Day 6 Assignment

[William Leiren]

William Leiren’s Synopsis Hooks

Numbers 1, 2, 3, & 4:

“Nothing worse than when your relaxing road-trip to a new life turns into a hellish nightmare due to the road rage asshole who’s one lane over- and he’s got your face!!!

An insecure professor was happy to spend the first night camping in the woods, until his crazed doppelgänger came bursting from the lake.

Of course, no one else can see this mythical “Fetch” creature- so he has to be imaginary, right…? Oh, great- that just means our professor’s lost his mind.

Until the creature chases the professor down in a stolen hotrod, and others actually SEE this evil twin! Including the hero’s wife.

And worse, the doppelganger’s seen her. And wants her for himself.

At road’s end, new life will surely come… but whose life?”

Number 5: What I learned doing this assignment is… how to inject dangling excitement into every line of hook synopsis.

[Larry Ridlen]

Larry Ridlen’s Synopsis Hooks

What I learned doing this assignment is…

Focusing on the steps for COM and MIT beforehand makes writing the synopsis a heck of a lot smoother.

A plane just about to land disappears! Reappears a moment later in a different position.

Jim is asleep at the airport and the power to manipulate alternate realities lies in his subconscious.

His befuddled path begins when he meets the woman of his dreams, Kim. She hates drugs. So does he. Too bad he’s secretly a drug runner for the mob.

On a drug run in Jamaica Jim meets Herbie, a Rastafarian who trains him to use the power he doesn’t know he has.

As Jim and Kim get closer, he discovers Nick, a relative of the mob boss, had raped her.

In the Nexus, a place apart from all realities, Jim meets alternate versions of people he knows. They train him.

Kim gets kidnapped by Nick and the mob!

Herbie and Jim team up to rescue Kim.

In a fierce battle with Nick, Jim tries to use his reality-bending powers to create the perfect reality.

Jim worked for the FBI all along!

[Joan Dougherty]

Joan Dougherty’s Synopsis Hooks

What I learned from doing this assignment is that the material it’s based on, created during a heat wave, is not very good. I’ve moved past it with this version. COM and MOT are identified in context.

What happens when someone desperate to keep his secret safe jails a visiting storyteller, once a childhood friend, to keep her from revealing it? [emotional drama]

Shades of Me Too and Black Lives Matter appear in Over the Edge, a unique script about stories told, withheld or suppressed. [timely]

Framing the film script is another story—a poem, myth or parable—that guides the unrolling of the action and underlines the transformative power of storytelling. It is told over a shot of a young boy running for his life through a wooded area. [opening with a hook]

Before long, one of the characters of this frame tale enters the jail and helps the storyteller wreck havoc on the jail keeper’s life and his ability to suppress the truth. [major twist]

Whether a figment of the storyteller’s imagination or an actor independent of her control, this character leads him to the place where his secret began and encourages him to tell it. When he does so, Tiago is both shattered and relieved. In the words of the frame tale, he is ready to go over the edge of the world’s rim to be renewed by story because he’s now willing to tell his own. [reversal]

When the sun pries open the sky, thus widening the clamshell of day that had closed overnight, he walks back over the edge to find those he had wronged waiting for him. They welcome him back to the community. [big surprise]

Telling a personal story to overcome personal trauma is not new, but entering a world of stories that daily renew one’s spirit is. It is found over the edge. [marketing component]