The page is the assignment's research and reflection, for the main write-up, please follow this link.
When I first receive the assignment, my first idea was to do a re-telling of ‘The Sword in the Stone‘ as it has personal significant to me. My name, Merlin, was chosen because I look up to the character of the same name in the film. Since the main character was Arthur in the original film, I decided to put the POV towards Merlin instead. I decided to turn Merlin into a villain because they are more fun to write and also because this is how I see myself if I were a character in a work of literature.
Next will be choosing of the genre. I came up with a few ideas, which include a university drama to even comedy. I settled for dystopian science-fiction as this genre tend to have a generic structure to me that makes it easier to write. I also want to include fantasy element as a link towards their original literacy genre.
This form the basis of what films to watch for research. The past 2 weeks was spent having movie and TV shows marathon to gather ideas and to plan the story structure. I kick off by watching the original ‘The Sword in the Stone (1963)’ to recap the story, along with ‘The Black Cauldron (1985)’. I also watched ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008)’ and ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010)’ on how to incorporate fantasy into the modern era. ‘
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ is also a fantastic inspiration as it is also about a wizard taking a younger person under his wing. However I feel that the movie is bogged down by unnecessarily love stories. Another good example is ‘Maleficent (2014)’ in which how villain can be the hero at the same time and her relationship with the Princess mimics The Sorcerer and The Apprentice’s.
For science fiction reference, I look into ‘Doctor Who’, who is one of my favorite TV drama and it has a over-arching story of the Doctor’s internal struggle. Beside that, I also watched ‘The Golden Compass (2007)’, ‘Tomorrowland (2015)’, ‘The Maze Runner (2014)’, ‘Divergent (2014)’, ‘Insurgent (2015)’, ‘The Hunger Games (2012)’, ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)’.
Beside just film, I also looked into storytelling in video game series ‘Assassin’s Creed’ and ‘Mass Effect‘. The idea of a war due to differences and the separation into fractions (Assassin vs Templar, Organic vs Syntactic) form the backdrop of my inspiration for The Original vs The Artificial.
More poster references:
My idea of turning Merlin as a villain stream from movie where the main antagonist have no concrete reason why they do certain thing. Like in ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles’ the main antagonist just wanted to killed all the magical creature for no reason. This is why I want to create a back story for my characters to make the story more believable.