This week was the read-through of the first draft of our scripts at Raindance.

My film script is a story about hallucinations arising through trauma. There were some queries about my characters. One person suggested that mum telling Sofi that she couldn’t live with her anymore, made mum seem like a ‘wicked witch’.

Now I definitely don’t want my film to be like a classic Disney. In fact, I recently saw an 18-certificate film, which had been inspired by the director watching Disney films with his daughter and wanting to subvert the ‘fairytale princess’ trope into a warrior princess. It had an extreme and one-dimensional ‘baddie’.

There is a trend, as seen in Game of Thrones, to portray characters as more multi-dimensional. Perhaps this is how the majority of us are in real life.

Yet I explained this part of the script was actually based on true life. A young man had given me consent to use his story (yes, I changed the sex to a female Sofi) and seemed very keen that I pay him royalties if I made money from it, as he was living in a friend’s garage at that time!

The problem is that I only had his side of the story and not his mum’s side of the story. There are two sides to every story was the favourite expression of one of my most dodgy friends ever, make of that what you will. For subtlety though, I will take it out.

It was pointed out that dad’s dialogue was also a bit direct and one-dimensional. Recap: In my script dad is not living dad but his ‘ghost’.

I have never had a conversation with a ghost, nor had hallucinations, which is how ghost experiences are medically interpreted. What I do know from my previous job as a doctor is that auditory verbal hallucinations (‘hearing voices’) often occur as command hallucinations (where the person hears a voice commanding them to do something).

I wrote the script specifically with hallucinations in mind. To emphasise this I will portray dad as even more abstract and dream-like in the next draft of my script. I aim to use this to change the film ending.

A classmate then suggested Sofi’s personality was too contradictory. Can I pull this off? Extreme behaviour sometimes comes with contradictions. The comments on repetition and dramatic tension I will immediately take on board. Thanks everyone x