EARNEST - Planning and research

Research

For our main task, lots of research is required. We're thinking of doing a modern adaption of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, and to prepare for that, we're going to need to know how to make a good adaptation. We're analysing the opening of five movies each, and we've picked a range of movies that span over the genres and themes of The Importance of being Earnest: Comedy, Romance and Historical Adaptation. We're using a variety of animated and live action movies, varying in tone, to get a larger feel for how to create mood through different mediums.

The movies we will be analysing are:

Grace:
The Importance of being Earnest (2002) [Adaption] [Romance] [Comedy]
Dangerous Liaisons [Adaption] [Romance]
Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies [Adaption] [Romance] [Comedy]
Easy A [Adaption] [Comedy]
Macbeth (2010) [Adaption]

Cliona:
Romeo + Juliet (1996) [Adaption] [Romance]
The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) [Adaption] [Romance] [Comedy]
Wuthering Heights (1992) [Adaption] [Romance]
Gnomeo and Juliet [Adaption] [Comedy] [Romance]
Mrs Doubtfire [Comedy] [Topical to movie]

Jane:
Sing Street [Comedy [Romance]
Catfish the Movie [Topical to the movie]
The Importance of Being Earnest (1986) [Adaption] [Comedy] [Romance]
Edward Scissorhands [Romance] [Adaption]
Hunt for the Wilderpeople [Comedy]

Jennifer:
Of Mice and Men [Adaption]
Clueless [Comedy] [Romance] [Adaption]
The Great Gatsby (2013) [Romance] [Adaption]
Ten Things I Hate About You [Romance] [Adaption]
Little Women [Adaption]


In each movie, we'll be analysing a variety of cinematic techniques: shots types, sound, mis en scene, set, location, and character relations, to name a few. To stay on top of our tasks, we've set deadlines, and plan to stick to them as closely as we can. The goals is to watch and analyse the start of a movie  every day, so we have plenty of time to get started on our film piece.

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Characters

We've done some brief brainstorming to lay down some ideas, though right now, we don't have many concrete ideas. We're hoping that watching and analysing our movies will give us a better insight into what to do and how to do it.

BOY A--
Name: James [Jay] Hilden
Actor: Conor Joyce
Backstory: His father is a member of the local Northern Ireland Parliament as an MP for the SDLP. His father expects him to be studious and proper, and therefore he feels he is restricted in his social life. He cannot do the things regular teenagers do, like having a girlfriend, or clubbin'. He wants a new identity so there are no repercussions to himself, and that is why he creates his 'Ernest'. His best friend is Alistair. 

BOY B--
Name: Alistair  [Ali] Wilde
Actor: Aneurin Duffin-Murray
Backstory: He comes from a family of NHS doctors, but did very poorly in his A2 level year. He is repeating this year in school and his parents are very restrictive due to wanting him to do well in this year. They have given him an ultimatum: do well or get a job. But Alistair still wants to have fun and so creates his 'Ernest'. His best friend is James.

GIRL A--
Name: Gemma Fairfax
Actor: Grace Magee
Backstory: Ali's cousin and the romantic interest of Jay. She's cosmopolitan and fashionable, a real city girl. Gemma is a bit of a snob, and Jay likes that she's a 'fancy lady'

GIRL B--
Name: Chelsea Cardew
Actor: Caoimhe O'Sullivan
Backstory: Jay's cousin and Ali's romantic interest. She's wild and loves adventure, and seems to like 'bad boys'. Chelsea is naive and stubborn, and inevitably drawn to 'wicked' things.

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Why we chose the names:

James - We decided to mirror the original Wilde character John by sticking to the 'J' theme. Both the main characters in the original play have nicknames, os we stuck to that too.

Hilden - In the original play, Jack Worthington's surname derived from a British train station. We mirrored this in deciding to make James' surname named after a train station in Northern Ireland, the Hilden station.

Alistair Wilde - In the original play, Algy is a self-insert from Oscar Wilde, a dandy, amoral character who talks in riddles. We thought it would make sense then to have our Algy character, Alistair, to have the same surname as Wilde, as a nod to the playwright.

Gemma Fairfax and Chelsea Cardew - Similarly with the boys, we wanted their names to closely mirror those of the original characters, and kept their surnames the same, picking first names that begin with the same letter as their original names.

Oscar - Instead of calling themselves 'Ernest' which is a rather old fashioned name now, we decided to just have the boys used the name 'Oscar' as their pseudonym. It's more modern, and is a nod to the origin playwright.

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Gay undertones in the original story

In more recent times, many scholars and critics have considered the play to be a huge metaphor for Wilde's sexuality: it was the last play he wrote before he was arrested, and when he was released from prison Oscar Wilde himself said "It was extraordinary reading the play over. How I used to toy with that Tiger Life."
The Importance of Being Earnest is a play written to poke fun at Victorian society's norms and rigid social expectations, one of these being the mask gay men and women were forced to wear, if they wanted to live their lives in peace.
We considered pushing further with the homosexual undertones in our own story: we live in a more advantageous age for people of the LGBT+ community, one the Victorians couldn't have dreamed of.
In the end, after some debating, the group decision was that we don't have enough time to squeeze everything into our film, it's only two minutes long after all.
If we had been given the time or budget to create a feature length movie, I would like to have used this, perhaps as the two boys struggle with their false identities to win over the girls, they realise it's so difficult because they're trying to force themselves to do something that just isn't natural for themselves?
It is something I would have been interested in adding in, so it's a shame that we're not, but I understand why.