forced Change.

2. For each emotion of that gradient, tell us the following:

A. Emotion: DENIAL

B. Action: She lives within the confines/rules of the organization without question.

C. Challenge / Weakness:
C: The organization keeps her malnourished and abuses her physically, emotionally and psychologically to keep her in check.
W: She’s been brainwashed into believing they care for her and these experiences are normal.

A. Emotion: ANGER

B. Action: Lashes out at the organization after discovering they’re trafficking the orphans; runs from her brother even though he can rescue her from the organization

C. Challenge / Weakness:
C: Her brother’s information regarding her real family flies in the face of everything she believes about the organization; she’s punished by the organization and has some of her organs harvested, becoming weaker/no longer allowed outside the compound

W: Mistakes her brother as an evil force even more than the organization is; thinks she can convince the organization to change their operations.

A. Emotion: BARGAINING

B. Action: Thinks there must be a mistake: she tries to change what’s happening and asks the organization to help stop the sale of children; tries to free the children

C. Challenge / Weakness:
C: Tries to discover a weakness in the organization to stop it
W: Goes against the entity she looks up to and who has provided all she’s known of family

A. Emotion: DEPRESSION

B. Action: Finds a way to escape but plans to destroy the organization and save the children.

C. Challenge / Weakness:

C: Has the opportunity to escape and leave her life of pain behind
W: Loves the trafficked children and knows she must sacrifice herself to save them,

A. Emotion: ACCEPTANCE

B. Action: Recognizes her brother is her true kin; Sacrifices herself to defeat the only family she’s known

C. Challenge / Weakness:
C: Must believe her brother is telling the truth, gives up her new dream of having a life with her brother; Destroys the organization she believed were her family;

W: Dies in the process of saving some of the children, hoping to absolve herself for her crimes

[Karen Tolliver]

Karen Tolliver Three Gradients

What I learned doing this assignment is how to include pieces of the story that will make my movie pop.

Emotional Gradient: Forced Change

1. A. Emotion: Denial

B. Action: Sharon refuses to believe Steven had anything to do with the embezzlement of their Accounting Firm.

C. Challenge: Released from jail and confronted with evidence of Steven’s second set of books. Weakness: Naive, denialist, refuses to believe it.

2. A. Emotion: Anger

B. Action: Her mother tells her Steven is just like her father.

C. Challenge: Everyone tells her Steven is no good. Weakness: Gets quiet.

3. A. Emotion: Bargaining

B. Action: Sharon and “The Crew” travel to Aruba to catch Steven.

C. Challenge: Sharon beats up Steven. Weakness: Out of control, can’t change what happened.

4. A. Emotion: Depression

B. Action: Sharon takes a walk on the beach alone.

C. Challenge: Sharon has a talk with God. Weakness: Doesn’t know what to do now.

5. A. Emotion: Acceptance

B. Action: Sharon “Home Alone” Steven and the FBI agent.

C. Challenge: Sharon confronts Steven, tells him he stole her life. Weakness: needs to learn to love herself.