In this blog, I look at the second of my personal explorations, I observe the origins of the story, look at some external inspiration influencing my creative choices and develop the story to the point at which I can start a story outline.
Like Part III of this Chapter, I will be developing this further going forward, this serves simply as an introduction to the project as well as a way to document its initial development.
At the start of 2019, I was dealing with the separation of my girlfriend and me, her having had to go back to Germany to continue her study and me having to stay in Invercargill. This was a very difficult situation for me to process and consumed my waking hours, the stories ideas generated during this time directly related to this change in my life and I have decided to revisit one of them which I remember quite clearly - and serves as a good example of why I chose this specific question this year.
The idea was to make a long-distance horror movie, a short that played on the helplessness of the protagonist to help someone else, who was in a very dangerous situation.
Personally, this related to me because when my girlfriend flew home, she stopped in Australia to spend a week with a Turkish family she knew from her working holiday there and during that time her much older host tried to make the situation sexual - this after her telling him about me and everything. I was scared for her and became paranoid, embarrassingly enough encouraging her to keep some kind of weapon with her. I was afraid that he would take things further and felt completely useless being so far away.
The idea spawned from that very specific situation and it is directly mirrored in the logline, but I think the set-up also puts the paranoia and fear that we feel in a long-distance relationship, especially when a significant other is out drinking or clubbing without us, into a literal, tangible sense.
In this way, I think it works as a narrative metaphor derived from personal experience.
The logline:
A man's girlfriend goes abroad and stays with a host family who quickly turns out to be very far from normal and whose intentions appear sinister.
External Inspiration:
The movie I am aspiring to make here is based very much on a modern problem that many couples face, the way we communicate with our significant others in the modern day is very different than in the past, we are much more familiar with the digital interface, we now communicate constantly with texting or facetime.
Searching (2018)
I am looking towards this movie for inspiration regarding the use of a digital interface such as a computer screen or mobile phones to communicate a film narrative.
The movie is very good at keeping the audience engaged through nothing more than a computer screen, the directors adopt filmmaking techniques such as camera movements and different shot types to give the digital proceedings a sense of urgency and drama.
Like my film, it also utilizes the storytelling device of a twist - putting previously established information into a new light and subverting the audience's expectations.
From this film, I want to take inspiration from how the filmmakers used the digital world to tell a compelling narrative, for the scenes in my film that take place on Facebook or facetime I want to apply the same rules they did and hopefully achieve a similar level of success in keeping the audience engaged. Where their film was a thriller, mine is more of a horror, but both rely on a central mystery to drive the story forward. I want to look at how they wrote the script as well, which the writer/directors basically had to format from scratch to give the reader a clear idea of what will be represented in the final product.
The Visit (2016)
Shyamalan combines traditional horror filmmaking and found footage in this film to create a unique style and atmosphere that you don't really find in other movies of its ilk. I am looking towards this film because of its incorporation of the horror techniques that he established earlier in his career in a different format. Even though the movie is found footage, something Shyamalan had never done before, it undeniably feels like a Shyamalan movie.
Another key part of what I want to take away from this film and its director is their ability to create unsettling scenes, things that in the moment of watching feels eery and off-kilter, making the audience clench up a bit - a type of horror that doesn't rely on jump scares but affects the audience emotionally to feel a sense of fear.
It also has some form of a plot-twist like all good Shyamalan movies, which is something my story contains as well, but ideally, I would like my scenes, especially those being told through a monitor, to have the same atmospheric presence as Shyamalan's best work.
The Prestige (2006)
This is more a study of Nolan's work as a whole, but he likes to break continuity and jump between timelines, with The Prestige, especially at the start of the film, as an audience you aren't always sure which timeline you are watching. The scenes flow together naturally and the cuts between different continuities are almost seamless, because of this you have to pay attention, but it can also be used to trick the audience.
Like The Village, The Prestige also has a twist, but it hides it under much more complex layers - where The Visit is simple and clean, The Prestige relies on a lot of small details that come at the audience at lighting speed to support its secret ending.
From The Prestige, I am stealing the non-linear storytelling to help hide the twist and keep the audience thinking, hopefully also giving it the same re-watchability that Nolan's work often holds.
