A little while ago I wrote a piece on why Out of Luck remains my favorite film. It was a story about the little film that could.
Anyway this is not that story.
So about a year ago I put up the script for The Arbitration. As I said in the series of tweets below — one of the best ways to learn about the craft is by reading scripts
I decided to do the same thing with Out of Luck but with a slightly different twist. As you know Out of Luck is readily available as well — it’s on Netflix (link below) but also on Iroko and a few other platforms
One of the things that is also useful is to see the changes made from script to screen and try to figure out the reasons for the changes.
First up is the shooting script for Out of Luck —
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hdvkzvrznlerj8w/Out%20of%20luck_shooting.pdf?dl=0
This is the script that we shot. The one the actors got. The one that made it into the editing room.
The other story is that it was initially called One Chance, and then Ndani came out with a series of the same name and then Omotayo, an inkblot founding partner — came up with Out of Luck which was a way cooler name anyway.
Second is the final script for Out of Luck -
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9z62mds8vuc340s/Out%20of%20luck_final.pdf?dl=0
It’s a bit of a misnomer to actually say this is a script in the true this is what we shot sense — however this is the script of the movie you watched.
This is the type of script you see when you read the For Your consideration oscar scripts. They basically rework the script to fit the edited movie.
It’s always useful to compare the two scripts and the finished work to try and understand why the cuts changed etc.
In my experience there are certain things that you need to show on the page with words, but one look between the actors saves you 2 minutes of screen time. The close cousin of this is exposition that you can lose. When you enter scenes and strip out bits.
There are also some scenes that just don’t work as shot, and then it’s better you cut them.
Anyway all this long story sha. Hope you enjoy the scripts. I may answer a few questions you have about them if you hit me up on the twitters.
Laters,
