Life is a Picture in Motion - Assignment Q1

Life is a Picture in Motion - 20 possible points

This is often how I see my life, as an ongoing movie. Some days it's a comedy, some days a drama, sometimes a romance. Some days it's the greatest surround-sound 3-D smell-o-vision adventure and other days it's boring and tedious and I want to switch theaters.

For this assignment, think about how your life is like a movie.  Describe a cinematic (movie-like) scene from your life. Write the action in present tense (which is how professional Hollywood scripts are written) and follow the format of the example below. You can change the names of the characters in your scene to keep them (and yourself, if you wish) anonymous.

• At least 5 paragraphs
• Use standard English convention: capitols, punctuation, complete sentences.
• Choose a scene with some conflict, drama or humor. If you write about yourself, put yourself in the 3rd person (as if you were someone else). Change the names of the people involved.
• Be as descriptive as possible.
• I don't mind if you embellish the truth, in other words, fib a bit to make the story more interesting.
• Read Ms. Hawks' True Life Example before beginning


MS. HAWKS' TRUE LIFE EXAMPLE

Title:  The Great Shake
Genre: Action - Drama

Ann and her friend Nancy, both in their 30's, and Ann's son Tony, 6, stand inside Woolworth's department store, shopping. Each looks at something different; Ann at Halloween colored hair spray, Nancy at cages of parakeets, and Tony at He-Man action figures, but all are within eyesight of each other. Suddenly, the building jerks with a loud jolt, then begins to shake violently. All of the items in the store are thrown from the shelves onto the floor, and the shelves themselves fall like dominoes, blocking the way to the exits. Instinctively, the three quickly move together in a huddle, their eyes wide with terror. The noise is deafening and it feels as if the building is being picked up and dropped repeatedly by an angry giant. Other customers in the store are screaming in panic

Realizing they are caught in the midst of a terrible earthquake, Ann looks at the ceiling, and sees it is constructed of old pressed-tin tiles, the kind common in old turn-of the-century structures and she thinks, "This building is so old, it might collapse on us."  She looks into the eyes of her best friend and son, and hopes this won't be their last day together.

Then, as quickly as it began, the shaking stops. "Come on," Ann says, "let's get out of here."

They pick their way through the piles of merchandise littering the floor. Ann throws aside display stands to clear the path as best she can. When they finally reach the front door and step onto the street, a popular shopping district in Santa Cruz, California, they see broken storefronts, bricks, and goods thrown onto the sidewalks. People wander about in a daze, some yell "We've got people trapped in here!"  White clouds of dust from the crumbling buildings too thick to see through billow around them. They spot a looter on a bicycle taking advantage of the chaos; he grabs merchandise and rides off into a cloud of dust. Several people watch the looter, but nobody bothers to do anything about him, they are all too shocked.

"Did a bomb go off?" Nancy asks. Ann turns to her, and sees that her friend is in such shock she doesn't realize what has happened. "No, it was an earthquake. And there's going to be aftershocks so we need to get away from these brick buildings."

As they walk away, Tony notices he's still clutching the He-Man action figure he was looking at when the earthquake started. "Mom!" he holds it up for her to see. "Hey, we didn't pay for that!" Ann takes the toy from him and tosses onto a pile of Woolworth's merchandise that was thrown through their now broken front window and lies outside the store on the sidewalk.

A Woolworth's clerk standing nearby sees this scenario–she shrugs and laughs. "Like it really matters. I would have let the kid keep it."