Story Development:
Similar to Searching (2016) or something of that nature, a large portion of the film is told through a computer - this is spliced with your regular old drama filmmaking.
The idea is that a man’s girlfriend goes abroad and ends up staying with a creepy older Turkish man - he becomes more and more obviously dangerous and our protagonist can do very little, other than watch on.
Taps into this emotion of being helpless whilst the person you love most is in an unfamiliar position, usually this happens in a long-distance relationship when the other person is out clubbing or something of that sort.
His arc is to get over her, learn to live his own life again.
The movie’s twist is that it’s being told non-chronologically, more like The Prestige or something, and that some of what we saw is him actually talking to her soul in hell.
This personally relates quite obviously, exploring the strong discomfort and stress that I feel when my own girlfriend (who lives in Germany) goes out drinking or directly relates to once when she stayed with a creepy old Turkish man in Australia who tried to turn the relationship sexual.
He has two central female relationships throughout the film, his girlfriend and his mother (who is trying to get him out of the house and doing more productive things again).
Our A Point is that he is obsessively still clinging to his girlfriend who has left, through the film he learns to solve problems by acting more and more independently, and doing things that support his own personal desires and instinct - clashing with hers - by our Z Point he has learned to again be his own person and live his life independently of his GF.
Maybe not this exactly.
Three scenes where he talks to her and the situation slowly gets more and more intense/dangerous.
This is in two timelines, when she was alive and when she wasn’t.
She arrives (alive)
Things go bump in the night (dead)
She takes him with her to dinner scared of her captor (alive)
She is revealed to be in hell and wants him to move on (dead)
Sprinkled between these scenes are scenes where she is dead as well, but these are told from his perspective.
The twist is: She is dead and he is talking to her in hell, the events we see unfold are after her death and his mother wants him to move on from this, hence why she bounces around the topic a bit and doesn’t really address it directly.
______________________________________
The movie opens with him waking up and not finding her in bed, she is in shower and goes to the airport - last goodbye. A bit of a montage of her arriving in the new town, sending him images and texts about her journey, finally as she moves further and further away, things become more suspicious.
The first sequence creates context for us, they are in a dedicated relationship and she is moving away, also gives us a good introduction to the computer interface.
They have their first conversation, where she talks about how unsettling the turkish man is.
His mother knocks and says that it's time for dinner, he goes out:
<time skip>
The next scene is of him having dinner with the family and his mother bringing a job to his attention.
The dinner is quite tense and he looks very depressed.
The next scene is of him calling her at night, she answers and is barely visible, he tells her about the job and how he feels so down and everything, she tries and comforts him, but they are distracted by a sound outside that she hears. She goes to look and the Turkish man can be seen sneaking around, She says she can’t leave now and stuff and he tries to get her out.
His job interview.
<time skip>
She tells him about the man and that she has to go to dinner, he asks her to keep a weapon with her, we see this whole thing and she keeps him close during dinner. (tension)
<time skip>
His mother is talking to him about the job interview and stuff and grilling him for it, he shouldn’t be that depressed about the girl etc and he tells her she doesn’t understand.
She goes to investigate his room while he is in the toilet and finds some occult shit. She looks up the girlfriend on facebook and stuff (established earlier in the film that she doesn’t use social media or whatever) and sees that she has a lot of posts saying goodbye to her etc - her being dead and shit.
That night he talks to her again and his mother spies, it becomes clear she is in hell as she hears other people as well.
A big confrontation where she talks to him and he reveals everything, she tries to help him.
<time skip>
One last image of her leaving on the airplane.
<time skip>
He talks to her and says he can’t call anymore, she wants him to move on.
Like Part III of this Chapter, I will be developing this further going forward, this serves simply as an introduction to the project as well as a way to document its initial development.
At the start of 2019, I was dealing with the separation of my girlfriend and me, her having had to go back to Germany to continue her study and me having to stay in Invercargill. This was a very difficult situation for me to process and consumed my waking hours, the stories ideas generated during this time directly related to this change in my life and I have decided to revisit one of them which I remember quite clearly - and serves as a good example of why I chose this specific question this year.
