The previous draft of our project mainly suffered from its length; not only did it go over the fifteen minute limit, but some of the individual scenes took too long to get to the point.
The first big change we decided to make to remedy this was to eliminate the customer character. They were intended to show how the attitude of Helen’s character, focused on working for the future and not valuing relationships with other people, ended up backfiring in a way that hurt her business, the thing she put all her time and effort into. However, because this character was only in two scenes, their subplot ended up just distracting from the main plot. As such, we decided to cut the character. The first scene will still be set in the shop, to establish Helen’s character’s dedication to her work, but we will instead use this scene to show Helen’s character meeting her roommate for the first time. On top of saving time, this change should make it clearer to the audience what Helen and her roommate saw in each other that led them to start their relationship.
The other major change we have made is combining scenes two and three, the two scenes in the apartment between Helen and her roommate. Since Scene 1 now establishes their dynamic and what they like about each other, showing how the rifts form in their relationship should only take one scene.
Beyond this, the other scenes can remain mostly the same, though we will be tightening the dialogue so that they don’t drag as much. We are confident that these changes will greatly improve our project.
