What’s The Story: Adapting Mike Leigh’s Improvisational Approach to Character, Narrative and Text for the Development of Comedy Film Scripts Online.

Abstract

This thesis aimed to ascertain if British film director Mike Leigh’s improvisatory approach to the development of character, narrative and text could be adopted and adapted to create comedic film scripts in an online environment.

The research hoped to address gaps in knowledge around Leigh’s working methods and the fact that no approach was available to utilise improvisation on existing online video conferencing platforms such as Zoom. Therefore, the research aimed to develop such a method to facilitate improvisation online. Thereafter, the newly established process was evaluated in terms of its efficacy in other scriptwriting forms, namely monologue writing.

Leigh’s process was applied in practice as part of an Online Ensemble Project. In pursuing this research-through-practice, I also examined and reflected upon my own emerging praxis as I adapted Leigh’s method for the same online project. Further insights into my praxis were then unearthed through a second application of the new method in an exercise involving the writing of comic monologues.

The thesis makes its original contribution to knowledge in the field of scriptwriting by developing an approach to improvising comedy film scripts entirely online.