The idea was to make a long-distance horror movie, a short that played on the helplessness of the protagonist to help someone else, who was in a very dangerous situation.
Personally, this related to me because when my girlfriend flew home, she stopped in Australia to spend a week with a Turkish family she knew from her working holiday there and during that time her much older host tried to make the situation sexual - this after her telling him about me and everything. I was scared for her and became paranoid, embarrassingly enough encouraging her to keep some kind of weapon with her. I was afraid that he would take things further and felt completely useless being so far away.
The idea spawned from that very specific situation and it is directly mirrored in the logline, but I think the set-up also puts the paranoia and fear that we feel in a long-distance relationship, especially when a significant other is out drinking or clubbing without us, into a literal, tangible sense.
In this way, I think it works as a narrative metaphor derived from personal experience.
The logline:
A man's girlfriend goes abroad and stays with a host family who quickly turns out to be very far from normal and whose intentions appear sinister.
External Inspiration:
The movie I am aspiring to make here is based very much on a modern problem that many couples face, the way we communicate with our significant others in the modern day is very different than in the past, we are much more familiar with the digital interface, we now communicate constantly with texting or facetime.
Searching (2018)
I am looking towards this movie for inspiration regarding the use of a digital interface such as a computer screen or mobile phones to communicate a film narrative.
The movie is very good at keeping the audience engaged through nothing more than a computer screen, the directors adopt filmmaking techniques such as camera movements and different shot types to give the digital proceedings a sense of urgency and drama.
Like my film, it also utilizes the storytelling device of a twist - putting previously established information into a new light and subverting the audience's expectations.
From this film, I want to take inspiration from how the filmmakers used the digital world to tell a compelling narrative, for the scenes in my film that take place on Facebook or facetime I want to apply the same rules they did and hopefully achieve a similar level of success in keeping the audience engaged. Where their film was a thriller, mine is more of a horror, but both rely on a central mystery to drive the story forward. I want to look at how they wrote the script as well, which the writer/directors basically had to format from scratch to give the reader a clear idea of what will be represented in the final product.
The Visit (2016)
Shyamalan combines traditional horror filmmaking and found footage in this film to create a unique style and atmosphere that you don't really find in other movies of its ilk. I am looking towards this film because of its incorporation of the horror techniques that he established earlier in his career in a different format. Even though the movie is found footage, something Shyamalan had never done before, it undeniably feels like a Shyamalan movie.
Another key part of what I want to take away from this film and its director is their ability to create unsettling scenes, things that in the moment of watching feels eery and off-kilter, making the audience clench up a bit - a type of horror that doesn't rely on jump scares but affects the audience emotionally to feel a sense of fear.
It also has some form of a plot-twist like all good Shyamalan movies, which is something my story contains as well, but ideally, I would like my scenes, especially those being told through a monitor, to have the same atmospheric presence as Shyamalan's best work.
The Prestige (2006)
This is more a study of Nolan's work as a whole, but he likes to break continuity and jump between timelines, with The Prestige, especially at the start of the film, as an audience you aren't always sure which timeline you are watching. The scenes flow together naturally and the cuts between different continuities are almost seamless, because of this you have to pay attention, but it can also be used to trick the audience.
Like The Village, The Prestige also has a twist, but it hides it under much more complex layers - where The Visit is simple and clean, The Prestige relies on a lot of small details that come at the audience at lighting speed to support its secret ending.
From The Prestige, I am stealing the non-linear storytelling to help hide the twist and keep the audience thinking, hopefully also giving it the same re-watchability that Nolan's work often holds.
Story Development:
Similar to Searching (2016) or something of that nature, a large portion of the film is told through a computer - this is spliced with your regular old drama filmmaking.
The idea is that a man’s girlfriend goes abroad and ends up staying with a creepy older Turkish man - he becomes more and more obviously dangerous and our protagonist can do very little, other than watch on.
Taps into this emotion of being helpless whilst the person you love most is in an unfamiliar position, usually this happens in a long-distance relationship when the other person is out clubbing or something of that sort.
His arc is to get over her, learn to live his own life again.
