This week we focused on ideation techniques and were tasked with remediation, and those of you who read my previous blog post would know that I was not familiar with this term and instead of doing the research first, jumped straight into what was asked of us, and immediately after thought that I had completely misunderstood the task based on what my peers submitted.
The challenge was this:
“1. Choose an existing artefact that is the output of someone’s creativity. This could be a poem, short story, illustration, song, or anything else you think is interesting.
2. Modify the artefact in some way using the techniques you selected. The aim is to remediate it into another form of the artefact.
The term ‘remediation’ is used here in the same way that Grusin and Bolter intended in their book, Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000). The term denotes a framework for “considering how all media constantly borrow from and refashion other media”, and this is exactly what we want you to do in this task.
As with all attempts to channel inner creativity, there are no rules for this exercise. Instead, you are encouraged to dive straight in and not think too hard about it. Select your initial artefact, blast through the ideation techniques to find ways to modify it and let the output happen organically. You might devise something that could be deemed a ‘success’ or it might be nonsensical and random (in our eyes this is equally a success). The point is not to aim for perfection and instead generate many ideas that could be improved upon if they show potential.”
As a writer I found that it might be difficult to create a brand-new script influenced by an artefact within such a short time frame, and so I decided to modify a scene from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001) (Fempiror, 2021). The method I initially selected was Opposite Thinking, something I never really explored for developing my screenplays in the past, at least not consciously, but because there was the mention of creating a somewhat “alternate reality” (Board of Innovation, 2021), it made me curious as to how a scene would actually play out if I was to simply change a script’s elements to what could be deemed ‘opposite’, and how this might change the outcome of future scenes. As I was focused on simply learning this method, I did not implement anything from outside the source material, i.e., personal, historical, or other creative influences, which in hindsight I wish I had done.
I decided on the scene near the beginning of the script in which Frodo Baggins returns home to Bag End after drinking with Samwise Gamgee to be surprised by Gandalf who is waiting for him in order to find out if the ring hidden by Bilbo Baggins was in fact the One Ring.
You can see the excerpt here:
Now originally, the plan was to remediate the script, right up to where Frodo, Sam and Gandalf leave Bag End, but, as much as I would enjoy theorising a sort of ‘opposite story’, time was of the essence and I settled with trying to keep it short and sweet and for the sake of the challenge, and wanting to learn how Opposite Thinking works, I opted for a simplistic and somewhat comedic version of the scene in which Frodo is replaced with one of the more unreliable Hobbits, Peregrin Took, and that ‘the One Ring’ is just ordinary. Now, even though the latter would be far more interesting, it is worth noting how a story can change, or in this case, end, with a few simple alterations.
Opposite thinking might have been a playful exercise, but in all honesty, I felt that I didn’t gain too much, this simply resulted in something that looks and reads like poor fanfiction. Part of me believes that when suffering from writer’s block, this might induce further ideas if an aspect of a piece of work is altered (either my own or someone else’s to then use as an influence). In retrospect, I would have borrowed and altered elements of the existing screenplay into another form of media instead of simply changing the existing artefact.
Bibliography
Board of Innovation, 2021. Opposite thinking - Board of Innovation. [online] Board of Innovation. Available at: <https://www.boardofinnovation.com/tools/opposite-thinking/> [Accessed 3 May 2021].
Fempiror, 2021. [online] Available at: <http://www.fempiror.com/otherscripts/LordoftheRings1-FOTR.pdf> [Accessed 3 May 2021].