First Draft of Script (dialogue and camera ideas)

Production Title: “My Happy Place” by Ophelia Murphy

News Reporter The world is stunned to silence as details of a horrific murder involving an 11 year old girl are revealed. Police reports say her father, under the influence of alcohol, repeatedly struck her with a garden shovel and left her for dead…

Mollie Stephens My name is Mollie and this is my happy place. I’m not sure where or when I found it; sometimes I think it might have found me, and I’m so happy it did. Look how beautiful it is…its quiet here. Peaceful. Here I can escape from the real world. Forget the pain, forget the loneliness, forget anybody else even exists. The sun is brighter (animation here) and the grass is greener (animation of flower growing). I feel as free as a bird. (shot of birds flying, flowed by shot of Mollie with open arms pretending to be a bird) My happy place is for me and I’m the only one who gets to come here. It’s the only thing in the world that’s just mine. Not that I’d have anyone to share it with. Sometimes I feel like the world has forgotten me. I used to have a lot. I had hobbies and friends and my own room filled with my own things, but he has taken it all. He took my happiness away. Sometimes I get scared he’ll take my life too. (swinging on swing, looking down sadly)He gets drunk. (shot of girl drinking milkshake to connote vulnerability) And he gets angry. And then suddenly everything is my fault and he wants to make me pay, so I run away. I run away and I end up here, and I’m happy and I’m the person I want to be. And it suddenly doesn’t matter that I have no friends or that everyone at school thinks I’m weird, (shot of ice cream on nose) (laughs) because I remember…that the world is bigger than us, (zoom out to wide shot) and that I can be anything or anyone I want to be. And more importantly, that I will be. And if I had my way I would stay in my happy place forever. Laying just here…right in this spot (fade edit into girl laying in shed)