Story-telling | Project Research: Inspiration and Visual Reference Material

I got the idea for The Way, after remembering something that happened to me when I was at school, which inspired me for the opening scene.  I was waiting for my mum to pick me up from school late one night, after I stayed late to work on an art project, whilst my mum was in a meeting.  I came outside earlier than I normally would, but since it was in the winter, it was already very dark.  After waiting about 10 minutes, a group of teenagers were walking toward me, shouting, swearing and being generally antisocial, which I tried to ignore, but as they came toward me, they threw a rock at the back of my head.  They ran up to me, asking if I was okay, but shoved a handful of mud in my face before I could think of how to respond.  Luckily, a teacher was just leaving school, and witnessed the whole thing, and took me inside to clean myself up.  The story I present in The Way is exaggerated compared to what happened to me, and I also decided to separate that incident from myself and worked the story around that introduction.

Using that incident as the basis for my story, I chose to twist events and add depth to the characters involved.  I questioned the relationship between the lead character, and the mother who had not picked him up from school, and decided to introduce alcohol abuse to the story.  This is a prevalent and topical issue in recent years and I wanted to highlight that alcoholism is not something that can be easily controlled: it is an illness that needs to be treated, and not a choice.  Therefore, I opted to focus the entire story on the lead character’s realisation that his mother cannot control her alcoholism, and thus takes a more sympathetic viewpoint of the situation.

I want to use a similar shooting location, and I want to film at night so that I can create a similar dark and unnerving atmosphere.  I scouted a location near my old school in Gravesend, not too far where the original incident happened, at night so I could capture the environment I wanted.  I had initially planned to shoot near an alleyway, but logistically, I could not find an alleyway that was near a main road that was not in use, and so I settled with finding a location with a bench to work as Derek's sleeping area.

One thing I did notice about the location which I had not considered was the lighting.  As we can see, there is very little lighting from streetlights, which means when I shoot, I will need to use some lighting equipment in order for the camera to pick up any action.