3 Minute Short Film (Cancelled)

For my three minute short film I decided to work with Alex Brand, we came up with multiple ideas but the concept we decided to go with was one concerning redemption, focusing on two characters who interlink as the narrative progresses, the story plays out like this; a girl is sat in her room, her room is very unusual for a girl's, it's dark and grubby theres ripped paper and broken items scattered around, aswell as strange violent pictures that she's drawn. We'd have her sat in a corner with a pair of scissors or a knife or something to that effect, she's sobbing but also evidently prepping herself up to do something. We then hear commotion downstairs, we don't see it as we just focus on her listening to it, until she gets up to see what it was, we then see a figure a standing over the presumably dead corpse of her dad on the floor, this figure doesn't realise that he's been spotted and just leaves, but not before the girl sees who it is. The idea behind the girl is that she's being abused by her dad, who hits her, she's finally had enough and begins to build up the courage to put an end to it by killing her dad. This is where the second character comes in, the male who breaks in and accidentily kills her dad whilst defending himself, the idea behind this character is that he's only stealing to try and eventually win back a family that he lost due to his choice of lifestyle years ago and irresponsibility. It is implied that he had no choice but to adopt this lifestyle using the things we see in his house, the way he grew up and the things that pictures in his house tell us. She would start to follow him out of a twisted sense of admiration and curiosity, whereas he would begin to follow her out of a twisted sense of guilt, he can't bring himself to apologise and give himself up, but wants to. They would gain redemption through another, through following each other they would learn what one another is about. I thought it should end with the man going to prison, but willingly, he feels like he can finally accept that he's done something to help and accepts his sentence, through this the girl would gain a new life, free of abuse and being held prisoner.

We got as far as location planning and scripting, which you can see a segment of below:

Scene 1

Cut To Scene

EXT – Outside House- Night

Ryan is walking down towards the house smoking a cigarette. He stops outside a house with no light on. He looks around and rushes to the door.

INT – Lisa Bedroom- Night

Lisa is sat on her bed crying, drawing a picture. She suddenly stops and stabs the picture repeatedly then falls back onto her back. She looks to her side and sees a picture of her and her mother; reaches out to grab it.

EXT – Outside House- Night

Ryan pulls up his scarf to cover his mouth. He presses up against the door and takes slow, deep breaths.

INT – Lisa Bedroom- Night

Lisa is no longer crying, she holding the knife and picture. She is standing by the mirror.

Off screen- Ryan breaks into the house.

Lisa hearing noise turns the music off.

Off screen- Ryan and father are grunting.

Lisa drops everything down and leaves the room.

INT – Stairwell – Night

Lisa peeks out and looks down the stairs, Ryan stops grunting and runs out the house. Lisa slowly makes her way down the stairs.

INT – hallway/living room – Night

Lisa looks into the living room revealing her father bleeding on the floor, dead.

Lisa

(Drops to floor, screams)

Ahhhhh!

Unfortunately this is as far as we got with this concept and both decided, after many weeks of development, that we had to drop it. Some of the scenes we wanted to include just weren't feasable and the narrative was going to be a bit too bloated and complex, we also struggled to think of more interesting scenes for the middle of the piece, we had the ending and the beginning figured out but we just couldn't decide on what would need to go in the middle. Because of this I thought it would be best to quickly help another group out whilst trying to come up with my own ideas. I decided to join Jordan's group as I liked his concept and thought it had a lot of potential to be interesting.