Adi Weitzman

A Short Film about the Struggles of being a Teenager

Global Context - Identities And Relationships

Goal - To show teenagers that they are not alone in their struggles and that their problems aren’t as big as they seem. To support them as they figure themselves out. To help them feel less alone in the difficult journey they are going through. To guide them to the right coping mechanisms.

Introduction

Focusing on Identity and What the biggest challenges teenagers are faced with are and how would they be portrayed in a short film?

Inspiration

After coming with an Idea for a project I struggled to come up with a plotline to the script. I decided to base the script on a short play that I had written and performed in 2019. The play was about underage drinking and the risk of alcohol. The research I conducted suggests that underage drinking is not only a problem in itself, but it is caused by many other, smaller problems. Such as stress, peer pressure, academic pressure, self-image, insecurity and many more. This became the basis of my script. What happens when you don’t know how to deal with those problems, and turning to alcohol instead.

Process

The original plan was to write and film the short movie and present as a film. However as things unfolded filming a Movie became irrelevant. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise giving me more time to perfect the script and the deep meanings behind it. I began by doing research on the Internet, I read up on the opinion of experts on the matter of teenagers and what they’re struggles are. Perhaps, the most Important part of my research was talking to people my age, hearing their experiences and views on what is in fact so difficult about this period in our lives. Once I had all the information I needed to narrow it down to a few of the most important things that I observed and figure out how to fit it into my script. I then edited the original script and wrote the new version.

Final Script

The final scripts contains the struggles of academic pressure, peer pressure, the need to fit in, self-image and the way they lead up to the most obvious problem, alcohol.

The script follows a young girl named Emma, who’s just failed some of her lessons and is worried about telling her parents. She is offered a drink at a party and things go downhill from there. She decides to buy into the fact that drinking can solve her problems and learns the hard way that it can’t, no matter how blinding it may be. She learns the way of her mistakes the hard way.