The movie’s twist is that it’s being told non-chronologically, more like The Prestige or something, and that some of what we saw is him actually talking to her soul in hell.
This personally relates quite obviously, exploring the strong discomfort and stress that I feel when my own girlfriend (who lives in Germany) goes out drinking or directly relates to once when she stayed with a creepy old Turkish man in Australia who tried to turn the relationship sexual.
He has two central female relationships throughout the film, his girlfriend and his mother (who is trying to get him out of the house and doing more productive things again).
Our A Point is that he is obsessively still clinging to his girlfriend who has left, through the film he learns to solve problems by acting more and more independently, and doing things that support his own personal desires and instinct - clashing with hers - by our Z Point he has learned to again be his own person and live his life independently of his GF.
Maybe not this exactly.
Three scenes where he talks to her and the situation slowly gets more and more intense/dangerous.
This is in two timelines, when she was alive and when she wasn’t.
She arrives (alive)
Things go bump in the night (dead)
She takes him with her to dinner scared of her captor (alive)
She is revealed to be in hell and wants him to move on (dead)
Sprinkled between these scenes are scenes where she is dead as well, but these are told from his perspective.
The twist is: She is dead and he is talking to her in hell, the events we see unfold are after her death and his mother wants him to move on from this, hence why she bounces around the topic a bit and doesn’t really address it directly.
______________________________________
The movie opens with him waking up and not finding her in bed, she is in shower and goes to the airport - last goodbye. A bit of a montage of her arriving in the new town, sending him images and texts about her journey, finally as she moves further and further away, things become more suspicious.
The first sequence creates context for us, they are in a dedicated relationship and she is moving away, also gives us a good introduction to the computer interface.
They have their first conversation, where she talks about how unsettling the turkish man is.
His mother knocks and says that it's time for dinner, he goes out:
<time skip>
The next scene is of him having dinner with the family and his mother bringing a job to his attention.
The dinner is quite tense and he looks very depressed.
The next scene is of him calling her at night, she answers and is barely visible, he tells her about the job and how he feels so down and everything, she tries and comforts him, but they are distracted by a sound outside that she hears. She goes to look and the Turkish man can be seen sneaking around, She says she can’t leave now and stuff and he tries to get her out.
His job interview.
<time skip>
She tells him about the man and that she has to go to dinner, he asks her to keep a weapon with her, we see this whole thing and she keeps him close during dinner. (tension)
<time skip>
His mother is talking to him about the job interview and stuff and grilling him for it, he shouldn’t be that depressed about the girl etc and he tells her she doesn’t understand.
She goes to investigate his room while he is in the toilet and finds some occult shit. She looks up the girlfriend on facebook and stuff (established earlier in the film that she doesn’t use social media or whatever) and sees that she has a lot of posts saying goodbye to her etc - her being dead and shit.
That night he talks to her again and his mother spies, it becomes clear she is in hell as she hears other people as well.
A big confrontation where she talks to him and he reveals everything, she tries to help him.
<time skip>
One last image of her leaving on the airplane.
<time skip>
He talks to her and says he can’t call anymore, she wants him to move on.
Scenes and key emotion(s):
1 Opening Montage (dread)
2 First Conversation (mystery)
3 Dinner Time (tense)
4 First Night Call (unsettling)
5 Hidden Call (creepy, suspense)
6 Job Interview (tension - tragedy)
7 Confrontation after interview (conflict)
8 Mum Investigates (suspense, mystery - revelation)
9 Night talk 2 - Mum spies (unsettling)
10 Apologies and comfort (cathartic)
11 Their last day (nostalgic/sad)
12 Saying Goodbye (bittersweet resolution)
1 Opening Montage (dread)
2 First Conversation (mystery)
3 Dinner Time (tense)
4 First Night Call (unsettling)
5 Hidden Call (creepy, suspense)
6 Job Interview (tension - tragedy)
7 Confrontation after interview (conflict)
8 Mum Investigates (suspense, mystery - revelation)
9 Night talk 2 - Mum spies (unsettling)
10 Apologies and comfort (cathartic)
11 Their last day (nostalgic/sad)
12 Saying Goodbye (bittersweet resolution)
Comments
Post a Comment