Episode 1

A grieving teenager risks losing himself in order to revenge the death of his best friend, while the girl he loves tries to save him from his dark path. 

The story of this script has been in my head for at least a year, and some prototypes of it are even older. I was not specically inspired by any individual works, but I was denitely inuenced by the many tragedies I have read in school. As time passed, the story became more complex and the ending changed completely. What was a simple high school drama turned into a coming of age story. 

If I had to describe my script as briey as I could, I would say that it is a journey of independence and self-realization. Blake breaks free from the legacy of his father and the dark inuences that threatened to snu out the light within him. He learns to think of himself without comparison to others. Kayla breaks free from the expectations of her parents and of herself. She learns to prioritize her own well-being instead of trying to please others. 

Artistically, I found myself in a strange place. I am at my core a Romantic, but one of the most important principles to me in ction is realism. Without realism, a story is not believable, and a story must be believable to be eective. In a tragedy involving love, death, and revenge among teenage characters, it was hard to balance realism with the intensity I wanted to depict. I had to make sure the stakes were high without making the characters’ actions unbelievable. 

Writing this script, I faced many challenges introduced by changing the medium from book to TV. Although I had the story as a whole gured out from the beginning, the main diculty I faced was guring out how to divide it across multiple episodes. I addressed this by identifying the key events of the story and giving each their own plot structure. Another problem was keeping continuing interest across episodes. I decided to use devices like ash-forwards and clihangers to achieve this. These issues were not things I had thought about when I planned the story to be a book. 

I chose TV over lm as my medium because it oers the same visual potential as lm over theater, but allows for extended and more complex storytelling due to its increased runtime and episodic divisions. Something I struggle with as an artist is tting my often bloated and complex ideas into limitations of length or size. For example, a musical composition originally planned to be nine minutes long ballooned to 16 minutes by the time I nished. The long runtime of a TV series allows me to tell what I want to tell without rushing things. 

My original plan was to write this story into a book, but I now feel that TV is a better way to tell this story. As a photographer, I want to be able to use visual compositions to tell the story even when there is no action or dialogue. I nd it fun to depict characters’ personalities and feelings through the image alone. Ideally, if this ever made it to production, each shot could be a still and the story would still be clear without any dialogue or motion. 

Brandon Ma