London College of Communication’s graduates of MA Screenwriting have gone on to win numerous UK and international awards, work on major film projects and are writing for a wide range of programmes currently being screened on UK television. Leading the field, this industry-focused screenwriting course develops writers for film, television and/or radio industries. This year’s show will see actors bringing our students’ eclectic television and film projects to life
MA Screenwriting students of this year had a performance evening during the Private View at LCC Postgraduate Shows 2017: Show 2.
We highlight some of the projects from the show…
Matt Flack
Blue Elephant
Just as they hit the road, Nathan’s father shows up and reveals he faked his own death, and he needs Nathan to come with him to Mexico to sign for his life insurance – dangling a big cash carrot as an incentive.
Thing is, Nathan hasn’t seen his father for 20 years, so they have a few little things to work through as they blast down Arizona and south across the border into Mexico, tracked all the while by the criminals that want their money and their blood.
Stacey Williams
Surrogate
Underperforming toddler? Check the warranty – you may be entitled to an exchange. If you want a dog, you need a licence. How come you don’t need one to have a baby?
In the world of Surrogate, you do. Only one in 5 get one, and a huge industry has sprung up around perfecting your parenting skills; you want the best for your child, right?
Emma is one of the 20% with a child license, for her 14-month-old son, Charlie. Her scores are exemplary. Charlie’s aren’t so great. Possibly he’s not cooperating. It’s pretty tedious when a team member isn’t pulling their weight.
When she’s offered the chance to swap him for a re-conditioned 15-year-old, Emma jumps at the chance. Initially, everything’s just fine, but when the new model starts to malfunction, she starts to worry she’s made a terrible mistake.
Julian Chomet
Fred
When a fiercely determined, working class teenager dreams of winning Wimbledon, it’s the start of a class war against the moneyed elite who play and run tennis in the 1920s.
FRED is the untold story of how the teenage son of a Stockport millworker stumbles across a tennis tournament and becomes obsessed with tennis and dreams of playing for his country and winning Wimbledon. But in the 1920s, top-level tennis is an amateur sport, with no prize money, played by an elite who can afford to indulge their passion. Fred doesn’t belong in their world: wrong accent, wrong school, wrong attitude and a ‘shite’ racket.
Fred battles against class prejudice and his father’s disapproval as he goes on a crusade to win the ultimate accolades in tennis. It’s not about money, it’s about glory, sticking 2 fingers up to those who look down on him and the chance to become a working-class hero.
Madison Grant
The Flower Girl
A do-gooder and a bad boy butt heads and hearts organising a festival that will either make or break their small town.
Hadley, a 22-year-old people pleaser, has inherited her mother’s flower shop and place in their tightknit community. When she learns of the town’s debt she takes on the responsibility of throwing the end of summer festival, which hadn’t been held since her mother’s death. She gets more than she bargained for when Brooks, the boy next door she’s despised her whole life, becomes her co-host.
They can’t help but argue and butt heads over every decision along the way. She fights her intense attraction to him and attempts to stay focused on saving the small town she loves. However, his selfish nature comes to light when it’s revealed he’s trying to sabotage the event to save his brewery. Will love blossom?
Nicholas Keegan
Seaward
Seaward is a fictional seaport town, a grey, industrial, poverty-stricken backwater on the North Sea coast. Two months after a prominent drug dealer is shot dead on a remote beach 40 miles from the town, Shelley Best, a former Met Detective, transfers to Seaward CID. And she is soon involved in the murder case, the main suspect being the dealer’s former business partner. Local journalist Jamie Dale is sent to cover the potential takeover of Seaward’s ailing freight container port by an international company, though he would rather report about crime and a notorious local housing estate.
After they cross paths, Jamie discovers why Shelley had to leave the Met and threatens to expose her. But Shelley is really working undercover for the National Crime Agency, investigating why a London-based organised crime group have decided to move into the town. And could it be connected to the port takeover?
Ethan Webber
The Church
The Church is a magical realist drama set in a village in the Yorkshire Moors and centres around Hanna (19), a girl with a deep distrust of those outside of her isolated cult. However, she is expelled by her uncle Reverend Heinrich for mistakenly causing a fire, which burns down their church. In a desperate attempt to be accepted back into the only world she has ever known, Hanna undertakes a seemingly impossible task… building a church alone. And with only her foul-mouthed parrot for company, she has to fend off sabotage from some members of her congregation who see her as cursed.
Also, as her sect believe that the ‘Rapture’ is upon them, Hanna is in a race against time to complete the building. Eventually, she comes to realise that the only way they will finish in time is to overcome her distrust of the other and reluctantly accept help from a non-religious ‘outsider’. However, this collaboration leads her to question not only her view of outsiders but also her very faith.
Rebekah Humphrey-Bullen
A Green Sea
He thought the war was finished, but the ghosts from the trenches followed him home.”
David is a medic in the trenches of World War I. While helping an injured soldier, a gas attack hits, and David makes the split-second decision to steal the injured soldier’s gas mask to give to another soldier who lacks his mask. This decision seeds his undoing.
When David returns home, he brings the ghost of the suffocated soldier home. Michael is after retribution and will do anything to make David admit what he did. Even if this means harming David’s wife and children.
Will David admit what he did in the war, knowing that the consequences will almost certainly result in him being hanged? Can David find a way to protect his family from his malevolent spirit?
John Garvey
Dying Trade
The show follows Adam, a struggling actor and his industrious business graduate sister Lucy as they try to make sense of running a funeral parlour with their stoner cousin Josh.
Adam is motivated by his ambitions to become an actor. Lucy is determined to prove herself a worthy businesswoman.
Adam’s vanity and selfishness often put Lucy’s well-intended plans into chaos. He’d rather follow his dreams and his dick than listen to his sister. Lucy, who is self- unaware and can be just as self-absorbed, often lets her passion to be successful cloud her judgment.
The funeral industry becomes secondary to the pair when they allow their ambitions to consume them. When the funeral director is hitting on the widow and the tea urn has been accidentally spiked, you have to ask yourself, who do you want to run your funeral?
Paulo Silvestro
Sheltered
In the house he owns, Jake has no room, no girlfriend and no mummy. He is well and truly on his own.
Jake is a mummy’s boy whose parents have bought him a house. Jake arrives at his new home to find his girlfriend, Ophelia, waiting for him. However, Ophelia has come home from her trip to Asia as a new person. No longer willing to be a second mother to Jake, she’s transformed into a pseudo-hippie.
Not only is Jake dumped, but he’s also left without a room in his own house, as Ophelia has rented out the spare rooms to a group of strangers.
See more from LCC Postgraduate Shows 2017.
- Find out more about MA Screenwriting at LCC.
- Find out more about LCC Postgraduate Shows: Show 2
- Interested in creative study? Find the perfect course for you at an LCC Open Day.