Some tips for the creation of your Car Story
Choose a scenario. The Car Stories will be performed in real cars (i.e. students' cars), so the most obvious scenarios are situations that happen in a car. Or, you might want to reimagine the car as some other form of vehicle -- a truck, a bus, a tank, a helicopter, an aeroplane cockpit, a submarine, a spaceship, etc. A list of suggested scenarios has been provided (see numbers 1-30), but if you have another idea which is not found on the list, feel free to suggest it.
Imagine your characters. You don't need to create a character's entire life story, but it is important to create a few details -- especially about the relationship betweeen your characters. For example, if you are doing "The Getaway Car" and the scene is a bank robbery, you should imagine more than just "we are two bank robbers." Ask yourself why you are robbing a bank. How did you get into such a situation? How are you related to the other character? For example, maybe one character is a single mother who is unemployed and desperately needs money. Maybe the second character is her 14 year old daughter who has never really forgiven her mother after the marriage break-up of her parents…. NOTE: If there are three people in your team, one person must be cast as a character who remains outside of the car. Some possibilities for the third person are: traffic cop, customs officer, guard at a military check-point, revolutionary at a highway barricade, etc.
Think about audience participation. The audience will be sitting in the back seat of the car. There will be between one and three audience members (usually two). In order to add a participatory dimension to your sketch, try to imagine a secondary (minor) role for the audience members. Of course, the audience will not have scripted lines (e.g. they will have no text), and usually they will only interact if you ask them direct questions. For example, in the "Getaway Car", the people in the back might be cast as the daughter's friends whom she has invited to come and watch her mother rob the bank. If the robbery goes wrong, maybe they will later be turned into hostages…. In some scenarios, you might consider giving the audience roles in which they represent non-human elements. For example, in the "First Date" scene, the audience might be cast as the girl's beloved pet Rottweillers who begin to growl and bark every time the boy tries to put his arm around the girl. Or in the "Mission to Mars" scene, the audience might be cast as alien creatures whom the astronauts captured on Mars and are now bringing back to Earth to sell to a zoo. They could make some kind of "alien" sounds (ask them to practice for a few moments before the sketch begins).
Start mapping out your story in a "story plan" -- an outline of what will happen in the story. This is usually a 'hit and miss' sort of process. There are many directions in which you can develop a story, but some will be much more dramatically interesting than others. Try to find a story-line that generates tension, excitement, and surprise. Here are some considerations to help you create an interesting story:
In general, all stories follow a similar pattern: you begin with two characters, each with their own identity (i.e. there must be some basic CONTRAST between the two characters) . As the story develops, the difference between the characters is transformed into DRAMATIC TENSION. Maybe the two characters begin to disagree about something, and this develops into a major argument. Or maybe the characters become increasingly suspicious of each other. Or maybe one character begins to develop a fear of the other character. The tension between the characters increases, perhaps taking an unexpected turn or two, and then concludes with a DRAMATIC RESOLUTION in which the tension is somehow resolved. The resolution can be happy, sad, tragic, etc. The important thing, in terms of dramatic value, is to find a resolution that is unexpected and creative (surprising, hilarious, emotional, etc.).
For dramatic tension to develop, something must HAPPEN in your story, and for something to happen, you need to bring NEW INFORMATION into the picture. If there is no NEW INFORMATION coming into the story, the situation will just drift along and become BORING. There are many ways to bring new information into the sketch, such as:
-someone receives an unexpected call on their cellphone;
-some surprising information is heard on the radio (for example, you could pre-record a radio broadcast in which there is a news bulletin announcing that a tornado is sweeping through Laval);
-something happens outside the car (e.g. the driver pretends that the car just hit someone or something…);
-one of the characters finds something in the car (in the glove compartment, or under the seat, or in the trunk, etc.)
Your story will be much more interesting if you include some CHARACTER MOVEMENT. The sketch takes place in a car, of course, so the possibilities for movement are somewhat limited. The most obvious option is to have one character get out of the car at some point, leaving the other character together with the audience. There are many possible reasons this might happen: maybe one character wants to stop and pick up something at the store, maybe to put some gas in the car, maybe to go to the bathroom, or maybe to make a telephone call at a telephone booth. Getting one character out of the car makes it possible to bring SECRET INFORMATION into the story -- i.e. information known only to one character and the audience (e.g., in a husband-wife scene, while the husband is buying something in the store, maybe the wife opens the glove compartment to look for kleenex, but she finds a photograph of another woman … or a gun… or some pills… or a body part … or ???… ). Also, with one character out of the car, it is possible to develop a secret alliance with the audience. For example, in the "Getaway Car" scenario, maybe while the mother is out of the car buying some ski-masks, the daughter asks her friends to call the police …
After you have worked out an outline, you can proceed to scripting (writing the dialogue for) your sketch. Team members should divide the scripting responsibilities between themselves, so that this can be done at home. For example, person A scripts the story up to a given point, then emails the story to person B who completes the script.